Advocating Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization

Abstract

While the principle of sovereignty has come under attack by political philosophers and international jurists in recent decades, it will continue to be— and should continue to be—an important norm of international relations. However, recent changes in the scales of markets, states, and peoples require a reformulation of the principle in order to take account of these changes and address some of the problems caused by them. Among these changes in scale are the impending coalescence of the European Union (EU) into a federal state, the increasing extension of U.S. military power, and the continued development of commercial and financial globalization. The concept of geographical scale is relatively unfamiliar to philosophers concerned with international relations. Nevertheless, it is usefully employed in considering the impact of recent changes in the organization of markets, states, and peoples on the relative importance of international norms such as state sovereignty, global security, human rights, and distributive justice. In this article, I examine sovereignty specifically and argue that, while the concept needs rethinking in light of recent scalar shifts in international relations, it nevertheless should continue to play a central role in assessing the legitimacy or illegitimacy of global political actors. Two reactions to these recent changes have been prevalent. On the one hand, a “new internationalism” has been asserted by political actors and theorists, from U.S. Senator Hilary Clinton to various philosophers of “globalization.” The view regards sovereignty as an outmoded idea that is unable to meet the challenges of an increasingly interconnected world. On the other hand, and this is the view argued for here, the international connections that are being established are seen as undermining any effective institutions of self-government—institutions inevitably built and maintained within sovereign states. While the paradigmatic case of the former view is the growth of nongovernmental organizations in the 1990s, the paradigmatic case of the latter is the war on Yugoslavia in that same period, a war perpetrated not only by local nationalist groups seeking their own nation-states, but by various international organizations of dubious legitimacy, from the World Bank to NATO. In the event, a sovereign state was openly attacked and dismembered by hegemonic states (the United States and Germany), in conjunction with secessionist movements