How can institutions be “racist?” What additional challenges are posed when bias is produced and reproduced by everyday institutional practices? This chapter traces the historical evolution of institutional discrimination from Reconstruction to the present, highlighting explicit legal and implicit policy-level discrimination in the Jim Crow era, the New Deal, and historical immigration policy. It also provides more in-depth analysis of the role of race in the present-day housing market, in the criminal justice system, and in election administration.

The imposition of effective cartel sanctions is shaped by the policy of and guidelines from enforcing authorities, such as the European Commission, as well as the Union Courts. The application of the 2006 Guidelines on Fines has been guided by the jurisprudence of the Union Courts. The Courts have in general upheld the fining methodology expressed in the guidelines and have clarified the way it should be applied in specific situations. The fact that the system of setting and reviewing EU competition fines was found lawful adds to the legitimacy of such fines and their enhanced deterrent effect. The aim of authorities and reviewing courts is to impose adequate and deterrent sanctions, while respecting the rights of defence of the undertakings.

This chapter examines the effectiveness of the administrative fines imposed on cartels by the European Commission. It reviews the theory and practice and evidence that European Commission fines, leniency and settlement procedures deter cartels.

Chapter 7 looks into the interstices of the contemporary sovereign states system. One of the key practical effects of the normative tensions between the different understandings of property informing the practice of the sovereignty cartel is a governance gap between autonomy and multilateralism into which a variety of illicit activities falls. The chapter argues that the tensions not only create spaces in the system in which illicit activity can find a home but actually force some activity there by definition. This often involves non-sovereign actors engaged in economic pursuits, either finding the interstices of sovereignty to arbitrage regulatory gaps or forced into the interstices by those gaps. It also often involves sovereign actors taking advantage of the market value of their sovereign property rights to enrich either their states or themselves. These gaps in governance in the sovereign states system introduce places where sovereign right can be challenged. This is why a sovereignty cartel is necessary to maintain these rights. The cartel is the mechanism by which the sovereign states system polices its interstices and keeps them from undermining the prerogatives of its members.

Chapter 4 unpacks and illustrates the idea of the sovereignty cartel. It looks at some of the individual-level practices through which the sovereignty cartel is reconstituted in the daily conduct of international politics. The chapter makes the connection between sovereignty as an abstract concept and the actual people who act on the international stage in the name of that concept. It complicates the idea of property rights by discussing the responsibilities that are often part and parcel of rights. These property rights include responsibilities to other sovereigns, but also include responsibilities to the citizenries in whose name states rule. In addition, the chapter provides examples of the sovereignty cartel in action, drawn from a variety of issues, including multilateral participation, human rights, and the governance of the global commons. These all show ways in which sovereign right involves specific and historically contingent claims by states, and requires of those states specific behaviors, rather than being a generic claim that can be understood and studied out of context.

Chapter 3 develops some of the basic arguments underlying the concept of the sovereignty cartel. It develops the idea of using property rights as a lens through which to study sovereignty and contextualizes that lens in a broader ontology of sovereignty. It builds on the property rights lens to develop the core idea of the book, that sovereignty can usefully be seen as a recognition cartel in which a small group of actors arrogate to themselves, and work communally to protect, a set of exclusive rights to global governance. It also addresses the question of why the sovereignty cartel should be read as a social construction, as the political expression of a set of norms of sovereignty, rather than as a simple interest-based argument. Yes, interests matter and power matters. But both matter in the context of, and can only be understood as expressions of, an ontologically prior set of norms associated with sovereignty.

Chapter 9 addresses the “So what?” question: what do we learn from studying sovereignty through a property rights lens? One key upshot of the argument is that changes in international patterns of economic regulation and use of force are not necessarily indicative of either the strength of or the content of claims of sovereign right. Sovereignty maintains its centrality in the international system not only (arguably not even primarily) through the practice of governance, but also through collusion to reinforce a normative structure of sovereign right. The chapter concludes with some thoughts about the “So what?” question for international relations theorists. For theorists of foreign policy the sovereignty cartel helps to explain deference by bigger states to the sovereign rights claims of smaller states when national interest would argue against such deference. For globalization theorists the cartel shows that globalization and sovereignty do not vary inversely on a unidimensional spectrum. For theorists of the social structure of the international system it highlights the often-overlooked agentive processes needed to maintain existing social structures rather than just agentive mechanisms for changing structures.

Chapter 8 fills in the last piece of the theoretical story of this book. It looks at the various normative tensions and governance gaps in contemporary state sovereignty and asks how sovereignty can be maintained as a set of broadly recognized norms, rather than simply as rights claims, in the face of those tensions. It introduces the idea of normative dissonance and connects this idea to arguments from political psychology about the cognitive mechanisms people use to navigate dissonant information and beliefs. It runs the idea past normative tensions in questions both of what sovereign property rights are and of who should hold those rights. This introduction of political psychology into the story of the sovereignty cartel provides a mechanism for thinking about state sovereignty as a system that cannot be reduced to a rational set of rules or to a simple discussion of interests, but that reconstitutes itself nonetheless. It is in this sense like any other social system; it does not make coherent sense, but it functions, so we make what sense of it that we can.

Chapter 1 introduces the concept of the sovereignty cartel, the idea that states do not just compete with each other to maximize the national interest or cooperate with each other to provide global public goods, but also collude with each other to reinforce the centrality of the sovereign state as a category of actor in international relations. It reviews the existing international relations literature on state sovereignty and locates the idea of the sovereignty cartel within that literature. It develops the metaphor of the cartel and gives an overview of how this metaphor is developed throughout the book. It looks at different understandings of property rights underlying the idea of the sovereignty cartel and introduces the possibility that these understandings are not mutually compatible. Finally, the chapter provides a plan of the book and an overview of the chapter structure.

This chapter provides a concise overview of European competition policy, with a focus on financial services. The chapter first defines competition and describes the objectives of EU competition policy, i.e. maintaining competitive markets and a single market in the EU. The ultimate goal of competition is to offer consumers a greater choice of products and services at lower prices (i.e. to enhance consumer welfare). The second part of the chapter analyses the economic rationale for competition policy by examining the difference between a perfectly competitive market and a monopoly. The third part of the chapter elaborates on the four tools of EU competition policy. The fourth part of the chapter discusses a framework for investigating the abuse of dominance