This chapter theorizes that sovereignty is the interplay of two contrasting modalities. In Idealized Sovereignty, sovereign authority is represented exclusively in “the state” per the doctrine of indivisibility developed by early modern theorists and reified in IR theory. In Lived Sovereignty, achieving sovereign competence involves divisible practices of state and nonstate actors in a variety of social relations. We would do a disservice to sovereignty’s complexity if only one of the two modes persevered in analyses of sovereignty. Instead, the chapter intervenes in major IR debates to argue that sovereignty should be hybridized. This overarching framework guides the ideal-types of public/private hybridity developed in the next chapter and the empirical analyses in the remainder of this book, where hybrid sovereignty is necessary to build a global empire, go to war, regulate global markets, and protect rights.

This chapter recapitulates the book’s arguments, before teasing out its larger implications both for International Relations scholars interested in the comparative evolution of international systems, and also for debates within the social sciences more broadly about the origins and character of global early modernity.

Chapter 2 makes the case for looking at state sovereignty as a social construction rather than as a definitional absolute. In other words, it argues that “sovereignty” does not have a specific meaning, defined by law or concept and static over time. Rather, it is a practice, and the content of sovereignty as a practice changes over time. The chapter reviews various ways in which sovereignty is understood in international relations, and the analytical utility and limitations of using the concept in these ways. It discusses the Peace of Westphalia in this context, since “Westphalian sovereignty” is a sufficiently common trope in international relations theory that it cannot be ignored (this discussion reappears in various places throughout the book), and argues that the Peace actually has fairly little to do with the contemporary practice of state soveriegnty. It also briefly discusses methodology, and how understanding sovereignty as a social construct can address questions of both power in and change of sovereignty in ways that conceptualizing sovereignty as a definitional absolute cannot.

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 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.

Few have interrogated the seeming inevitability of the Westphalian or modern system of international relations. The starting point of enquiry for this project is to question our Westphalian reality historically. It locates the birth of the modern international relations system in the death and erasure of its last viable alternative – the East Asian tribute system, which I call Eastphalia. The analytical focal point of this article is a critical case study of the 1875 Un'yō crisis between Japan and Korea. Like many other systemic changes, East Asia’s induction into Westphalian international relations is most legible retrospectively. The kind of “systems encounter” of interest to this chapter comprises a collision between two constitutive sets of interlinked conceptual and legal regimes, institutional apparatuses, and bureaucratic protocol. Often moving at a glacial pace, such systemic changes are not easily visible to a human eye in the midst of unfolding events, partly because our capacities for observation are not calibrated to appreciate changes that occur at such speeds. I consider these frustrated instances of misrecognition as the fricative encounter of two different systems of knowledge and power. I have specifically chosen a confrontation between two East Asian neighbors with a long history of relations, rather than one between an Eastern and a Western entity in order to reveal the Westphalian transition as a systemic harmonization. Such an approach rejects a triumphant modernist narrative of the so-called “West” and Western values over the East.

Chapter 1 problematises the classic history of diplomacy in relation to extraterritoriality and presents the key debates in IR and international law to which this study contributes. This chapter further shows that classic diplomatic history's focus on embassies and Grotius to historicise extraterritoriality has contributed to the Westphalian imaginaries that remain dominant and maintain linear trajectories of the shift from personal to territorial concepts of sovereignty. If a range of new studies, focused on biographical and cultural aspects of diplomacy, are also contesting this approach and account of early modern jurisdiction, they nevertheless remain limited in terms of not fundamentally questioning the link between extraterritorial and territorial sovereignty based on the analysis of ambassadorial immunity and the shift from the personal – the ambassador – to the territorial – the embassy. These limitations call for new approaches to the history of extraterritoriality.

This introductory chapter presents the Valladolid junta in imperial Spain (1550-1551) as an alternative starting point for the history of international legal thought instead of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Unlike Westphalia’s myth of equal states recognizing independence from the emperor and papacy within Europe, the Valladolid debate addressed the controversial question of legitimate infidel polities outside Europe. By focusing on native peoples on the colonial margins of transatlantic Christendom, the chapter reframes international relations from the periphery rather than strictly Europe. A more interesting story emerges, revealing that Christian-infidel relations and its discourse of infidel rights was an ambivalent predecessor to a modern international relations marked by recognition of independent sovereign states and colonial subjugation of less civilized ones. Accordingly, the chapter accomplishes two tasks: it reconsiders the Westphalian myth by examining the international politics of Thomas Hobbes attentive to his influential idea of the state of nature; it also treats significance of theology and the Church for affirming world order - the normative basis of international society - especially among sixteenth-century Spanish Dominicans associated with Valladolid critical of papal and imperial tyranny.

Chapter 2 undertakes to provide a critical narrative of the development and direction of international law as it was characterised by Catholic preoccupations from the Medieval and Early Modern era. Chapter 2 surveys the theological and philosophical contribution to the structure of premodern international law by Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Francisco de Vitoria and Robert Bellarmine. They assisted the Catholic Church at crucial moments in its history and left an enduring legacy, which could broadly be described as a foundation for a Catholic cosmopolitan approach to international law. This process is highlighted and contrasted with the way early-modern international law was constructed. The structure of international law that emerged during the eventful sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to Catholic political and legal thought becoming a minor key in the development of a secularised public international law in the nineteenth century. This distinctively different approach to sovereignty and international order provides an opportunity to examine the peripheral place of religion, particularly Catholicism, in the structure of nineteenth-century international law.

The chapter examines the relationship between cultural diversity and the institutions of international society. It is concerned with the the impact of cultural diversity on the institutions of international society, with the capacity of those institutions to allow cultural diversity to play out in the least disruptive manner possible, and with finding space for the promotion of just claims for cultural recognition. It suggests, firstly, that the institutions of the supposedly pluralist international society have never provided a religiously and culturally neutral set of institutions able to mediate claims of difference and conflicting values. Second, the chapter questions the traditional pluralist emphasis on the nation-state, highlighting the hybrid character of the dominant units, and shows how empires instituted empire-specific diversity regimes that were subsequently disrupted by geopolitical conflict and competition. Finally, it explores the tensions between the deepening of global governance on the one hand and the more recent reassertion of demands for harder sovereignty, often as an explicit container for cultural or civilizational difference.