Abstract
The contemporary approach to the concept of “sovereignty” may be characterized as a titanic clash between two extreme methodological positions, which in different ways underpin the skepti-cism about sovereignty. On the one hand, there is the unproblematic employment of the term in empirical research, where an understanding of its substance is at best attained by operationalizations or operational definitions or at worst simply left to the intuitions or preconceptions of the audience. On the other hand, there is, what a contemporary critic has aptly called, the “indefinability thesis,”1 that is, the overproblematized philosophical treatment of the word as part of a “discourse” or “discursive practice,” where the content of the word is allowed to vary historically from one period to another, to describe in the end, among other things, the functions or the foundations of contemporary scientific discipline(s). The basic assumption of this study is that neither of these approaches is satisfactory in the context of empirical investigations. Sovereignty cannot be regarded as a set of operations or a “primitive term,”2 the meaning of which is given beforehand and is not in need of further logical and empirical explication. Nor can the concept be regarded as some sort of a chimera, or a kind of disciplinary tool or premise with specific functions, with no immediate or contingent relation whatsoever to a nonlinguistic or nondiscursive world. In this chapter, a critical assessment of these two broad approaches to the concept of sovereignty will first be undertaken. Then the focus of attention will be shifted to the general outlines of a third way of addressing what is, after all, a methodological issue.
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Notes
John Hoffman, Sovereignty (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998) p. 15.
Carl G. Hempel, Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952) p. 15.
Harold Laski, A Grammar of Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, Fifth edition, 1967) pp.44–45.
Edward Hallet Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis 1919–1939 (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Second edition, 1964) pp.230 and 231.
Stanley I. Benn, “The Uses of ‘Sovereignty’ ” in Anthony Quinton (ed.), Political Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1967) p. 82.
Richard Falk, “Sovereignty,” in Joel Krieger et al. (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) p. 853.
Michael Newman, Democracy, Sovereignty and the European Union (London: C. Hurst & Co. [Publishers] Ltd., 1996) pp.14–15.
See also Morgenthau Frankel, Krasner Nettl, and Waltz quoted in Michael Ross Fowler and Julie Marie Bunck, Law, Power, and the Sovereign State-The Evolution and the Application of the Concept of Sovereignty (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995) pp. 1–2.
Marc Williams, “Rethinking Sovereignty,” in Eleonore Kofman and Gillian Youngs (eds.), Globalization: Theory and Practice (London and New York: Pinter, 1996) pp. 112–113.
Alan E. Chalmer, What is This Thing Called Science? (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, Second edition, 1982) p. 32; see also pp. 28–34.
Cf. Giovanni Sartori, “Guidelines for Concept Analysis,” in Giovanni Sartori (ed.), Social Science Concepts: A Systematic Analysis (Beverly Hills, London, and New Delhi: Sage Publications Ltd., 1984) p. 55.
Janice E. Thomson, “State Sovereignty in International Relations: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Empirical Research,” International Studies Quarterly (Vol. 39, No. 2 1995) p. 219.
Daniel Philpott, “Westphalia, Authority, and International Society,” in Robert Jackson (ed.), Political Studies-Sovereignty at the Millennium (Vol.47, No.3 Special Issue 1999) p. 570.
P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927).
William Outhwaite, New Philosophies of Social Science-Realism, Hermeneutics and Critical Theory (London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1987) pp. 10–11.
See also William Outhwaite, Concept Formation in Social Science (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983) p.10.
Carl G. Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966) p. 89.
Cf. Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli Ac Pacis Libri Tres, translated by Francis W. Kelsey (New York: William S. Hein & Co., Inc., Vol. 2 1995) p. 102.
See John Austin, The Province ofJurisprudence Determined, edited by Wilfrid E. Rumble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) pp. 181–182.
Janice E. Thomson., “State Sovereignty in International Relations: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Empirical Research,” International Studies Quarterly (Vol. 39, No. 2 1995) p. 219.
For the problematic nature of these terms see e.g. Hoffman, Sovereignty pp.75–76; R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) pp.187 and 188–189.
Mervyn Frost, Ethics in International Relations -A Constitutive Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) p.225, n.43.
Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) p. 52.
Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, The State, and Symbolic Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) p. 7.
Walker, Inside/Outside, p.8. See also R. B. J. Walker, “Sovereignty, Identity, Community: Reflections on the Horizons of Contemporary Political Practice,” in Saul H. Mendlovitz and R. B. J. Walker (eds.), Contending Sovereignties-Redefining Political Community (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1990) pp.160, 182, and 183. See also Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, p.18.
Walker, Inside/Outside, p.19. See also Richard K. Ashley, “Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique,” Millennium (Vol. 17, No. 2 1988) pp. 256–257.
Ti-Chiang Chen, The International Law of Recognition-With Special Reference to Practice in Great Britain and the United States, edited by L. C. Green (London: Stevens &Sons Limited, 1951) p.105.
Hersch Lauterpacht, Recognition in International Law (Cambridge: The University Press, 1947) p.98; see also pp.103 and 141–145.
See Steve Woolgar and Dorothy Pawluch, “Ontological Gerrymandering: The Anatomy of Social Problems Explanations,” Social Problems (Vol. 32, No. 3 February 1985) p. 216.
Martyn Hammersley, The Politics of Social Research (London: Sage Publications, 1995) pp.106 and 160.
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© 2005 Ersun N. Kurtulus
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Kurtulus, E.N. (2005). Referents of Sovereignty or Discourses of Sovereignty: Referent as Discourse and Discourse as Referent. In: State Sovereignty. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403977083_2
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