A treaty is normally a documented agreement between two or more human groupings whereby diverse perceived benefits are traded and exchanged, instead of economic or aggressive coercion being used as a means of obtaining them. Thus land is exchanged for peace, rights and benefits... mutual military support is exchanged for security... sovereignty is traded for slaves, money and titles... and so on. A treaty is thus essentially a compromised agreement between two or more separate political administrations to control factors of mutual interest, or to trade one side's unilateral concerns for the different concerns of another side. Such are the pressures of human acquisition however, these contrivances are only interim devices behind which political ambitions have time to make their preparations. In the past, a treaty has... more often than not... been nothing more that a cynically pragmatic contrivance to gain time. Diplomats posture and display and indulge in convoluted intrigues, in order to persuade representatives to sign and respect a documented list of agreements. The hope is that a cessation of hostilities might give sufficient breathing space for one or the other signatory to rebuild, resupply, and probably enter into deceptive and secret alliances in order to influence subsequent hostilities.

A treaty is devised to facilitate and control group concerns and is consequently related to circumstances current during the time of its creation. Circumstances, events and technology change significantly between generations so that any treaty agreed as appropriate for one generation is going to be less so with each succeeding generation. Certainly a treaty that defines a geographic boundaries between groups might survive intact for numerous generations if the separation continues to suit the signatories, but usually, sooner or later, the resources of one region become the aspirations of another, and military invasion violates and nullifies the agreement. Generally therefore, a treaty has a natural timespan. A treaty has a shelf-life. In times of rapid change, to expect any sort of treaty... especially if it involves sociological, political, technological or economic factors... to be relevant for more than two or three generations would seem to be quite unrealistic. Few grand-children appreciate or are willing to be subject to the conditions of their grand-parents. Life and the climate changes. Attempting to coerce descendants in their time and space to conform to constraints and concerns which were deemed appropriate several generations ago is absurd. Certainly to imagine that any one generation has sufficient prescience to be able to extrapolate into the future, allow for the chaotic intrusions of evolution and impose a treaty on all following generations forever, is a psychotic arrogant nonsense.

A treaty is not designed to unite two or more disparate groupings. The usual attempt to codify the trading of one set of concerns for a different set of concerns will in fact ensure separation. Certainly specified boundaries will physically ensure separations, but any exchanged unilateral advantages are most likely to eventually become inequalities and hence a cause for dispute and resentment and social separation. A treaty is a very inappropriate social instrument to be relied upon as a means of uniting two disparate groupings.

In any attempt to create social and geographic cohesion between separate groups, it is self-contradictory and absurd to expect an agreement in the form of a treaty between the groups to sit comfortably alongside or within a single umbrella citizenship constitution. Any treaty matters which continue to remain relevant need to be absorbed into the formulation of a constitution. Such a constitution will only have the capacity to unify according to the degree it manages to avoid the resentments induced by any unjustified bias favouring specific demographic groups. In the local flower club, if the cactus growers and the orchid growers sign a treaty as to how the resources of the club should be distributed, there will not be much unity at the committee meetings.