The Momentum of ‘Developed’: Bodies of Water, Aging Bodies and Malta's Interventions at the UN

Abstract Histories of major powers continue to shape how many scholars conceptualize internationalism. By focusing on Malta's interventions at the UN challenges, this article challenges such narrative. In particular, it examines Arvid Pardo's 1967 petition that the seabed be reconceived and protected as the ‘common heritage of mankind’ and Vincent Tabone's 1969 ‘question of the elderly’ that linked global governance to questions of the life course through the language of universal human rights. Despite their differences, these interventions emerged through representatives of Malta in the late 1960s, moved through various UN committees and resolutions throughout the 1970s, and came to shape international policy recommendations with major UN conferences that took place in 1982. Besides challenging the assumption that ‘small states’ form merely the background of international politics, the histories of these two proposals further disturb common binaries through which postwar stories of internationalism are often framed: the environmentalism of Pardo's ‘common’ and the appeal to universal human rights of Tabone's ‘question’ cannot be entirely understood through the lens of Cold War tensions, nor do these two interventions fit comfortably within the frameworks of East and West and North and South. These cases further complicate the over‐determined postwar organizing schema of ‘developing’ and ‘developed’, as these proposals shifted international environmental and population critiques from the activities of those countries deemed ‘developing’ to those deemed ‘developed’.