Dimensions Of Sovereignty Research Articles

Надгосударственность и суверенитет в Европейском союзе и Евразийском экономическом союзе

In the last decade, the notion of sovereignty has been increasingly used in public discussions. A variety of actors are appealing to it, from systemic actors looking for ways to overcome the global governance and security crisis to sovereigntists protesting universalism and the weakening of the role of the state. Under these conditions, the transformation of sovereignty within integration associations is of particular interest. The concept of “strategic sovereignty” has appeared in the discourse of the most advanced among them, the European Union (EU). Among the challenges to this sovereignty, Brussels puts emphasis on the policies of China and Russia. The latter also actively appeals to the notion of sovereignty, and is itself the core of another integration association – the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). From the very creation of the Eurasian Customs Union, it has been emphasized that it borrows the experience of the EU and aims to become a nexus in interlinking regional integration agreements across Eurasia. In the context of the conflict between Russia and the west, the EU and the EAEU are increasingly opposed to each other. This study is focused on identifying the features of the transformation of sovereignty in integration associations on the example of the EU and the EAEU. The analytical focus of the evaluation of the two models is set by the concept of four dimensions of sovereignty by S. Krasner and the phenomenon of supranationality. As the study shows, the transformation of sovereignty is not limited to the transfer of power to supranational bodies. In the EU, sovereignty is shared among the levels of this political community, forming a multi-level system of governance. Regarding the EAEU, the literature is dominated by the opinion that the sovereignty of the participating countries is indisputable, and the association itself is purely interstate in nature. Indeed, there are practically insurmountable obstacles to transferring the issues of organization of power to other levels by the EAEU states. At the same time, different dimensions of sovereignty here were affected by asymmetric relations with Russia even before the formation of the EAEU. The union was created on the basis and because of these dependencies, but it also transforms them.

Sovereignty Trade-Offs between Politics and the Economy: The Deconcentration of IG Farben after 1945

AbstractThe postwar deconcentration of IG Farben AG shows that the Allied military governments and their German counterparts were anything but united on the extent and form of sovereignty the Federal Republic of Germany should receive. The American plan to divide the corporate enterprise into a large number of individual companies aimed to establish a democratic state independent from the influence of domestic business. By contrast, West German government officials and the business community were convinced that the future sovereignty of the Federal Republic depended on the global competitiveness of large industrial conglomerates. To thwart the American deconcentration plans, they traded off one dimension of sovereignty against the other. Leading members of the West German government accepted delegating the negotiations over the future of IG Farben to business representatives, thereby sharing domestic sovereignty because the delegation promised to maintain a powerful German chemical industry that could support the trade balance of the future West German state. This development contributed to the emergence of a Federal Republic characterized by the close involvement of economic actors in political decision-making. It contained important elements of a post-democratic sovereignty, which is commonly used to describe the development of the late twentieth century.

How the Gulf States are using their air space to assert their sovereignty

Abstract All Arab states, including the Gulf states, are regularly considered an anomaly in International Relations: allegedly artificially created, lacking clear identity, borders and sovereignty. We challenge this assertion by looking at one dimension of sovereignty often overlooked: the air space. We measure this assertion along the classical lines of sovereignty: do the states have the institutions, regulations and capacity to manage their air space, do they use it for economic and diplomatic purposes, do they have the means to conduct war in it, and does it feature in their national identity? We find that particularly since 1990, the Gulf States have affirmed their sovereignty markedly in all these areas. These findings show two things: that sovereignty can be a feature of a state regardless of the nature of its creation, and that it can be affirmed in a space previously overlooked, the air.

‘An Unacceptable Surrender of Fiscal Sovereignty’: Arbitration and Sovereignty in the Double Taxation Regime

