Sovereignties (Once Again) in Question

Abstract

Globalization and Sovereignty. By John Agnew. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009. 216 pp., $26.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-742-55678-2). Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty. By Elden Stuart. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 304 pp., $25.00 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-816-65484-0). Sovereignty and the Limits of the Liberal Imagination. By G. Nelson Scott. New York: Routledge, 2009. 206 pp., $130.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-77784-1). The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation. (McCarthy 1985:199) Contemporary scholars of global politics, it needs be said, are awash in sovereignties. Beset by suspicions that global connections have eroded sovereignty—that, given international legal norms, trade relations, global flows of people, etc. —“we cannot presume “the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth” as Bodin (1992:1) once did. For some, sovereignty became fractured and proportional; states could enjoy varying degrees of sovereignty, which fundamentally changed the concept. In a lucid attempt to address the confusion, Steven Krasner opened up the term, offering four different meanings of sovereignty—all descriptors of authority which are neither logically nor empirically coupled (Krasner 1999:9). By 2000, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri were transforming sovereignty into a series of imperial, disciplinary, capitalist, and network practices, all given the name Empire . In short, we seem to have replaced Bodin's sovereign absolute with a series of contending, overlapping sovereignties. Despite all of this, whenever I read new contributions to our understandings of sovereignty, my thoughts drift back to one of the English language's most monstrous literary creations. It is not, as the reader might suspect, Hobbes's Leviathan, but instead Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden—the desert-crossing philosopher/beast from Blood Meridian. Both violence and desire personified, one of Judge Holden's hobbies was to kill birds and to make detailed notes and sketches of the species he had found. When queried about his purpose, he claims that he wishes to become suzerain of the Earth—”…a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other rules. …