Politics & International Relations
State Sovereignty
State sovereignty refers to the exclusive authority and autonomy of a state within its territorial boundaries, free from external interference. It encompasses the state's ability to govern itself, make laws, and engage in international relations. This principle is a cornerstone of the modern state system and is often invoked in discussions of international law and diplomacy.
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10 Key excerpts on "State Sovereignty"
eBook - PDFSword and Scales
An Examination of the Relationship between Law and Politics
- Martin Loughlin(Author)
- 2000(Publication Date)
- Hart Publishing(Publisher)
Today, the concept also underpins the international order; it is only since the emergence of sovereign states, for example, that the con-duct of international politics can properly be said to have come into existence. Sovereignty thus identifies both the condition of political independence and provides the prop by which many political practices, domestic and international, are sustained. Consequently, the emer-gence of the State based on the principle of sovereignty is commonly treated in modern political science as “the predominant source of the individual’s moral and legal valuations and the ultimate point of refer-ence for his secular loyalties” and the preservation of sovereignty is seen as being the “foremost political concern in international affairs.” 1 The State founded on the principle of sovereignty provides the frame-work through which politics, in the sense explored in the previous chapter, is conducted. In this chapter, I propose to take the inquiry fur-ther by focusing on the meaning of this basic principle of sovereignty. During the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin defined sovereignty as the supreme power which is exercised over citizens and subjects, unre-strained by law. This formulation suggests that sovereignty is closely linked to power and is an essentially empirical phenomenon. This is the approach—sovereignty as the ability to bring about intended effects— which was still being followed by most nineteenth-century jurists. John Austin, for example, defined the sovereign as “a determinate human superior, not in a habit of obedience to a like superior, receiv[ing] habitual obedience from the bulk of a given society.” 2 During the 1 H.J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations (New York: Knopf, 6th edn. 1985), 345. 2 John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined [1832] Wilfrid E. Rumble ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1995), 166 (emphases in original).
eBook - PDFFrom Hierarchy to Anarchy
Territory and Politics before Westphalia
- J. Larkins(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Mutual recognition of each other’s sovereignty is the ground rule of international society and confirms membership of the society of states. However, in order to gain access to this club, prospective members must possess a territory. Hedley Bull defines states as “independent political communities” that “possess a govern- ment and assert their sovereignty in relation to a particular portion of the earth’s surface and a particular segment of the human population.” 29 Similarly Alan James asserts that since each of the member states of international society exclu- sively represents a distinct “physical sector of the land mass of the globe”, so the landscape of international society is “divided into states by frontiers rather as a farm is into fields by fences and walls.” 30 Now that international society has expanded globally “almost every square kilometer of the earth’s land sur- face” has been allocated to “one sovereign state or another, with virtually all frontiers being tidily delineated or clearly demarcated.” 31 English School think- ers also endorse the institutionalist assumption that the inside/outside spatial distinction between domestic and international politics is primarily articulated in terms of sovereignty. Bull, for example, distinguishes the exercise of internal sovereignty (which gives a state supremacy over all other authorities within a territory and over a population) from external sovereignty (which denotes inde- pendence from outside authorities). 32 Again the underlying assumption here is that territory exists a priori and is something onto which sovereignty is some- how fixed. English School emphasis on the importance of international law has lead many of its advocates to endorse the idea of the state as a Rechstaat, that is, as the embodiment of the collective agency of social power through represen- tative institutions, created by laws, customs, and practices. However, even the Rechstaat resides upon the territorial a priori.
