1 See BBC, ‘Swiss Bank Refuses US Tax Request’ (1 May 2009), {http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8028174.stm}, last accessed 13 September 2010.

2 See, for example, Avi-Yonah, Reuven, ‘Globalization, Tax Competition, and the Fiscal Crisis of the Welfare State’, Harvard Law Review, 113:7 (2000), pp. 1573–1676CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Rixen, Thomas, ‘Tax Competition and Inequality – The Case for Global Tax Governance’, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, 17 (2011) pp. 447–467, in printGoogle Scholar ; Dietsch, Peter, ‘Tax competition and its effects on domestic and global justice’, in Banai, Ayelet, Ronzoni, Miriam, Schemmel, Christian (eds), Social Justice, Global Dynamics – Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 95–113Google Scholar .

3 See Thomas Rixen, ‘From double tax avoidance to tax competition: explaining the institutional trajectory of international tax governance’, Review of International Political Economy. First published on: 20 October 2010 (iFirst), p. 10. Rixen credits the term to Vann, Richard J., ‘A Model Tax Treaty for the Asian-Pacific Region? (Part I)’, Bulletin for International Fiscal Documentation, 45:3 (1991), pp. 99–111; see p. 102Google Scholar .

4 This question targets the ‘regulative’ as opposed to the ‘constitutive’ face of sovereignty. See Philpott, Daniel, ‘Sovereignty: An Introduction and Brief History’, Journal of International Affairs, 48:2 (1995), pp. 353–368Google Scholar . Whereas the latter defines the legitimate holders of sovereignty, the former asks ‘what essential prerogatives in making and enforcing decisions’ legitimate polities enjoy (p. 358).

5 See Krasner, Stephen D., ‘Pervasive Not Perverse: Semi-Sovereigns as the Global Norm’, Cornell International Law Journal, 30 (1997), pp. 651–680; see pp. 653–659Google Scholar .

6 Krasner, ‘Semi-Sovereigns’, p. 656.

7 See Palan, Ronan, ‘Tax Havens and the Commercialization of State Sovereignty’, International Organization, 56:1 (2002), pp. 151–176CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

8 These two policy objectives are widely accepted as serving basic functions of domestic fiscal policy. See, for example, Avi-Yonah, ‘Globalization’, pp. 1576 and 1625.

9 See Avi-Yonah, ‘Globalization’, pp. 1527 and 1621.

10 See Rixen, ‘From double tax avoidance to tax competition’. For the OECD tax convention that serves as foundation to this regime, see Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Model Tax Convention on Income and on Capital: Condensed Version (Paris: OECD, 2005)Google Scholar .

11 Rixen, ‘From double tax avoidance to tax competition’, p. 13.

12 See Krasner, ‘Semi-Sovereigns’, p. 659. See also Buchanan, Allen, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 56–57Google Scholar and chap. 6. Authors who do not make the distinction between different aspects of sovereignty that I rely on here, like Endicott, Timothy, ‘The Logic of Freedom and Power’, in Besson, Samantha and Tasioulas, John (eds), The Philosophy of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar ; or Klabbers, Jan, ‘Clinching the Concept of Sovereignty: Wimbledon Redux’, Austrian Review of International and European Law, 3 (1999), pp. 345–367CrossRefGoogle Scholar , capture these tensions as an apparent paradox of sovereignty.

For international lawyers like Klabbers, the apparent paradox of sovereignty primarily refers to the issue whether voluntarily entered to legal agreements can bind sovereign states at later moments in time. By contrast, this article is preoccupied with the question whether interdependent states have moral obligations vis-à-vis each other.

13 Recognising this conflict undermines the position that Buchanan labels legal nihilism. Paraphrasing H. L. A. Hart, Buchanan points out that ‘to say that there is no international law because the sovereignty of states precludes their being bound by law is to fail to understand that the powers, rights, liberties, and immunities that constitute sovereignty are defined by international law. To be sovereign is to be a member of a system of entities defined by and subject to international law.’ See Buchanan, , Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination, p. 50Google Scholar .

14 I take most of these examples from Krasner, ‘Semi-Sovereigns’, pp. 662–4.

15 Krasner, Stephen D., Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

16 Rustiala, Kai, ‘Rethinking the Sovereignty Debate in International Economic Law’, Journal of International Economic Law, 6:4 (2003), pp. 841–878CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

17 See Brown, Chris, Sovereignty, Rights and Justice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002)Google Scholar . He points out that ‘modern thinking on actual sovereign powers stresses the extent to which they have always been limited …’ (pp. 5–6).

