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State sovereignty is like a living organism; it casts off its meanings as it evolves in response to the demands of global governance. In simple terms, sovereignty can be described as a principle that legitimises internal political organisation and serves as a mechanism for enhancing international order. It is, therefore, linked to both internal and global governance.
Thomas Biersteker and Cynthia Weber have argued, state sovereignty is ‘a political entity’s externally recognised right to exercise final authority over its affairs’. With regard to internal political control, sovereignty revolves around population, territory and recognised authority. To this Alan James has added a constitutional dimension, claiming that ‘sovereign states are those territorially-based entities which are independent in terms of their constitutional arrangements’.
The present author makes a distinction between three types of sovereignty. The first is external or juridical sovereignty, which is based on the notion that theoretically ‘the state has over it no other authority than that of international law’. The second is internal or empirical sovereignty, which is based on the view that states have the right (and capacity) to control the people, resources and institutions within their territories.
The third is individual or popular sovereignty, which is predicated on the claim that all people are entitled to fundamental freedoms and that states exercise control over them only with their consent. Empirical sovereignty and juridical sovereignty accord states rights and responsibilities that other no international actors do have.
The concept of global governance implicitly questions some understandings of sovereignty because it is based on the assumption that states and non-state actors are partners in the management of global affairs. Realists, who claim that states are the most important international actors, would regard global governance as a diminution of sovereignty. The realist view of sovereignty is that theoretically each state is free to pursue its domestic and external affairs without outside interference.
Hence there appeared Hans Morgenthau’s definition of sovereignty as ‘a centralised power that exercised its law-making and law-enforcing authority within a certain territory’. On the other hand, liberals, who subscribe to the view that transnational forces play important roles in world politics, regard global governance as a necessary process of addressing anarchy in the absence of central authority.
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Liberals believe that sovereignty gives states the right to exercise control within their territories, but that this control is to be exercised with some degree of consent and legitimacy from society. For this reason, liberals associate empirical sovereignty with popular sovereignty. Constructivists, who consider sovereignty to be socially constructed, regard global governance as a part of the social construction and reconstruction of international society.
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The assumptions that underpin sovereignty date back to the Peace of Westphalia, which inaugurated a new ‘international’ legal order for Europe. The Westphalian regime, which brought about a break from the previous religious order, is best remembered for making the territorial state the cornerstone of the modern international system. Since then, the development and reinterpretation of sovereignty has closely mirrored the evolution of the state and the prevailing norms of global governance. However, sovereignty has not always been honoured.
In Europe, sovereignty was occasionally subverted with a view to maintaining the balance of power. This is partly why Stephen Krasner has claimed that breaches ‘to the Westphalian model have been an enduring characteristic of the international environment’. Krasner has more recently written of sovereignty as ‘organised hypocrisy’. Others have suggested that sovereignty can be understood only with reference to particular historical periods. Sovereignty has undergone various transformations in accordance with the prevailing norms of global governance.
Whenever serious crises undermine the legitimising principles of sovereignty, new norms are negotiated, and these norms often reflect the preferences of the hegemonic states. It is the processes of negotiating the rules for sovereignty which Biersteker and Weber had in mind when they argued that sovereignty was socially constructed. They posited that it is ‘the practices of states and non-state agents [that] produce reform and redefine sovereignty and its constitutive elements’.
In such social interactions, all participants help, in varying degrees, to shape, and are also shaped by, the structure of the system. A global structure that is characterised by power politics and secret diplomacy is likely to favour the notion that sovereignty resides with governments. However, a global order, which is committed to the promotion of democracy and human rights, would favour popular sovereignty. Thus, it is the norms, values and institutions which underpin global governance that determine the nature of sovereignty.