eBook - PDFSovereignties
Contemporary Theory and Practice
- R. Prokhovnik(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
state; the significance of the differences between how sovereignty is studied in political theory and IR; and the idea of sovereignty as political, about state power, contrasted with the idea of sovereignty as unpolitical, a purely descriptive designation about a universal relation of ruling. The argument of this book holds that a broad perspective can help to work out what sov- ereignty means given all these debates in the western tradition. It would also be instructive, though beyond the scope of this book, to examine other, non-western traditions of political theory and practice about the issues and ideas sovereignty deals with. There are at least six contemporary discourses on sovereignty. The first three are deeply problematic, tending to essentialise and depoliticise sov- ereignty in different ways. The second three contain great potential for revitalising the notion of sovereignty. The mainstream international relations discourse sees sovereignty as paradigmatically ordaining hierarchy at home and anarchy abroad, with inter-state relations taking place on the basis of national interest and power. This discourse relies heavily on an analogy between the modern liberal rational, calculating, autonomous individual agent and the sov- ereign state. This supposedly neutral and descriptive discourse has an important, often unacknowledged, normative dimension. The tradition of political theory that deals with political concepts has emphasised the authority relationship by which sovereignty is seen to establish the domestic legitimacy and stability of government, a liberal constitutionalism, and the political obligation of the governed.
eBook - PDF- Kevin R Cox, Murray Low, Jennifer Robinson, Kevin R Cox, Murray Low, Jennifer Robinson(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
Even though some recent research in political geography and IR has moved beyond such state-centrism, further work still needs to be done to effectively under-mine statist assumptions about State Sovereignty, subjectivity, and territoriality. SOVEREIGNTY AND SUBJECTIVITY Contemporary discourses of sovereignty rely on specific assumptions about subjectivity and agency in the international arena. These assumptions, in turn, reinforce mainstream discourses of State Sovereignty as a natural and necessary framework of power. Thus, the notion that the state exercises sovereign control over its territory and advances its sovereign interests through foreign policy rests on an assumption that the state is the subject of international politics. It conceives the state as an entity presiding over its society and making deci-sions in the interests thereof (Ashley, 1988a: 227). The habitual statements about the interests of a state, such as ‘America’ or ‘Russia’, as the causes of their foreign policy illustrate the conception of the state as a pre-existing subject analogous to an autonomous individual. This conception, with its roots in the political tradition flowing from Machi-avelli to Hobbes and Locke, is indeed a crucial pillar of the state system. The view of the state as the subject of interna-tional politics is based on the modernist conception of the autonomous self as ‘the heroic figure of rea-soning man who is himself the origin of language, the maker of history, and the source of meaning in the world’ (Ashley, 1988b, quoted in Edkins and Pin-Fat, 1999: 3). It presumes that State Sovereignty reflects the interests of a pre-existing subject. It sets an autonomous subject apart from the objective world, at once conceiving agency as prior to action and separating agents from their action (Campbell, 1993: 82). While rendering state action as contin-gent and problematic, it conceives its subjectivity as natural and given.
eBook - PDFDemocracy
Problems and Perspectives
- Roland Axtmann(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- EUP(Publisher)
The theory of sovereignty legitimised this endeavour. This theory claimed the supremacy of the government of any state over the people, resources, and, ultimately, over all other authorities within the territory it controlled. ‘Sovereignty’ meant that final authority within the political community lay with the state whose will legally, and rightfully, commanded without being commanded by 153 Democracy others, and whose will was thus ‘absolute’ because it was not ac-countable to anyone but itself. ‘Governing’ by the ‘sovereign’ thus aimed to take on the form of the artful combination of space, people, and resources in territorialised containments, and the policing, monitoring, and disciplining of the population within these spaces became the foundation, and the manifestation, of State Sovereignty. As a result of historical develop-ments that spanned several centuries, the modern territorial state came into existence as a differentiated ensemble of governmental institu-tions, offices, and personnel that exercises the power of authoritative political rule-making within a continuous territory that has a clear, internationally recognised boundary. It thus possesses ‘internal’ so-vereignty that is typically backed-up by organised forces of violence and that grounds the state’s ‘external’ sovereignty vis-a ` -vis other states and its demands for non-interference in internal matters. Hence, ‘sovereignty’ has a spatial dimension in that it is premised on the occupation and possession of territory. This spatial dimension man-ifests itself most clearly in the drawing of territorial boundaries that separate the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside’. This territorial exclusion is, in turn, the prerequisite for identifying the source of sovereignty within the bounded territory and for defining ‘us’ in contradistinction to ‘them’. Let us look more closely at the discourse on ‘sovereignty’ as a theory of political legitimacy.
