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Usurping the Sovereignty of Sovereignty?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Daniel Philpott
Daniel Philpott
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Abstract

Stephen Krasner's Sovereignty and Michael Ross Fowler and Julie Marie Bunck's Law, Power, and the Sovereign State together pose the deepest challenge yet to the assumption of sovereignty in international relations scholarship. Both claim not merely that state sovereignty is now compromised but also that it has always been severely truncated, violated, and curtailed. Both works contribute importantly to the field by amassing and cataloging formidable evidence of compromises of sovereignty. Yet by failing to provide a yardstick by which to compare these compromises with states' comparative respect for sovereignty, both works ultimately fail to sustain their thesis. Both also overlook the constitutive dimension of sovereignty, a dimension whose acknowledgment would render sovereignty far more stable than either admits. By contrast, a third work, Rodney Bruce Hall's National Collective Identity, commendably explores the constitutive role of sovereignty and applies it to the development of the nation-state system. The strengths and weaknesses of all three works help set an agenda for future scholarship on sovereignty.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , January 2001 , pp. 297 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2001

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References

1 William Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. Michael Clamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), act 4, scene 2, lines 247–50.

2 See, among others, Wriston, Walter, The Twilight of Sovereignty (New York: Scribners, 1992)Google Scholar; Ohmae, Kenichi, The End of the Nation State (New York: Harper Collins, 1995)Google Scholar; Vernon, Raymond, Sovereignty at Bay (New York: Basic Books, 1971)Google Scholar; Cooper, Richard, The Economics of Interdependence-Economic Policy in the Atlantic Community (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968)Google Scholar. For a good discussion of the relationship between sovereignty and power, see Gelber, Harry, Sovereignty through Interdependence (London: Kluwer Law, 1997)Google Scholar.

3 Among dozens of examples, see Chopra, Jarat and Weiss, Thomas G., “Sovereignty Is No Longer Sacrosanct: Codifying Humanitarian Intervention,” Ethics and InternationalAffairs 6 (1992)Google Scholar; and the essays in Gene M. Lyons and Michael Mastanduno, Beyond Westphalia? State Sovereignty and International Intervention (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).

4 For other recent works that also treat sovereignty at a conceptual level, see Bartleson, Jens, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Biersteker, Thomas J. and Weber, Cynthia, eds., State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walker, R. B. J., Inside/Outside: InternationalRelations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Barkin, J. Samuel and Cronin, Bruce, “The State and the Nation: Changing Norms and the Rules of Sovereignty in International Relations,” International Organization 48 (Winter 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keohane, Robert O., “Sovereignty, Interdependence, and International Institutions,” in Miller, Linda B. and Smith, Michael Joseph, eds., Ideas and Ideals: Essays on Politics in Honor of Stanley Hoffmann (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993)Google Scholar; the essays in Hashmi, Sohail H., ed., State Sovereignty: Change and Persistence in International Relations (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Jackson, Robert, ed., Sovereignty at the Millennium (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999)Google Scholar; James, Alan, Sovereign Statehood: The Basis of International Society (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986)Google Scholar; Hinsley, F. H., Sovereignty, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

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6 See Krasner, Stephen D., Structural Conflict: The Third World against Global Liberalism (Berkeley: 1 University of California Press, 1985)Google Scholar. Here rules are international regimes that are not epiphenomenal but rather closely reflect the international distribution of power. His emphasis is on structural conisstraints.

7 On neoliberal institutionalism, see, for instance, Keohane, Robert O., InternationalInstitutions and State Power (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

8 For philosophical accounts of constitutive rules, see Rawls, John, “Two Concepts of Rules,” Philo-sophicalReview 64 (1955)Google Scholar; and Searle, John R., The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995)Google Scholar. For international relations scholars who emphasize the importance of constitutive norms, see Dessler, David, “What's at Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate?” International Organization 43 (Summer 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reus-Smit, Christian, “The Constitutional Structure of International Society,” International Organization 51 (Autumn 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, The Moral Purpose of the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Onuf, Nicholas Greenwood, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Kocs, Stephen A., “Explaining the Strategic Behavior of States: International Law as System Structure,” International Studies Quarterly 38 (December 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cassese, Antonio, International Law in a Divided World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 129–57Google Scholar; Arend, Anthony Clark, Legal Rules and International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Ruggie, John Gerard, “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47 (Winter 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge,” International Organization 52 (Autumn 1998)Google Scholar; Wendt, Alexander, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46 (1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kratochwil, Friedrich, Rules, Norms, and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Philpott, Daniel, “Westphalia, Authority, and International Society,” Political Studies 47 (1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 There is a large literature on international society. The locus dassicus is Bull, Hedley, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 On the role of sovereignty in the international system, see the essays in Jackson, Robert, ed., Sovereignty of the Millennium (Oxford: Blackwell; 1999)Google Scholar.

11 See James (fn. 4).

12 Ibid., 45–48.

13 Fowler and Bunck draw the quote from Lane, Kevin P., Sovereignty and the Status Quo: The Historical Roots of China's Hong Kong Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990), 24Google Scholar.

14 Hall acknowledges that not all realists hold this view and discusses Hans Morgenthau as an alternative. He notes that while Morgenthau is not a structuralist, he still relies on ahistorical abstractions (pp. 14–19).

15 For further development of the concept of the three faces of sovereignty, see Philpott (fn. 8), 573.

16 This would be the logic of neoliberal institutionalism. See Keohane (fn. 7).

17 As an example of a realist explanation of shifts in norms, see Gilpin, Robert, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

18 For such an explanation, see the work of Wallerstein, Immanuel, e.g., The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

19 For a liberal critique of absolute sovereignty, see Beitz, Charles, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar. In the Catholic tradition, see Maritain, Jacques, Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951)Google Scholar.

20 See the essays in Beitz, Charles R. et al. , International Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

21 See Article 2 (p. 7) of the United Nations Charter; Walzer, Michael, “Lone Ranger,” New Republic 218 (April 27, 1998), 10–11Google Scholar.