Sovereignty E-Book

Robert Jackson

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Concepts series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 318

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Sovereignty is at the very centre of the political and legal arrangements of the modern world. The idea originated in the controversies and wars, both religious and political, of 16th and 17th century Europe and since that time it has continued to spread and evolve. Today sovereignty is a global system of authority: it extends across all religions, civilizations, languages, cultures, ethnic and racial groupings, and other collectivities into which humanity is divided.

In this highly accessible book, Robert Jackson provides a concise and comprehensive introduction to the history and meaning of sovereignty. Drawing on a wide range of examples from the US Declaration of Independence to terrorist attacks of 9/11 he shows how sovereignty operates in our daily lives and analyses the issues raised by its universality and centrality in the organization of the world. The book covers core topics such as the discourse of sovereignty, the global expansion of sovereignty, the rise of popular sovereignty, and the relationship between sovereignty and human rights. It concludes by examining future challenges facing sovereignty in an era of globalization.

This interdisciplinary study will be of interest to a wide range of students, academics and general readers who seek to understand this fundamental concept of the modern world.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Other books in the Key Concepts Series

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Preface

1 Sovereignty and Modernity

Manifestations of sovereignty

Sovereignty and modernity

Independence and supremacy

Power, authority, responsibility

The discourse of sovereignty

2 ‘A Shocking Idea’

Europe before sovereignty

Respublica Christiana

The revolution of sovereignty

3 Sovereigns of Europe and the World

The great transformation

The divine right of kings

Dynastic sovereignty

Western empires

Imperial sovereignty

4 Popular Sovereignty

In the name of the people

Parliamentary sovereignty

Democratic sovereignty

Totalitarian sovereignty

National self-determination

Territorial sovereignty

The end of sovereignty?

5 Sovereignty and Humanity

Protecting human rights

Humanity discourse

Human rights, human wrongs, and sovereign states

Human rights under international law

Humanitarian intervention

6 Sovereignty and Globalization

9/11 and the state

The globalization thesis

The sovereign states system

Presuppositions of a states system

Between past and future

References

Index

Other books in the Key Concepts Series

Barbara Adam, Time

Alan Aldridge, Consumption

Alan Aldridge, The Market

Colin Barnes and Geoff Mercer, Disability

Darin Barney, The Network Society

Mildred Blaxter, Health

Harriet Bradley, Gender

Harry Brighouse, Justice

Steve Bruce, Fundamentalism

Margaret Canovan, The People

Alejandro Colás, Empire

Anthony Elliott, Concepts of the Self

Steve Fenton, Ethnicity

Katrin Flikschuh, Freedom

Michael Freeman, Human Rights

Russell Hardin, Trust

Fred Inglis, Culture

Jennifer Jackson Preece, Minority Rights

Robert H. Jackson, Sovereignty

Paul Kelly, Liberalism

Anne Mette Kjær, Governance

Ruth Lister, Poverty

Jon Mandle, Global Justice

Judith Phillips, Care

Michael Saward, Democracy

John Scott, Power

Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism

Stuart White, Equality

Copyright © Robert Jackson 2007

The right of Robert Jackson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2007 by Polity Press

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For Ben

Preface

Sovereignty is an idea of authority embodied in those bordered territorial organizations we refer to as ‘states’ or ‘nations’ and expressed in their various relations and activities, both domestic and foreign.1 In the early twenty-first century there are almost two hundred of those organizations around the world, each one responsible for the territory under its jurisdiction and the people who live there. Sovereignty is at the centre of the political arrangements and legal practices of the modern world. The idea originated in the controversies and wars, religious and political, of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. It has existed without interruption and spread around the world since that time, and it continues to evolve. The following chapters present a brief but comprehensive account of the idea.

State sovereignty is a fundamental idea of authority of the modern era, arguably the most fundamental. It stands in marked contrast to ideas of authority of other eras, particularly the preceding medieval period of European history, which revolved around the theocratic and transnational idea of Latin Christendom. Sovereignty also stands in marked contrast to ideas of authority in other parts of the world before Western imperial states intervened and established themselves as a global, and no longer merely a European or Western, system of authority. That worldwide episode was only completed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prior to European and American intrusion the non-Western world operated with markedly different ideas of authority. Over the centuries the arrangements and practices of sovereign statehood became established in every continent, although not everywhere at the same time or with the same degree of effectiveness or acceptance.

