Reconstructing Sovereignty

Abstract

For three or four centuries, and certainly by the Peace of Westphalia ending the Thirty Years War, state sovereignty has been the guiding principle of international relations. The state has been the way people have organized themselves, and has been seen as the natural or inevitable end product in the evolution of international society. F.H. Hinsley characterizes sovereignty as ‘final and absolute authority in the political community’,3 and notes that it has been intimately associated with the state: ‘the origin and history of the concept of sovereignty are closely linked with the nature, the origin and the history of the state.’4 He talks about the ‘inexorable’ consolidation of the state and the ‘victory of the concept of sovereignty’.5 Harold Laski notes, however, that ‘there is historically no limit to the variety of ways in which the use of power may be organized’.6 Mary Catherine Bateson, too, sees more room for human agency and change: ‘The state is not a fact of nature, however, but the solution to a problem7 — a modern and Western solution, recently generalizable to the rest of the world, which is, in turn, itself a source of problems.’8 KeywordsInternational CommunitySocial PurposeSovereign StateState SovereigntyGlobal OrderThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.