Rethinking the Nation-State: The Many Meanings of Sovereignty

In international politics, no concept is less understood and more misused than that of sovereignty. The term carries at least three meanings in everyday language. First, it denotes "supreme power" -- as in Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "Oenone," which celebrates "self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-restraint" as the only way to a "life to sovereign power." In a similar vein, Robert Burton, tongue in cheek, praises tobacco as a "sovereign remedy to all diseases." A second meaning of the word denotes autonomy, freedom from constraint, or independence. And the third definition can be found in John Keats' "Hyperion":

For to bear all naked truths And to envisage circumstance, all calm That is the top of sovereignty.

Setting aside the poet's sense of sovereignty as a serene, Stoic state of mind, we are left with two basic, everyday meanings for the word: supreme power and autonomy or independence. This is how most people think when they talk about states and their sovereignty.

In that case, it is of course easy to poke large holes into sovereignty as a central tenet of traditional realist thinking about international politics. Supreme power? Not even the United States, the "last remaining superpower," has it. America's word is not holy writ; it certainly cannot treat the rest of the world in the manner of the Athenians, who famously told the intractable Melians that "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." When the United States goes to war, it usually feels compelled to ask for the approval of the U.N. Security Council. Living in a world of almost 200 countries, Washington must consult, convince, and coax other nations; only rarely can it coerce or ignore them.

This is even more true when it comes to autonomy, the second vernacular meaning of sovereignty. No nation is an island, and not even North Korea is autonomous (literally, "able to make one's own laws"). Nations have always depended on others for resources, support, or security. Even if not forced to do so, they have always compromised their autonomy in countless ways: through treaties, coalitions, alliances, institutions (with their constraints), and confederations.

Thus it seems to follow that there is no such thing as sovereignty. It follows further that the dominant model of international politics -- the realist or balance-of-power construct -- is as useful as a unicycle: you can ride on it, but not very well, if at all. If sovereignty is compromised in myriad ways, so is the conventional model that recalls G.W. Leibniz's "windowless monads" by assuming that states are like billiard balls: hard-shelled, highly polished units without bonding surfaces, propelled only by their internal dynamics, and doomed to a life of perpetual collision.

REWRITING RULES

Here Stephen D. Krasner's most recent work, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, makes a most welcome appearance. Right away, Krasner cuts through a tangle of conceptual confusion by sorting out the many ways in which we use and misuse the term "sovereignty." His classificatory scheme is fourfold.

To begin, he rightly makes short shrift of the commonplace idea that sovereignty means freedom from external influences. What he labels "interdependence sovereignty" is usually expressed in pat phrases such as "state sovereignty is eroding because of globalization." Such bromides, Krasner argues, confuse "control" with "authority." Of course states are losing control over the flow of people, goods, pollutants, and currencies across their borders. But this has always been the case. In fact, "by some measures, international capital markets were more open before the First World War than they are now." So there is nothing new under the sun here, nor does the loss of control prove anything about sovereignty itself.

More interesting are Krasner's next three definitions of sovereignty. "Domestic sovereignty" is perhaps the weightiest of them all. Associated most strongly with Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it is deeply rooted in the Western tradition of political philosophy. Hobbes taught that the only way to escape from the state of nature, really a state of war, was for men "to confer all their power and strength upon one man É that he may reduce all their wills É unto one will." There had to be a supreme authority that enforced the law and adjudicated conflict. "Domestic sovereignty," then, refers to that "final source of authority," as Krasner calls it, which exists in all polities -- even in federal republics like the United States where power is widely shared. The locus of final authority may vary widely, from the politburo in China to a supreme court in the United States, Germany, or Israel. But there has to be such a locus; we would not call an entity without one a real state. "Domestic sovereignty" is part of the logic of statehood.

Next in Krasner's taxonomy comes "international legal sovereignty." This has a higher normative content than does "domestic sovereignty" (although even Hobbes' Leviathan or North Korea's Kim Jong Il cannot live by brute force alone but needs internal legitimacy as well). How do we know "international legal sovereignty" when we see it? Krasner proposes the following tests: "Is a state recognized by other states? Is it accepted as a juridical equal? Are its representatives entitled to diplomatic immunity?" In other words, it is not enough to seize power and control territory. Those who claim domestic sovereignty must be accorded the badge of acceptance by other states -- implying that their claim is right and just. To be a proper actor on the world stage, a political entity must be so certified. In this respect, all states that fulfill the criteria are "sovereign" -- whether puny or powerful, a city-state like Kuwait or a vast landmass like Canada.