Today sovereignty is a global system of authority. It extends across all the religions, civilizations, languages, cultures, ethnic and racial groupings, and other communities and collectivities into which humanity is divided. The sovereign states system is the only global system of authority that has ever existed. It was once possible for many people, indeed millions, to live outside the jurisdiction of sovereign states. That is no longer possible. There is no inhabited territory anywhere on the planet that is outside. The entire population of the world, more than 6 billion people, find themselves living inside a sovereign state. They may have some choice in determining in which particular state they will live. They have no choice except to live in one state or another, having to make the best of it, enjoying its advantages and opportunities and suffering its hazards and liabilities. The weight of that now universal fact of human affairs is not always fully appreciated.

Sovereignty is a foundational idea of politics and law that can only be properly understood as, at one and the same time, both an idea of supreme authority in the state, and an idea of political and legal independence of geographically separate states. These two facets of state sovereignty are not separate ideas. They are different aspects of one overall idea. Sovereignty is a constitutional idea of the rights and duties of the governments and the citizens or subjects of particular states. It is also an international idea of multiple states in relation to each other, each one occupying its own territory and having foreign relations and dealings with others, including peaceful and cooperative relations as well as discordant relations and periodical wars.

The core meanings of ‘sovereignty’ are captured in ordinary English usage as recorded authoritatively in the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED), by far the most important dictionary in the language. That source has a vital role in this study because it sets out the historical evolution of the word from its earliest recorded usage by English writers (and by implication English speakers) in the late-medieval and early-modern periods. The history of the word is an integral part of the history of the idea. That deserves emphasis because the word ‘sovereignty’ nowadays is given many different and often contradictory meanings that are not disciplined by that historical usage. Instead, they are dictated by the theories, methodologies, or ideologies of contemporary commentators on the subject. ‘ “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less” ’ (Carroll 1991: ch. 6). That stipulative approach to terminology is particularly noticeable at the present time among social scientists. In their innovative definitions the word ‘sovereignty’ is uprooted from its historical moorings in ordinary English and made a prisoner of the author’s concepts, thereby becoming part of an esoteric jargon, usually to the detriment of our historical knowledge of the subject.

Sovereignty is not originally or primarily an abstract idea fashioned by philosophers and other theoreticians and then applied in practice. It is an expedient idea worked out by kings and other rulers, and their representatives and agents, in response to the novel circumstances of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. The political arrangements and legal practices of sovereignty came first, the academic theories later. The rulers of early modern Europe initially came up with the idea in their repudiation of the overarching authority of the pope, who was then theocratic head of Latin Christendom. Their successful assertion of sovereignty was a way of escape from papal authority, an act of secession. They also asserted their sovereign authority in relation to rival authorities within their claimed jurisdictions and in relation to their subjects. They employed the idea in their dealings and struggles with each other, including their wars, which led to early formulations of international law. Our classical theories of sovereignty were initially fashioned to understand those expedient arrangements and practices in a comprehensive and systematic way. That classical approach is followed in this study.

The idea of sovereignty is a big idea. It defies academic attempts to pin it down and fit it into tidy analytical categories. When we think we have managed that feat we discover another angle or dimension of the subject that we have not considered. That research experience happened repeatedly in the course of this inquiry, which could have gone on indefinitely but had to end at some point. This book is that point. Sovereign statehood is a multifaceted and wide-ranging idea which calls for an interdisciplinary inquiry. It is impossible to squeeze the subject into any single academic pigeon-hole, such as history or legal studies or political science. None of these disciplines, by themselves, capture the various facets of the idea and stages of its evolution: the political and the legal, the domestic and the international, the present, past, and conceivable future.

The interdisciplinary inquiries upon which this study is based would have been far more difficult to carry out were it not for the existence of the JSTOR and Project Muse digital archives of scholarly journals. Those electronic sources made me more aware of the many journals that deal with sovereignty and made their contents far more readily accessible. Political Studies; International Affairs; American Journal of International Law; Journal of the History of Ideas; Past and Present; Journal of the American Academy of Religion; and Church History are among the most important of them. In many cases they also quickly led me to books I had not previously known about. The various disciplines that are involved in the study of sovereignty become more fully apparent. That reinforced my conviction that only by adopting an interdisciplinary approach could one hope to come to grips with the subject.

