Negative sovereignty in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Martin Wight once compared ‘the increasing number of small states which are the debris of colonial empires’ to ‘the increasing number of small principalities’ of an earlier period in international history which were ‘the debris of feudalism’. The citystates, monarchies, republics, confederations and various other emergent states of Europe eventually found an alternative to the mediaeval societas Christiana on which their independence and intercourse could be legitimately based. This was, of course, the practice of dynastic legitimacy or what Burke glorified as ‘prescription’: the right of inherited and established states to international recognition which sufficed as the constitution of European international society until the French revolution. Burke invoked it to condemn the revolution and justify foreign intervention not only to destroy the Jacobins and restore the monarchy but also to defend ‘the college of the ancient states of Europe’.3 It was a lost cause.