Sovereign Equality and National Sovereignty in Communist and Third World Countries

Abstract

It is now necessary to look into non-Anglo-American discourses on sovereignty in order to understand international conceptual struggles in the post-1945 era. While Germany ceased to be a major ideological enemy of Britain and America, the Soviet Union and other communist countries became the serious ideological threat in the Cold War period. In addition, newly independent states were more or less hostile to former colonial powers. To accommodate their demand for national sovereignty was an indispensable task for the Anglo-American powers in order to contain the communist threat. The era is symbolised by the principle of ‘sovereign equality’ that appeared in the Charter of the United Nations and became a pillar of international society. From immediately after the Second World War, the Soviet Union interpreted this principle in a peculiar way, so that it challenged the Western bloc led by the United States. China and other socialist states followed suit to reinforce the challenge. Newly independent states also endeavoured to put the principle into practice. Sovereignty was no longer an outmoded idea of Western international society; it was a vital element of global international society, and the conceptual field in which power politics in the age of the Cold War and decolonisation took place. In this chapter we shall trace the discourses on sovereignty in socialist and Third World states in order to identify the necessity of a re-establishment of the principle of sovereignty after the Second World War.