In writing this book I incurred debts to institutions and individuals which I wish to acknowledge. I would like to express my gratitude to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada which funded some of my early research on the subject. I also thank the Department of International Relations at Boston University for its support of my continuing research. The inquiries for chapter 6 were funded by the Danish Social Science Research Council in cooperation with the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University. I wish to thank my friend and colleague Georg Sørensen for making that possible. An earlier version of chapter 5 was published in Ronald Tinnevelt and Gert Verschraegen (eds), Between Cosmopolitan Ideals and State Sovereignty (Palgrave Publishers). Chapter 6 is a revised version of an article that appeared in a special issue of Political Studies edited by J. M. Hobson (Blackwell Publishers). I am grateful for permission to reprint those refashioned essays here.

The subjects that scholars study sometimes hint at their autobiographies. I was born and have lived for extended periods in Canada, a country that is unsure of its national identity, particularly as regards Quebec, many of whose residents have called for the province’s independence. In describing themselves as ‘sovereigntists’ they even contributed a new word to the English language. The early part of my academic career was spent in Kenya, shortly after that country’s independence, which involved a transfer of sovereignty from Britain. I have lived, on and off, in the United States, the cradle of popular sovereignty as registered in the ‘Declaration of Independence’ and the doctrine of civil rights. That nation also withstood a huge civil war waged over the Confederate States of America’s act of secession based on their asserted right of sovereignty. I have regularly visited Britain over the years and watched the government’s efforts to suppress the terrorist militias of Northern Ireland, particularly the republican irredentists whose aim was to oblige the British government to relinquish sovereignty over the territory leaving it free to become part of the Republic of Ireland. I have also noticed misgivings of many Britons concerning the European Union’s acquisition of authority in certain areas affecting their lives which they believe ought to be exclusively in the hands of the British government. Some of those same concerns are also evident in Denmark, where I have spent happy summers visiting the University of Aarhus.

The preoccupations of academics are bound to affect their families. I would like to thank my wife Margaret for lovingly putting up with her intellectually distracted husband as he struggled to come to grips with the complicated, frequently frustrating, but always fascinating subject of this study. The excellent wine cheerfully dispensed by my son-in-law, Steven Preece, helped relieve the pressure involved in bringing this book to a conclusion. I also want to register a fond debt of gratitude to my daughter, Jennifer Jackson Preece, author of an earlier volume in this Polity series that set an example for my own contribution. I dedicate this book to my grandson, Benedict Jackson-Preece, and to all children in the hope they may grow to adulthood under conditions of security, freedom, and dignity in whatever sovereign state they are bound to live.

R.J.

Boston

Note

1 ‘State’ is the proper name for those organizations in international law. Most of the world uses the word in that way. Americans prefer ‘nations’ to distinguish sovereign ‘states’ from the states of the United States. But ‘nation’ is more ambiguous. Most ‘nations’ are not sovereign although many, such as Quebec, Scotland, and Chechnya, may harbour a desire for national independence.

1

Sovereignty and Modernity

Manifestations of Sovereignty

Sovereignty is one of the constituent ideas of the post-medieval world: it conveys a distinctive configuration of politics and law that sets the modern era apart from previous eras. A. P. d’Entrèves (1970: 67) puts the point well: ‘The importance of the doctrine of sovereignty can hardly be overrated. It was a formidable tool in the hands of lawyers and politicians, and a decisive factor in the making of modern Europe.’ And not only Europe: sovereignty is a foundation idea of politics and law around the world. By ‘sovereignty’ I am of course referring to state sovereignty unless otherwise indicated.

This book is written in the genre of the history of ideas. The idea of sovereignty was expediently arranged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by European rulers in the course of their rivalries and struggles, religious and secular. Political and legal thinkers captured the idea, its modus operandi and its underlying principles, in commentaries on the subject. Those commentaries are interdisciplinary: the idea is at the heart of political and legal theory, diplomatic as well as religious history, constitutional law and international law. Sovereignty has proved to be remarkably long-lasting. But it is not fixed and unchanging. On the contrary, it has evolved and taken on different personas over time: it has been reformulated periodically to fit the demands and exigencies of specific historical periods or episodes (Philpott 2001). It has never changed fundamentally, however, or out of all recognition. Sovereignty in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is still recognizably the same basic idea that it was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Sovereignty is an arrangement of authority that has important consequences for the millions and now billions of ordinary people, past and present, who have been subjected to it and affected by it. To open our minds to that evolving idea, and to begin to see how it operates, we should contemplate the encapsulated historical events listed below. They illustrate just some of the many and various ways in which sovereignty has been entangled with the modern world across a lengthy span of time, starting in the sixteenth century and continuing into the present century.