18 Brown, , Sovereignty, Rights and Justice, p. 35Google Scholar .

19 Having said that, I suspect my disagreement with Brown might be merely terminological.

20 Shue, Henry, ‘Limiting Sovereignty’, in Welsh, J. M. (ed.), Humanitarian Intervention and International Relations (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 15Google Scholar . Shue adds: ‘Without a partially rule-governed society, there are no duties; and with no duties, there are no effective rights. This is nothing specifically to do with sovereignty but is a matter of what a right is. Thus, if sovereignty is a right, sovereignty is limited. Sovereignty is limited because the duties that are constitutive of the right, and without which there can be no right, constrain the activity of every sovereign belonging to international society.’ (p. 15)

21 For a more detailed development of the analogy between individual liberty and state sovereignty, see Endicott, ‘The Logic of Freedom and Power’. Endicott cites Raz, who rightly emphasises that ‘autonomy is possible only within a framework of constraints.’ See Raz, Joseph, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 155Google Scholar . The structure of this argument is the same as Shue's point about sovereignty.

22 See Slaughter, Anne-Marie, ‘Security, Solidarity, and Sovereignty: The Grand Themes of UN Reform’, The American Journal of International Law, 99 (2005), pp. 619–631CrossRefGoogle Scholar : ‘To exercise … authority and control in a world that has become so interconnected that people, politics, and pathogens are virtually able to disregard borders requires institutionalized cooperation and intervention.’ (p. 629)

23 Chayes, Abram and Chayes, Antonia H., The New Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar .

24 See Buchanan, who argues ‘for a kind of staged, conditional, and provisional practice of recognition, according to which in some cases an entity claiming statehood status would not be granted all the attributes of sovereignty at once, but would be accorded them in steps, contingent on satisfying certain normative standards …’ See Buchanan, , Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination, p. 56Google Scholar .

25 See Krasner, ‘Semi-Sovereigns’, pp. 653–54.

26 See Shue, ‘Limiting Sovereignty’.

27 The following information is based on Anne-Marie Slaughter's insightful comments on the UN report ‘A more secure world: our shared responsibility’ (Slaughter, ‘Security’).

28 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001)Google Scholar . Available at http://www.iciss.ca/report-en.asp, accessed 13 September 2010, p. 13.

29 Slaughter, ‘Security’, p. 620.

30 High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, UN, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, UN Doc. A/59/565 (2004). Available at: {http://www.un.org/secureworld/report}, accessed 13 September 2010, pp. 21–2.

31 The first two sections of the article contain an inquiry into the most appropriate content of sovereignty as a norm governing interstate relations but took for granted that some form of state sovereignty is justified. The present section questions this assumption.

32 Brown, , Sovereignty, Rights and Justice, p. 80Google Scholar .

33 For a discussion of a variety of different replies to the two questions, see chap. 5 of Brown, Sovereignty, Rights and Justice.

34 Endicott, ‘The Logic of Freedom and Power’, p. 257.

35 See also Buchanan, , Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination, pp. 55–56Google Scholar .

36 I would like to thank an anonymous referee for forcing me to rethink the normative status of sovereignty under the Westphalian conception.

37 I bracket the issue of sanctions in the present article.

38 The contrast to another economic context, namely trade, is surprising. The rules of the World Trade Organization against protectionist tariffs can be regarded as conform to the idea of sovereignty as responsibility.

39 See the section, ‘The many facets of sovereignty’, third paragraph.

40 See Dietsch, Peter, ‘Show Me the Money: The Case for Income Transparency’, Journal of Social Philosophy, XXXVII/2 (2006), pp. 197–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

41 This assumes that the policy choices of the government in question are themselves legitimate, that is, geared towards the classic goals of fiscal policy (welfare maximisation through the provision of public goods and equity in particular). See the discussion of the second principle below.

42 Given that individuals are taxed on a residence basis, if a government wanted to keep secrecy laws intact for its own citizens, this would be compatible with the transparency requirement defended here. For a stricter transparency requirement, see fn. 40.

43 See Murphy, Richard et al. , Tax us if you can, Tax Justice Network (2005), p. 56Google Scholar .

44 That is, a tax regime where the tax base for a certain kind of tax is consolidated across countries before the right to tax a certain share of this tax base is allocated on the basis of a to-be-agreed-upon formula.

45 Harmonisation is undesirable both because it would not respect the diverging preferences of different polities with regard to the size of the state and the level of redistribution, but also – borrowing a point made by John Stuart Mill about the desirability of various experiments of living – because it would reduce the diversity of fiscal arrangements and the insights generated by this diversity.

46 For a more systematic analysis of what it means to respect the fiscal policies of other countries, see Peter Dietsch and Thomas Rixen, ‘Tax Competition and Global Background Justice’, unpublished paper.

47 By contrast, today's international tax regime seems rather inimical to conversion. A report published by Oxfam estimates that developing countries lose approximately $50 billion of government revenues annually due to tax competition (see Oxfam, Tax Havens: Releasing the hidden billions for poverty eradication, 2000). This may not be a consequence of intentional policies pursued by developed countries, but suggests that the latter could and should at least be more proactive in reforming the current regime.

48 Musgrave, Richard A. and Musgrave, Peggy, ‘Inter-nation Equity’, in Bird, Richard M. and Head, John G., Modern fiscal issues: essays in honor of Carl S. Shoup (Toronto, Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1972)Google Scholar .