Sovereignty as Symbolic Form

Jens Bartelson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317685821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Staatsbürgerkunde & Bürgerrechte

This book is a critical inquiry into sovereignty and argues that the meaning and functions performed by this concept have changed significantly during the past decades, with profound implications for the ontological status of the state and the modus operandi of the international system as a whole.

Although we have grown accustomed to regarding sovereignty as a defining characteristic of the modern state and as a constitutive principle of the international system, Sovereignty as Symbolic Form argues that recent changes indicate that sovereignty has been turned into something granted, contingent upon its responsible exercise in accordance with the norms and values of an imagined international community. Hence we need a new understanding of sovereignty in order to clarify the logic of its current usage in theory and practice alike, and its connection to broader concerns of social ontology: what kind of world do we inhabit, and of what kind of entities is this world composed?

This book will be of interest to students of International Relations, Critical Security and International Politics.

1
Sovereignty as Symbolic Form

In this chapter, I start by discussing some of the difficulties we encounter when we try to make sense of sovereignty today, arguing that these reflect underlying tensions in the ways in which we understand political concepts and their meaning. As I will suggest, while methods informed by the linguistic turn have helped us to understand the causes and consequences of conceptual change, their emphasis on the contingency of conceptual meaning has had important implications for the function of sovereignty in the present that remain beyond the grasp of these methods. In order to find a way out of this impasse, I will suggest that we should understand sovereignty as a symbolic form that has conditioned the ways in which we habitually talk about, reflect upon and organize the political world. I end this chapter by briefly describing how the symbolic form of sovereignty was assembled during the early-modern period, and how its subsequent diffusion has been conditioned by practices of international recognition.

The language of sovereignty and the sovereignty of language

While sovereignty remains both salient and contested, our understanding of this concept remains trapped between extreme points. At the one extreme, we find those who still maintain that sovereignty has a given and sufficiently precise meaning that corresponds to immutable features of the political and legal worlds. At the other, we find those who argue that sovereignty is what we make of it through the use of language, and that sovereignty therefore is wholly contingent upon our linguistic practices and conventions. Still others do their best to split the difference between these views, by arguing that though some attributes of sovereignty certainly are subject to historical change, its core characteristics remain the same across time and space.¹ And while some critical theorists have argued that sovereignty “is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence,” this has done little to challenge these core characteristics.²

The ambiguities of sovereignty have led some commentators to suggest that since this concept lacks analytical purchase, it should be abandoned in favor of concepts that are better suited to make sense of political reality. Yet most efforts to banish sovereignty on such grounds have back-fired. Either sovereignty has been replaced by semantically equivalent concepts, or disciplines dependent on its meaningful employment have suffered a loss of coherence in its absence.³ Thus, since sovereignty arguably has been constitutive of the modern state and the international system, it remains indispensable to our understanding of both.⁴ As Skinner recently has argued: “We can scarcely hope to talk coherently about the nature of public power without making some reference to the idea of the state as a fictional or moral person distinct from both rulers and ruled.”⁵ On a similar note, Jennings has claimed that:

Nothing is better testimony to the success of political modernity than how widely the concept of sovereignty has been—and remains today—accepted as the sole important term for comprehending political power & we remain without a viable alternative vocabulary for thinking politically.⁶

While few today are prepared to argue that sovereignty is here to stay forever, even fewer maintain that sovereignty is about to fade away. Many scholars struggle to strike a balance between these views by disaggre-gating sovereignty into its component parts. By so doing, they invite further stretching of its meaning, thereby legitimizing the relocation of political authority away from states to a variety of non-state actors.⁷ But as long as our understanding of sovereignty remains trapped between the different views of political concepts alluded to above, we will not be in a position to understand the wider political significance of such attempts at disaggregation and stretching in the present. This book aims to amend this situation by inquiring into the consequences of conceptual mutability and contingency for the function of sovereignty in the present.

The inability to make sense of sovereignty in the present is a result of a theoretical deadlock. On the one hand, according to the view of classical semantics, concepts exist by virtue of being distinct from objects, and are distinct from objects only by virtue of their meaning being nothing but the class of objects to which they refer. Concepts are essentially predicates, and as such, they are necessarily concepts of something, and hence cannot exist independently of that something.⁸ Those who subscribe to this view will be inclined to assume that the concept of sovereignty has a given meaning by virtue of referring to some given facts or norms of political life. Taking this view of concepts appears to be a necessary condition of all further inquiry, since in the absence of any fixed meaning and stable reference, we will simply not know what we are talking about, let alone that we are talking about the same thing when we are talking about sovereignty.

