Abstract
This chapter historicizes “the sovereignty principle” in the making of “the international.” Focusing on three distinct moments—(a) the “legal” conventions that guided the Berlin Conference (1884/1885), (b) the short-lived experiment of a Franco-African Union (1946–1958), and (c) the various deliberations on self-determination that took place in the inter- and post-war periods—it contends that contrary to conventional wisdom, sovereignty is not a fixed and unchanging fact, but a flexible, mutable, negotiable, and layered normative principle. In the specific context of the three instances analyzed, the chapter suggests that sovereignty functions, respectively, as a “relational,” a “divisible,” and a “modernization-bound” norm. The chapter thus contends that both colonialism and decolonization have to be (re)conceptualized in the manner in which they came to (re)distribute sovereign effects.
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Notes
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For instance, a notion of government without legitimacy.
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Note that no systematic distinction is made between the effects of colonialism and those of empire.
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The overarching thrust of this critique can be found among critical legal scholars, the most prominent of which is undoubtedly Antony Angie. See, for instance , Anghie (1999); other notable scholars include Thuo Gathii (1998), Abi-Saab (1994), Esmeir (2012), wa Mutua (1995), Gong (1984), and Riles (1993). Postcolonial scholars have also discussed the centrality of colonialism in articulating the sovereignty doctrine; see among others Mongia (2007). Lydia Liu (1999) has specifically looked at the problem of translation in unpacking the impact of the colonial encounter.
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If Alexandrowicz (150–157) is mainly concern about how positivist international law factors into the colonial set, one could go further and investigate the role of the sovereignty norm in its constitutive form/structure.
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An idea that has a long pedigree, see, for instance, Eric Cheyfitz (1997) but which was being articulated for the first time by a collective of European actors. See, in particular, Prince von Bismarck’s opening address to the Conference: “all the Governments invited share the wish to bring the natives of Africa within that pale of civilization by opening up the interior of the continent to commerce.”
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Anghie (1999). It is impossible to do justice, in this brief essay, to Anghie’s extensive and meticulous argument about the imbrications of international law with the colonial encounter. Anghie is among the prominent scholars who engage international law through the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). More than any other postcolonial legal scholar, he has most powerfully engaged the wide-ranging implications of a history of international relations fraught with methodological and ideological misgivings about the integration of colonial history in the development of IR and international law. A key argument he and others thus make is that one cannot demarcate (legal) norms and praxis without falling into a teleological account of the history of this integration.
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Scott applies a Foucauldian governmentality reading on governing conduct in Europe, juridically, socially, politically, etc.
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See debates within Assembly of the French Union between parliamentarians from metropolitan France and representatives of colonial territories, Archives nationales d’Outre-mer, ANOM, Aix-en-Provence, BiB/50243/ 1946–1952.
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I unpack useful aspects of this discussion by showing how internal disagreements within the decolonization movement in French West Africa also had to do with a difficulty to making various ideological alignments speak to constituencies represented by different African leaders in the French colonial institutions of legislative governance.
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Alexandrowicz (1973) defines a protectorate as “a split of sovereignty and its purpose is to vest in the Protector rights of external sovereignty while leaving rights of internal sovereignty in the protected entity. In this way the Protector shelters another entity against the external hazards of power politics.” Quoted in Anghie (1999, p. 54).
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As RBJ Walker points out, the practice and aspiration of the (nation) state has increasingly narrowed our political horizon beyond state sovereignty and reinforce the conditions that have come to render the notion of sovereignty seemingly incontestable.
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Much has been written about the unequal nature of colonial treaties. On one hand, we are told that their legality lies in the fact that they were legal contracts between “sovereign” entities. Yet the same entities were denied any sovereign subjectivity when it came to subjecting them to European colonial domination . Treaties created unequal obligations as much as unequal legal and moral regimes.
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Shilliam offers a critical discussion of the manner in which the Ethiopian-Italian conflicts of 1935–1936 could be read as an instance of a “colonial-modern” intervention. On the need to restore the colonial and the colonial encounter in the constitution of “Europe,” see Mignolo (2000).
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Chakrabarty (2000) among others had offered a strong critique of the normativity of European modernity.
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Niang, A. (2018). Rehistoricizing the Sovereignty Principle: Stature, Decline, and Anxieties About a Foundational Norm. In: Iñiguez de Heredia, M., Wai, Z. (eds) Recentering Africa in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67510-7_5
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