Abstract
In this chapter, I focus on the notion of sovereignty, both its explanatory value (the extent to which it accurately describes the relationships of power in the contemporary world) and its effect as a symbolic, political, and legal principle in the conduct of political affairs. Toward a reconception of the notion of sovereignty, I explore the distinction between external and internal sovereignty and propose a relational understanding of internal sovereignty. This takes us briefly through historical debates about the origins and location of sovereignty and contemporary critiques of assumptions about the modern interstate system, sovereignty, and territoriality.1 It is important for us to consider not only the challenges that come from violations of sovereignty in the Westphalian system but also the opportunities that erosions of sovereignty invite for rethinking the terms of political association and cooperation among individuals in this changing world.
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Notes
“The prevailing concept of the international legal system is that territorial boundaries establish statehood and that territorial boundaries are the basis for state sovereignty.” Robert McCorquodale, “International Law, Boundaries, and Imagination,” in Boundaries and Justice: Diverse Ethical Perspectives, ed. David Miller and Sohail H. Hashmi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 155.
This notion of sovereignty includes three of Krasner’s four usages of sovereignty: international legal sovereignty, Westphalian sovereignty, and interdependence sovereignty. Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3.
Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber make this distinction by separating the concepts of state and sovereignty and defining the “territorial state” as a “geographically-contained structure whose agents claim political authority within their domain,” and by defining sovereignty “as a political entity’s externally recognized right to exercise final authority over its affairs.” Biersteker and Weber, eds., “The Social Construction of State Sovereignty,” in State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2; See also R.B.J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, trans. M. J. Tooley (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 44; See Julie Mostov, Power, Process, and Popular Sovereignty (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992), 28–36.
Mostov, Power, Process, and Popular Sovereignty, 37. According to F. H. Hinsley, “the idea is that there is a final and absolute political authority in the political community.” Sovereignty, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 26.
David Held, “The Transformation of Political Community: Rethinking Democracy in the Context of Globalization,” in Democracy’s Edges, ed. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 86–87.
Neil Brenner, Bob Jessop, Martin Jones, and Gordon MacLeod, eds., “Introduction: State Space in Question,” in State/Space: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 2; John Agnew, “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory,” Review of International Political Economy 1, no.1 (1994): 53–80.
Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: New Press, 1998), 92.
Ibid., 94–95. “International human rights, while rooted in the founding documents of nation-states, are today a force that can undermine the exclusive authority of the state over its nationals and thereby contribute to transform the interstate system and international legal order. Membership in nation-states ceases to be the only ground for the realization of rights,” 95.
John Gerard Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 164–165; See also Friedrich Kratochwil, “Of Systems, Boundaries, and Territoriality: A Inquiry into the Formation of the State System,” World Politics 39, no. 1 (1986): 27–51.
On “sovereign bargains,” see Karin T. Litfin, “Sovereignty in World Ecopolitics,” Merschon International Studies Review 42, no. 2 (Autumn, 1997): 167–204.
Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 12; See also Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond,” 160–165.
Walter Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought (Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1970), 207–208. See also Mostov, Power, Process, and Popular Sovereignty, chap. 3.
Quentin Skinner, The Foundation of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 62–63.
Ibid., 215.
Julian Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty: Mixed Monarchy and the Right of Resistance in the Political Thought of the English Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1–7, 31, 34.
Ibid., 2–6.
David Gauthier, Logic of the Leviathan: The Moral and Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 171; see also Mostov, Power, Process, and Popular Sovereignty, chap. 2.
Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, 52–53; Julian Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 29.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 240.
Ibid., 242, 243. Bodin and Hobbes classified forms of commonwealth according to the location of sovereign power; that is, every body politic was a monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, the distinction being in the number of those who share in the exercise of sovereign power. Mostov, Power, Process, and Popular Sovereignty, 37.
John Locke, The Second Treatise on Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980), 47–48.
Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 49–50; see also Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty, 123.
Rousseau followed in the tradition of Bodin and Hobbes, while the American Federalists followed the Lockean tradition of sovereignty. See Mostov, Power, Process, and Popular Sovereignty.