In 1534 King Henry VIII of England demanded and obtained from parliament an Act of Supremacy which gave the king and his successors supreme headship of the Church of England, and immunity from ‘foreign law’ and ‘foreign authorities’, particularly the laws and authority of the head of Latin Christendom, the pope.In 1649 King Charles I of England was tried by parliament and executed for the crime of erecting ‘an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his Will, and to overthrow the Rights and Liberties of the People’.In 1662 a quarrel between King Louis XIV of France and Pope Alexander VII, which involved a fracas between the papal guards and the French ambassador, was resolved in 1664 by the humiliating capitulation of the pope, who sent a legate to Paris to express his regret for offending the king’s dignity and honour.In 1763 at the Peace of Paris, following the end of the Seven Years War in which Great Britain defeated France, the conquered French colony of Quebec was recognized to be part of British North America.In 1776 the American Declaration of Independence claimed ‘That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.’In 1860 and 1861 thirteen southern and slave-holding states of the United States asserted their individual sovereignty, declared their separate secessions from the United States of America, and formed the Confederate States of America (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, and Kentucky). Their secession ended with the defeat of the Confederate forces by the Union Army in 1865.In 1885 the Signatory Powers of the General Act of the Berlin Conference (Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Russia, the USA, and several smaller powers) recognized ‘the obligation to insure the establishment of authority in the regions occupied by them on the coasts of the African Continent’. Colonization of almost the entire African continent by Britain, France, and other European powers proceeded to take place.In a 1918 speech delivered to a joint session of the United States Congress President Woodrow Wilson declared: ‘What we demand in this war … is that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression.’ He called for ‘a general association of nations … formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.’ That was a major purpose of the League of Nations which Wilson was instrumental in creating.In 1941 US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met on board a British battleship anchored off the coast of Newfoundland and signed the Atlantic Charter, which declared the ‘common principles’ to which they subscribed, namely ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’, their ‘wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’, and their ‘hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries’.In 1947 the territory of British India was partitioned into two separate and independent states, India and Pakistan. Among the major consequences was the creation of 15 million refugees who now found themselves living on the wrong side of the newly drawn international borders between the two countries, and the outbreak of recurrent wars between India and Pakistan to change those same borders in contested regions, particularly Kashmir.In 1960 British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan delivered a speech to the South African Parliament in which he declared that a ‘wind of change’ was sweeping over the African continent which would result in its complete decolonization: ‘Ever since the break up of the Roman empire one of the constant facts of political life in Europe has been the emergence of independent nations … In the twentieth century … the processes which gave birth to the nation states of Europe have been repeated all over the world … Today the same thing is happening in Africa.’In 1990 Iraq invaded, occupied, and annexed the neighbouring country of Kuwait, and a successful war against that act of aggression was subsequently fought by the United States, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, and other countries, with United Nations authorization, to expel the illegally occupying Iraqi army and to restore the sovereign government of Kuwait.In 1991 the Soviet Union was dissolved into fifteen new or reconstituted independent states: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.In 1991–2 the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia disintegrated into wars which resulted in the independence of Serbia-Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia. In 2006 Montenegro separated from Serbia to become yet another independent state of former Yugoslavia.In 1993 a ‘velvet divorce’ was arranged by Czech and Slovak national leaders which resulted in the division of Czechoslovakia into two independent states: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.In 1995 a referendum in the Canadian province of Quebec on the question ‘Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership … Yes or No?’ The ‘no’ votes were 51% and the ‘yes’ votes 49%.In 2005 a referendum in France and another in the Netherlands, on a proposed ‘Constitution-Treaty’ for the European Union, were each defeated.

