Abstract
This article argues that the delineation of the current debate on sovereignty in times of globalization and the manner of questioning are problematic. Although various understandings of sovereignty differ in terms of content, they nevertheless reproduce the same conceptual structure: of a rigid binary separation into internal/external, national/global, a container theory of space, the need to search for the supreme, a (political, ethical, legal) skepticism and the idea of the uniformity of the sovereign entity (state, people, law). The continuity of this conceptual structure has contributed to the fact that not only our political, social and legal thinking and imaginaries have been shaped for centuries by the logic of sovereignty thinking, but also and above all our political practices. The article works out the manner in which this conceptual structure – and not just the content of the concept – is already theory-forming in terms of the structural composition of social and political realities, circumstances, problems and approaches, and its consequences cannot be reflected upon in a debate that postulates the concept of sovereignty. My criticism is that, in the process, important empirical insights about the driving forces of globalization and the economic materiality of global power relationships get lost and decisions are taken that are questionable in a normative sense, in terms of the authorization of actors on the one hand and the delegitimization and exclusion of actors on the other.
Highlights
Ever since Bodin and Hobbes, the concept of sovereignty has been a foundational, a worldview-conceiving political concept
It is obvious that Schmitt and Kelsen approach the problem of sovereignty differently in terms of content, and reach contrary conclusions: power versus law; decision versus norm; social facticity versus normative attribution
The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany argued in the so-called Lisbon judgment that the “Treaty of Lisbon neither transfers constituent power, which cannot be affected by the constitutional bodies, nor does it abandon state sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Germany.”[53]. And elsewhere it says: the sovereign “state is neither a myth nor an end in itself but the historically grown and globally recognized form of organization of a viable political community.”[54]. To reinforce this view, the judges state that the principle of democracy is closely interwoven with sovereignty and they emphasize that the principle of the conferral of powers may not be infringed by the progressing European process of unification
Summary
Ever since Bodin and Hobbes, the concept of sovereignty has been a foundational, a worldview-conceiving political concept. Sociologists, legal scholars and political scientists describe and conceive a world order in which the concept of sovereignty oscillates – both empirically and normatively – between insignificance and redefinition.[12] Sovereignty has become a “contested academic concept.”[13] During the course of these debates, a whole range of new conceptual compounds have been, and are still being, created, such as “post-Westphalian sovereignty,”14 “late sovereignty,”15 “divisible sovereignty,”16 “pooled sovereignty,”17 “multilevel sovereignty,”18 “disaggregated sovereignty”19 − to name just a few of them. Similar to Bartelson, I argue that the idea of sovereignty already shapes the political realities over which the sovereign seeks to exercise power, but Bartelson is convinced that sovereignty has been governmentalized, whereas I seek to clear space for a non-sovereign form of democracy In his analysis of the ontology of sovereign thinking, Havercroft focuses on skepticism as the central structural element. I show that Grimm and Cohen – despite their different conclusions – reproduce the conceptual structure of the idea of sovereignty and tend toward an under-complex analysis of the political, legal and social reality
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