John H. Jackson, Sovereignty-Modern and the Constitutional Approach to International Law

Abstract

In his own words, John H. Jackson was intrigued by frequent recourses to sovereignty in the congressional debate over the adoption of the results of the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations in 1994. Concerns of politicians and lobbyists for policy space, democracy, accountability, but also an agenda for economic protectionism, all informed this debate and the recourse to a notion which had emerged in Europe after the Thirty Years War and shaped ever since the post-1648 Westphalian System of nation states. Himself a convinced multilateralist, educated in Wilsonian traditions, John did not react by discarding the notion of sovereignty as historical and outdated in modern times, as did Louis Henkin, or as it was depicted by Stephan Krasner as a matter of ‘organized hypocrisy’. John was more cautious, recognizing national sovereignty as an important component of international law. Simply rejecting or dismantling it would bear the risk of undermining international law and thus its stabilizing functions. He identified sovereignty as one of the logical foundations of international law, and ‘to discard it risks undermining international law and certain other principles of the international relations system’. John instead set out to analyse or ‘decompose’ the term in an analytical process typical for him: informed by the tradition of American pragmatism, empirical research, logic and reflection—and the finding and tension, as he recalled that ‘all politics is local’ (Tip O’Neill) and ‘all economics is international’ (Peter Drucker). Of course, he would not stop to deal with an understanding of sovereignty as a blank