These episodes, and many others that one could mention, differ in important respects but they all turn, in one way or another, on the idea of sovereignty. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to grasp their historical meaning and significance without that idea. Any discerning reader can see the issues at stake in these episodes without knowing a great deal about them. That is owing to the fact that sovereignty is part of our common-sense understanding of politics and law, although we may not always be fully aware of that. The aim of this study is to sharpen and deepen our knowledge of the idea, so that we can more precisely see how sovereignty operates and the ways it is involved in our lives. This chapter lays out the basic elements and modus operandi of the notion. Subsequent chapters narrate phases of its history, including some of the episodes noted above, which are particularly important for conveying the vitality of the idea and its resilience in the face of recurrent and often profound historical change.

Sovereignty and Modernity

Sovereignty is a distinctive configuration of state authority. By ‘state’ I refer to the conventional meaning: a defined and delimited territory, with a permanent population, under the authority of a government. A ‘state’ could be a colonial state in an empire or a ‘state’ of the United States. Neither of those states, however, are ‘sovereign’ states. Governmental supremacy and independence is that distinctive configuration of state authority that we refer to as ‘sovereignty’. It is vested in the highest offices and institutions of states as defined by constitutional law: kings, presidents, parliaments, supreme courts, etc. It is also vested in the independence of states: their political and legal insulation from foreign governments as acknowledged by international law. When the government of a state is said to be sovereign, it holds supreme authority domestically and independent authority internationally, at one and the same time.

Sovereignty is a historical innovation of certain European political and religious actors who were seeking to escape from their subjection to the papal and imperial authorities of medieval Europe and to establish their independence of all other authorities, including each other. It is a post-medieval and, indeed, anti-medieval arrangement of governing authority. It is one of the defining markers of the modern world.1 Charles McIlwain (1932: 392) concluded his seminal work on ancient and medieval political ideas with the following observation:

The full development of the idea of sovereignty belongs to the historian of modern, not of medieval, political thought … conducive to a theory of sovereignty, is the idea of nationality, growing gradually into a sentiment of national unity. The complete expression of this sentiment is not to be found before the sixteenth century.

Whether the sentiment arose at that time, and whether sovereignty requires that sentiment or can subsist without it, are questions for later chapters. The novel and radical idea of sovereignty nevertheless was a repudiation of the European Middle Ages, which rested on the contrary idea of universal Christian theocracy in which the nations or states – regna – were not sovereign, as that political and legal condition came to be understood. Medieval regna were not independent authorities; nor were they superior authorities. They were subordinate to higher authorities – at least in principle if not always in practice. We cannot begin to understand the idea of state sovereignty without knowing something about the pre-existing medieval idea in reaction to which it was initially conceived. That topic is addressed in the next chapter.

Sovereignty is a constituent idea of the modern age. Other eras have had distinctive and different arrangements of authority. The medieval world of Latin Christendom operated without a notion of state sovereignty. The Roman Empire also carried on without it. Modern international law, the ‘law of nations’, is sometimes seen as a descendant of what Roman lawyers termed jus gentium, the human law which applies to peoples, as distinguished from jus civile, the civil law which applies to citizens or subjects of the Roman state (civitas). The gens (‘nations’) Rome dealt with inside the empire were subjects of its imperial authority and were in no way independent. The ‘barbarian’ tribes Rome encountered outside the empire and beyond its law and jurisdiction were political objects that were kept in their place by Roman military power. They were not under the authority of Rome. When those ‘foreign’ and ‘rude’ peoples could no longer be held in check, they penetrated the empire and eventually destroyed it.

The imperial dynasties of China, the Islamic Ottoman Empire (in the Middle East, south-east Europe, and North Africa) and the Mogul Empire (in South Asia) operated with notions of suzerainty and not sovereignty. They strove to hold sway over diverse territories and populations, usually with the aim of extracting tribute. Their Weltanschauungen, and also that of Rome, was hierarchical and not horizontal, and they were on top. Pre-colonial populations of North and South America, hinterlands of Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Pacific Islands knew little or nothing of sovereignty as understood in this study. They were subjected to it by European conquerors and colonists from whom they also got the idea to demand it for themselves: colonialism provoking anti-colonialism based on the doctrine of self-determination.