eBook - PDFChanges in Statehood
The Transformation of International Relations
- G. Sørensen(Author)
- 2001(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Sovereignty and Changes in Statehood 153 The modern sovereignty game The substantial features of modern statehood were identified in Chapter 6. They are: Government A centralized system of rule, based on a set of administrative, policing and military organizations, sanctioned by a legal order, claiming monopoly of the legitimate use of force. Nationhood A people within a territory making up a community in the Gesellschaft and the Gemeinschaft sense, involving a high level of cohesion, binding nation and state together. Economy Segregated national economy, self-sustained in the sense that it comprises the main sectors needed for its reproduction; major part of economic activity takes place at home. The modern sovereignty game is based on nonintervention and reciprocity. For modern states, nonintervention is the right of states to conduct their affairs without outside interference. That also implies that the modern sovereignty game is one of self-help; states are individually responsible for looking after their own security and welfare: the state decides for itself `how it will cope with its internal and external problems, including whether or not to seek assistance from others . . . States develop their own strategies, chart their own courses, make their own decisions about how to meet whatever needs they experience and whatever desires they develop' (Waltz 1979:96). That situation is of course not only one of opportunity, but also of constraint: `Statesmen are free within the situation they find themselves which consists externally of other states and internally of their subjects. That is obviously a circumstance of constrained choice . . .' (Jackson 1993a:6). The dealings with other states are based on reciprocity, that is, they involve a notion of symmetry, of giving and taking for mutual benefit.
eBook - PDF- Laura Brace, John Hoffman(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
A poststatist view of sovereignty What makes sovereignty ambiguous and problematic is the contra-dictory character of the state. The state is the source of those absolutist dualisms which have paralysed the conceptual analysis of sovereignty (even, as we have seen, in the work of no-nonsense realists like James). A recent analysis seeks to distinguish analytically the state and sovereignty, but still persists in seeing the two entities as 'mutually constitutive' (Biersteker and Weber, 1996: 11). If we define sovereignty 'as a political entity's externally recognized right to exercise final authority over its affairs' (1996: 12), it is clear that the link between state and sovereignty remains. But if the state is the source of sovereignty's conceptual problems (as I have argued), then why not ask what the concept might mean in a world without the state - in a world in which conflicts of interest are resolved without force; where differences are respected (even IS IT TIME TO DETACH SOVEREIGNTY FROM THE STATE? 23 welcomed), and where pluralistic identities have to be accommodated? What makes the modern or liberal state significant in analysing sovereignty is that it raises, however unwittingly, the prospect and possibility of statelessness by enshrining the self-governing individual as its legitimating norm. In the same way that modernity makes postmodernity possible, so liberal statism enables us to look beyond the state to a world in which human survival itself increasingly requires governmental rather than statist methods of resolving conflicts of interest. The point is that it is not enough to denounce State Sovereignty. We can only move beyond its abstract divides through identifying a stateless world which celebrates diversity, explicitly recognizes pluralism and focuses upon difference as the heart of individual identity.