It was precisely this view of concepts and their meaning that constituted the prime target for what has become known as the linguistic turn in philosophy and the social sciences. Some of those who initiated this turn maintained that the meaning of concepts derives from their usage rather than from their referents, which implies that conceptual meaning is bound to vary according to usage.⁹ As Skinner once stated, “There are in fact no such timeless concepts, but only various different concepts which have gone with various different societies, [that] is to discover a general truth not merely about the past but about ourselves as well.”¹⁰ From this point of view, sovereignty is what we make of it through our linguistic practices, given the contextual constraints at hand. Those who take this view are inclined to argue that sovereignty has no meaning apart from its actual function, which has been to render intelligible and legitimize the authority claims made by modern states.¹¹ To others taking the linguistic turn, the history of concepts initially “directed itself to criticizing the practice in the history of ideas of treating ideas as constants, articulated in differing historical figures but of themselves fundamentally unchanging.”¹² Hence conceptual historians do not assume that conceptual meaning is reducible to the function of concepts in different contexts, but hold that they possess the capacity to unify meaning and experience into potentially coherent wholes.¹³ A history of sovereignty is therefore a history of the meaningful experience of sovereignty as it has been condensed into this concept across time.¹⁴

Finally, when viewed from the end point of the linguistic turn, not only do our political concepts have a history, but are nothing but the sum of their histories. In order to analyze the formation of concepts, writes Foucault, “one must relate them neither to the horizon of ideality, nor to the empirical progress of ideas.”¹⁵ Concepts are neither words nor things, so rather than exploring their deductive or causal relations, “one would have to describe the organization of the field of statements where they appeared and circulated.”¹⁶ Doing this means investigating

[their] anonymous dispersion & that characterizes a type of discourse, and which defines & forms of deduction, derivation and coherence & [s]uch an analysis, then, concerns a kind of pre-conceptual level, the field in which concepts can coexist and the rules to which this field is subjected.¹⁷

From this it follows that if the concept of sovereignty is epiphenomenal to statements produced within a given discourse, then there cannot be any such thing as sovereignty outside the confines of discourse.¹⁸

So how we understand political concepts has profound implications for how we understand the nature of sovereignty and which methods we deem appropriate for studying it. But these accounts also have very different normative implications. Essentialist renderings of sovereignty tend to be vaguely supportive of the corresponding institutions and practices, while accounts that emphasize its contingency tend to question its normative value, sometimes to the point of debunking the sovereign state.¹⁹ For example, as Derrida has argued:

There is something of a rogue state in every state. The state’s use of power is originally excessive and abusive & it is thus no doubt necessary to erode not only its principle of indivisibility but its right to the exception, its right to suspend rights and law.²⁰

Yet arguments to the effect that the meaning of sovereignty is mutable and contingent are vulnerable to the objection that any actual account of its variation across different contexts must presuppose that this concept has some stable connotations, otherwise it would not be accessible to inquiry in the first place. Hence, in the next chapter, I argue that this is one reason why those critical of sovereignty end up reaffirming its traditional connotations and their associated theoretical assumptions.

But though the linguistic turn certainly has had liberating effects on the study of political and legal thought, the widespread conviction that the meaning of sovereignty is either mutable or contingent has had profound consequences for its function in political practice. Yet as long as our analysis stays within the bounds of the linguistic turn, these consequences are likely to escape our attention. By reducing the meaning of sovereignty to its changing functions within a different context, attempts to understand the meaning and function of sovereignty in the present leave us with the false choice of either accepting that sovereignty is what we make of it, or arguing that this concept has some immutable core meaning because its referents—states—remain essentially the same across time. And as long as we remain paralyzed by this choice, sovereignty will keep running away from us, performing new tricks behind our backs.²¹

We are today living in the aftermath of a successful revolution against the tendency of classical semantics and hermeneutics to locate the sources of meaning in objects and subjects respectively, a revolution motivated by the conviction that meaning resides inside language and nowhere else. Although the claims of classical semantics and those of the linguistic turn appear incommensurable at first glance, they converge on the assumption that language and the world are separate domains that stand in a determinate relationship to each other. Their main differences concern which of these domains should enjoy autonomy and primacy in relation to the other, as well as how they might intersect and condition each other. In recent years, there has been a growing awareness that the linguistic turn has exhausted some of i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: revisiting sovereignty
• 1 Sovereignty as symbolic form
• 2 The fetishism of sovereignty
• 3 Restoring sovereignty?
• Conclusion: reinventing outsides?
• Bibliography
• Index