State sovereignty is the prevailing idea of political and legal authority of the modern era, defined as the span of time from the early sixteenth century to the present. Sovereignty expresses some core ideas of modernity including the fundamentally important notion of independence: rex est imperator in regno suo (the king is emperor in his own realm). That Latin expression could serve as the motto of sovereignty. Sovereignty was originally a way of escape from dictation and direction by outsiders and it remains to this day an institution that prohibits unwarranted foreign interference in the jurisdiction of states. A basic norm of the UN Charter (Article 2) consecrates the doctrine of equal sovereignty, territorial integrity, and non-intervention. Independence of their homelands from foreign authority is what anti-colonial nationalists demanded, and almost always obtained by securing a transfer of sovereignty from an imperial power. It is what secessionists and irredentists continue to call for and sometimes fight for in various countries around the world.

Sovereignty is a pluralistic arrangement of authority: there is not one sovereign state in the world; there are many sovereign states. Their independence is independence in relation to each other. Their supremacy is supremacy over their own subjects or citizens. Sovereignty was initially asserted by kings against medieval popes and emperors, and against rival monarchs and other independence-minded rulers. It was subsequently claimed by parliaments in political contests with monarchs for supreme authority in the state, by absolute rulers and dictators in asserting their will to power against embryonic parliaments, by anti-colonial nationalists in rebellions and wars against foreign imperialists, by constituent ‘states’ or provinces of federations in seeking to become independent, by federal authorities in asserting their primacy over ‘state’ or provincial authorities, and by the people in laying claim to state legitimacy and legality – or more precisely by those who claimed to speak in the name of the people.

States whose governments demonstrate sovereign authority, and only those states, have a place on the political map of the world. A world based on state sovereignty is a world of mutually exclusive territorial jurisdictions: a world without overlapping jurisdictions. Territorial sovereignty can be held jointly, as in the case of condominia, such as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1899–1956), but that is uncommon historically. The inclination and direction is toward jurisdictional exclusivity. Sovereignty can be shared or ‘pooled’, which is how the political and legal authority of the European Union is often characterized. But that is a somewhat misleading notion because the European Union is not a supreme and independent entity, at least not yet. The territorial sovereignty of Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain, Poland, and other states that form the EU remains in their possession on most vital questions, such as those of peace and security.

The lines on the political map – international boundaries – mark that political and legal independence of sovereign states from one another. They are the ‘no trespassing’ or ‘keep out’ signs of international politics and law. They delineate and differentiate the most basic ‘we’ and ‘they’, ‘ours’ and ‘yours’ of global political life. On this side of the line is our place, on that side your place. We are neighbours, and neighbours leave each other alone. The doctrine of non-intervention long has been, and still continues to be, keyed to the idea of state independence and territorial integrity. Sovereignty is, so to speak, the international ‘real estate’ system of the modern world (Mayall 1990: 20). That world is still a world of fences and hedges even though it is also, increasingly, a cosmopolitan and transnational world, as discussed in chapters 5 and 6.

An international boundary between territorially contiguous, sovereign states is the marker of an authority differentiation, and not a power relation. A boundary is not a wall or dyke or other physical barrier, although it may follow or coincide with a lake or river or mountain range: for example, the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain. Boundaries may be and often they are backed by armed force, at least to some degree. Yet that, too, is a contingent feature and not an inherent characteristic. Some boundaries are heavily defended: the Maginot line of French fortifications to block invasion by neighbouring Germany is an extreme case. Some are largely undefended: the United States–Canada boundary. Some are relatively open: borders between European Union member states. How defended or undefended, open or closed, they happen to be is determined by the sovereign states involved. But all international boundaries have exactly the same political and legal significance: they mark the territorial limits of sovereign jurisdictions: inside the borders are our affairs, outside are foreign affairs.

Sovereignty has always been jealously possessed by states and persistently pursued by political actors who are not sovereign but desire to hold and exercise sovereignty: revolutionists, nationalists, populists, secessionists, irredentists, among others. Whether the twenty-first century is making way for a postmodern world that goes beyond or gets away from sovereignty, or not, is an issue addressed in the final chapter. There may of course come a time when the institution is abandoned or abolished and the idea forgotten. That is almost inevitably bound to happen if we take a very long view of the future. No human institution lasts forever. If modern history discloses anything about state sovereignty, however, it is its adaptability to new circumstances, and its continuing popularity around the world.