J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Praeger, 1960). See Mostov, Power, Process, and Popular Sovereignty, chap. 1.
David Miller, “Democracy and Social Justice,” in Democracy, Consensus and Social Contract, ed. Pierre Birnbaum, Jack Lively, and Geraint Parry (London: Sage, 1978), 76.
Henry B. Mayo, An Introduction to Democratic Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 72.
Ibid., 73.
Ibid., 95. See also S. I. Benn and S. R. Peters, The Principles of Political Thought: Social Foundations of the Democratic State (New York: Free Press, 1965), 336–344. For varied responses to popular rule, see Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); and David Held, Models of Democracy (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987).
Andrzej Rapaczynski, Nature and Politics: Liberalism in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 25.
Ibid.
Ibid., 26.
Ibid.
Ibid., 26n1. See also Talmon, Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, and John W. Chapman, Rousseau—Totalitarian or Liberal? (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 74–79.
See for example, Bernard Crick, “Sovereignty,” in The International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (London: Macmillan, 1968), 80.
William N. Nelson, On Justifying Democracy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 53. William Riker combines the incoherence arguments with Talmon’s concerns about populism. Liberalism against Populism: A Confrontation between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice (San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman, 1982).
Norberto Bobbio, The Future of Democracy: A Defence of the Rules of the Game, trans. Roger Griffin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 28.
Ibid., 29.
Ibid., 83.
Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, “Introduction,” in Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World, ed. Hansen and Steppatat (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 2. Michel Foucault would also have us look at the “disciplinary power” of the notion of sovereignty: “sovereignty and disciplinary mechanisms are two absolute integral constituents of the general mechanisms of power in our society.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1980), 108.
Hansen and Stepputat, “Introduction,” 4, 13–18; Thomas Blom Hansen, “On Legality and Authority in India,” in Hansen and Stepputat, Sovereign Bodies, 170–171; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Hansen and Stepputat, “Introduction.” Agamben focuses this notion on the control and degradation of “bare life” in concentration camps and refugee camps: Homo Sacer, 166–180. See also Aihwa Ong on “zones of exclusion” in “(Re)Articulations of Citizenship,” PS: Political Science & Politics 38, no. 4 (October 2005: 697–699.
Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging (New York: Routledge, 2000), 209. For another look at the Northern League, see John Agnew, “Territorial and Political Identity in Europe,” in Europe without Borders: Remapping Territory, Citizenship, and Identity in a Transnational Age, ed. Mabel Berezin and Martin Schain (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2003), 219–242.
See Paolo G. Carozza, “Subsidiarity as a Structural Principle of International Human Rights Law,” The American Journal of International Law 97, no. 1 (January 2003): 38–79; Andreas Follesdal, “Subsidiarity,” Journal of Political Philosophy 6, no. 2 (1998): 231–259; and Follesdal, “Subsidiarity and Democratic Deliberation.”
David Held, “Democratic Accountability and Political Effectiveness from a Cosmopolitan Perspective,” Government and Opposition 39, no. 2 (2004): 375.
Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Julie Mostov, “ ‘Our Women’/‘Their Women’: Symbolic Boundaries, Territorial Markers, and Violence in the Balkans,” Peace and Change 20, no. 4 (October 1995): 515–529.
Hilary Charlesworth, “The Sex of the State in International Law,” in Sexing the Subject of Law, ed. Ngaire Naffine and Rosemary Owens (Sydney, Australia: LBC, 1997), 259. See also McCorquodale, “International Law, Boundaries, and Imagination,” 143.
See V. Spike Peterson, “Gendered Nationalism: Reproducing ‘Us’ versus ‘Them,’ ” Peace Review 6, no. 1 (March 1994): 4–5; see also Mostov, “ ‘Our Women’/‘Their Women,’ ” 522–523.
For a striking picture of this from another part of the world, see Geraldine Heng and Janadas Devan, “State Fatherhood: The Politics of Nationalism, Sexuality and Race in Singapore,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommers, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Routledge, 1992), 343–364.
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© 2008 Julie Mostov
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Mostov, J. (2008). Locations and Boundaries of Sovereignty. In: Soft Borders. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612440_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612440_2
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