Keep Sovereignty Sovereign!

Abstract

Politics without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations. Edited by Christopher J. Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe, Alexander Gourevitch. London: Routledge, 2007. 224 pp., $135.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-415-41806-2), $37.95 paper (ISBN: 0-415-41807-0). O Sovereignty, that elusive, yet ineludible elixir of international relations! Politics without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations , edited by Christopher J. Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe, and Alexander Gourevitch, seeks to reclaim sovereignty as a normative model for international relations. The book stakes a decidedly iconoclastic position within the considerable literature that addresses the nature of sovereignty in an era of globalization. Caustically critical of much contemporary writing on the subject, Bickerton, Cunliffe, Gourevitch, and their contributors take to task arguments as varied as Stephen Krasner's (1999)“organized hypocrisy,” David Held's (1995) cosmopolitanism, Alexander Wendt's (1999) constructivism, Robert Jackson's (1990)“quasi-states,” and Kofi Annan's (1999) dual concept of sovereignty. In essence, they fear that these understandings of sovereignty will bequeath us a world in which, paraphrasing Rousseau, “we still endure all of the worst features of state sovereignty, and yet derive none of its benefits” (p. 14). The central argument of Politics without Sovereignty is that sovereignty allows for political agency. Outside the sovereign state, there can be no coincidence of the general and the popular will; no meaningful form of accountability, responsibility, or representation; no way to adequately secure the consent of the governed; and, therefore, nothing to prevent the encroachment of increasingly mechanistic and arbitrary forms of rule. Hewing closely to Rousseau, sovereignty is portrayed, not just as supremacy, but as collective political agency. To reduce sovereignty to an aspect of the ruler is to misrecognize the key role of agency in sovereignty and to falsely tar sovereignty with totalitarianism. The people are sovereign, not the state. This argument is, thus, less a retreat to realism than an appeal for placing the consent of citizens at the core of international relations. States and scholars, Bickerton, Cunliffe, and Gourevitch warn, relegate sovereignty to the scrapheap of history at …