Independence and Supremacy

A sovereign state can be defined as an authority that is supreme in relation to all other authorities in the same territorial jurisdiction, and that is independent of all foreign authorities. ‘Supremacy’ means the highest and final authority from which no further appeal is available. A sovereign is not subordinate to anybody. ‘Independent’ means constitutionally separate (James 1986) and self-governing. A sovereign is not somebody else’s dependency. ‘Sovereignty is the authority of the last word’ (Barker 1956: 60). Political actors that are sovereign are not answerable to anybody else. Everybody who is subject to their authority is answerable to them. State authorities can have the last word only if they are both supreme and independent. That is what a sovereign state is. A sovereign is the exclusive and ultimate source of the laws of the state and of all other disclosures and acts of state authority. A sovereign government is usually said to be a ‘free’ government in the sense that it is free from all foreign authority and law except that to which it has consented or otherwise subjected itself: for example, by means of a treaty. If a state’s government were in a position of legal subordination to a foreign government, that authority would be the sovereign, and the state would be an American-style ‘state’, a colony or some other kind of integral unit or dependency of a larger sovereign state.

That is the classical definition of sovereignty that will be employed in this study. That definition can apply to a republic just as readily as a monarchy, to an autocracy as well as a democracy, to an Islamic republic as well as a Christian kingdom. These are different ways of arranging or constituting state authority in a country. They are not different kinds of sovereignty. A sovereign state is not a particular form of constitution, such as a monarchy or republic or democracy. Nor is it a particular style of governance. Sovereignty is a political and legal foundation upon which various sorts of state constitution can be erected, and styles of governance carried on. If states are sovereign, their ruling authority will have the same basic characteristics of supremacy and independency no matter how they are otherwise constituted or governed. Sovereignty is the basic authority assumption, the underlying premise, of modern politics and law. We are thus inquiring into a fundamental idea.

Sovereign states are Janus-faced: they simultaneously face inward at the population of the country, and outward at other countries. Sovereign governments, by their very organization and orientation, are obliged to face in both directions, to frame foreign policies as well as domestic policies in order to carry out their responsibilities. That is because supremacy and independence are not two separate characteristics: they are two facets of one overall characteristic: sovereignty. Facing inward, the sovereign is the supreme authority in the country. There can be only one sovereign within a country – even if its authority is divided constitutionally between two levels of government, as in a federal state. A federal constitution merely specifies where supremacy resides on any specific issue: that is, whether at the federal level or at the ‘state’ or provincial level of authority.

Facing outward a sovereign is but one among many such authorities around the world. In the outward exercise of their sovereignty states are never in a position of supremacy. They are in a position of independence. If one state’s authority were superior in relation to another state, the latter state would not be sovereign, but instead would be a province or colony or some other kind of component or dependent unit of the former state, which might then more accurately be referred to as a federal state or imperial state. All sovereigns, even the most powerful, must come to terms with that pluralistic reality. They do that by various means and measures that derive from their sovereignty. That includes diplomacy, which is a mutually recognized practice of communication, negotiation, and other forms of interaction between representatives and agents of sovereign states. That also includes international law, which consists of the legal rules (mostly customs and treaties) that obtain in the interactions of sovereign states, either bilateral or multilateral. They do that, as well, by means of commercial relationships, transportation arrangements, and related kinds of international organizations and intercourse. They do that, in the final analysis, by means of war, which reflects the fact that there is no supreme authority above independent states for resolving disputes between them.

Sovereignty is one holistic idea with two conceptual facets: like two sides of a ship’s hull, inside and outside. The ship of state is sovereign internally: its crew and passengers are subject to the captain’s supreme authority. The ship of state is also sovereign externally: its independence is recognized or at least tolerated and not extinguished by other independent ships sailing on the ocean of world politics, each with its own captain, crew, and passengers. Supremacy and independence cannot exist separately. They can only be distinguished analytically. To change the metaphor: they are two sides of the same political and legal coin.

A colonial government might be said to possess internal sovereignty without having external sovereignty. But that ignores the profoundly important political and legal fact that differentiates a colonial government from a sovereign government: its internal authority is not held independently. It is delegated by an imperial government, which has the final word and thus exercises sovereignty over the colony. A colonial government lacks the vital authority to sail independently on the ocean of world politics. The various colonies of European Africa – British, French, Belgian, Portuguese, etc. – had no independent authority or capacity to conduct diplomatic relations, to establish or employ international laws, to carry on commercial relations, or to declare or wage war. That authority and capability resided with the imperial governments in London, Paris, Brussels, Lisbon, etc.