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The Economy of Accord: Ellipsis in the Drafting of the Antarctic Treaty
In December 1959, twelve nations gathered in Washington to sign the Antarctic Treaty, establishing the world's first major nuclear-free and demilitarized international territory. Negotiating across intense Cold War ideological divisions, diplomats from the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and nine other signatory states had to reconcile competing territorial claims with scientific cooperation. The treaty's success hinged on drafting language that was legally airtight yet syntactically concise. To prevent the legal text from collapsing under endless repetitive qualifiers, the drafting committee relied extensively on elliptical coordination and verbal substitution, crafting articles of remarkable brevity and diplomatic elegance.
Elliptical coordination occurs when shared grammatical elements - such as subject nouns, modal auxiliaries, or dependent clauses - are stated once and subsequently omitted in coordinate structures. In Article I of