eBook - PDFState Sovereignty
Concept, Phenomenon and Ramifications
- E. Kurtulus(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Sovereignty, in other words, consists of legal freedom, and is restricted by the various legal duties incumbent upon a state in its international capacity. In consequence, a state’s sovereignty will vary from time to time in accordance with the extent to which its freedom of action has been limited by international law. 46 Thus the greater the legal freedom which a state has, the greater is its sovereignty; and any addition to a state’s legal duties has the effect of diminishing its sovereignty. 47 James points out the possibility of interpreting even this notion of sov- ereignty in qualitative terms, because “states are either in possession of a reserved domain or they are not.” 48 However, despite this, there is evi- dently a strong case for not using the word “sovereignty” synonymously with legal freedom or reserved domain. As has been shown convincingly by the same scholar quoted earlier, such an approach presents several problems, two of which are especially pertinent here. First, this view says nothing distinctive about juridical sovereignty as such. Possession of legal freedom or a reserved domain is the common denominator of many, probably all , legal persons—such as international organizations, states, companies, individuals, and so on—and not solely of those terri- torial entities that are endowed with sovereign status under international law. Thus, it is not possible to distinguish, on the basis of this conceptu- alization, those legal persons that have juridical sovereignty from those which do not. 49 This suggests a reason to confine, as some international lawyers do, 50 the usage of “sovereignty” in the legal sense to designation Sovereignty of States and Similar Entities ● 71 of legal personality of a certain kind only—howsoever this kind is defined.
eBook - PDFSovereign Forces
Everyday Challenges to Environmental Governance in Latin America
- John-Andrew McNeish(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Berghahn Books(Publisher)
This was clearly reflected in the legal and political disagreements of the TIPNIS struggle described above. Renewed Scholarly Debates on Sovereignty There has been a renewed interest in the meaning and use of the concept of sovereignty across the legal and social sciences in recent years. This has in part been generated by the internal reworking of theory within different disci-plines, but also as a result of the need to suffi ciently respond to the persisting controversies and contradictions observed in politics and law. The legal and political interpretation of sovereignty and sovereign rights remains a central factor in ongoing conflicts and social contestation at different scales, e.g. from international discussions on terrorism and migration, state reactions to regional calls for national independence, and state, corporate and com-munity confrontations on local property and resource rights. Recognizing that the concept of sovereignty has shifted over time and has never reached a universally agreed meaning, recent scholarship has focused on the chang-ing and multiple meanings of this concept across a variety of historical and political contexts. Across the constellation of the social sciences and political theory, diverse writers (including Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann) have touched on the historically complex and unsettled configurations of sover-eignty in European countries. In political and legal studies, renewed debate has recently surfaced regarding the significance of the sovereign state in a glo-balized market economy. On the one hand, it is suggested that the sovereign state is no longer the main locus of political authority and community in the future. It is now challenged by new constellations of authority and community that transcend the divide between the domestic and the international spheres and will soon be replaced by new forms of political life that know nothing of this distinction (Bertelsen 2006: 464).
eBook - PDFElection Interference
International Law and the Future of Democracy
- Jens David Ohlin(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
J. INT’L L. 30, 40 (2018) (“As a principle, the concept denotes international law’s acknowledgment that States are primarily responsible for what happens on their territory and that other States should respect said competence. On this basis, sovereignty is the fount from which various primary rules, like the prohibition on intervention into the internal affairs of other States, emerged.”). 19 Treaty Between the United States and Other Powers Providing for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, Aug. 27, 1928, 46 Stat. 2343, 94 L.N.T.S. 57 (1929) [hereinafter cited as “Kellogg-Briand”]. 1. The General Principle of Nonintervention 71 Treaty of Westphalia required its contractors to pledge not to interfere with each other. 20 The cornerstone of the Westphalian system is a community of nation-states, each one enjoying the formal equality of sovereignty, and each one pledging to all the others to govern their internal affairs without external interference. Of course, the difference between the “internal affairs” of a state and something that is legitimately the subject of international concern is far from clear. International lawyers often use the phrase domaine re´serve´ to refer to that aspect of a state’s existence that forms part of their sovereign discretion. But the mere use of a foreign phrase – and italics, no less – adds nothing more than the illusion of precision. Figuring out what counts as a state’s domaine re´serve´ requires additional conceptual content – some standard, norm, or principle that defines what counts as a state’s sovereign discretion. Prohibited interference is the easiest to determine in the case of violations of territorial integrity.
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