When do developed countries cede sovereignty over taxation? For decades, the axis of international fiscal conflict was between tax havens (usually developing countries) and developed welfare states. In an era of austerity, the Panamas and Cayman Islands of the world were seen as helping rich individuals and corporations shield their assets from tax collectors in Paris and Washington. Scholars rightly interpreted this as a distributive conflict attributable to too much tax sovereignty, a problem of Ciudad de Panama and George Town developing resource-sucking financial industrial policies and no international rules in place to hinder double non-taxation (i.e. income not taxed anywhere). But in recent years, tax conflicts between developed countries have spilled out into the open. In July 2019, for example, France announced plans for a GAFA tax – a special assessment on U.S. companies Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, who are seen by many observers as gaming the global tax infrastructure. The U.S. has responded by reviving a New Deal-era law that would allow them to double rates on French citizens and corporations that owe U.S. tax. These loud defections from longstanding tax law norms are in fact the latest in a series of quieter non-compliant actions that have pushed developed countries into increasingly sovereignty-compromising, mandatory, binding, and judicialized enforcement regimes. This is a puzzling turn. Generations of fiscal realists have presumed that states would jealously guard tax sovereignty: “The revenue of the state is the state,” as Edmund Burke argued in 1790 (Burke, 1955: 105). The intimate relationship between revenue, social contract, and statehood is an important theme in the emergence of the Westphalian state, and one explanation for why international governance institutions in the area of taxation entail significantly less pooling of sovereignty than others. Nonetheless, in the spring of 2017, 27 states acting through the OECD agreed to introduce “mandatory binding arbitration” provisions into over 150 bilateral double taxation treaties amongst themselves, requiring that disputes over interpretation be submitted to panels of independent adjudicators. At around the same time, EU member states committed to making tax arbitration between one another enforceable through domestic courts and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Both proposals had been rejected at the turn of the 1980s, with the OECD concluding that tax arbitration would be “an unacceptable surrender of fiscal sovereignty” (OECD, 1984: 115). This article seeks to understand why states gave up in 2017 on an institutional change they had long resisted, and in the process makes a few distinct contributions to ongoing scholarly debates. We contribute to the historical institutionalist literature by offering empirical confirmation of one of its central theoretical claims: that a political context with strong veto players (e.g. states and their tax ministries) can block fundamental change of institutions (e.g. the international anti-double tax regime set up in the 1920s). Nevertheless, as scholars in that literature have also suggested, changes in the external environment (e.g. increased capital mobility from the 1970s) can lead to drift in regimes, where old rules are on the books but no longer functional in practice. This opens up space for subversives (e.g. activist corporations and lawyers) to push states to layer new rules (e.g. arbitration) on top of the old ones. We also contribute to the literature on hierarchy in international relations by adding new depth to the idea of partial sovereignty – in our case the particular ways in which judicial sovereignty as a specific sub-type can lead to progressively deeper constraints on other modes of sovereignty. Finally, we add to the international political economy of tax scholarship by demonstrating that distributive conflict between developed countries started earlier than is generally presumed. In Section II, we begin by discussing theories of institutional change and sovereignty, and how these might inter-relate. We develop a categorisation of dimensions of sovereignty and of sovereignty-diminishing change paths, which we apply to the case of the development of tax arbitration in Section III. Section IV concludes.

Temporality, sovereignty, and imperialism: When is imperialism?

Scholars of modern imperialism have conventionally defined it in clear contrast against the ostensibly legitimate rule of the sovereign territorial state. From this conventional perspective, the theoretical distinctiveness of imperialism as a phenomenon appears in juxtaposition against normal sovereign state rule and effectively ‘begins’ at the transgressions of state power beyond some accepted space of normalized sovereign dominion. While the spatial and temporal dimensions of sovereignty have been well explored and the spatial distinctiveness of imperialism has mirrored that of sovereignty, the temporality of imperialism has not been as carefully considered. While the problems of what imperialism ‘is’ and what it ‘does’ have been thoroughly examined, ‘when’ imperialism is has not. This article aims to correct this by offering a critique of the conventional temporality of imperialism and its subjection to a spatial ideology, and instead articulating a critical temporality of imperialism that avoids some of the conventional conception’s limitations, especially that of naturalizing state rule and its claims to legitimacy.

The Coming of Age of International Monetary and Financial Law after the Global Financial Crisis

John Jackson’s legacy as one of the founding fathers of International Trade Law is widely recognized. His formidable mind, work ethic, and sheer brilliance radiated throughout his career. His contribution to theory (whether in the understanding of the different dimension of sovereignty or in debates about WTO dispute settlement procedures) and practice (nationally and internationally) made him a unique scholar, universally respected and revered. What is perhaps less well-known is the passion with which he embraced the challenges faced by the international community—policy makers, lawyers, economists, market practitioners—in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis. He was a renaissance man, always ready to move beyond established parameters in order to break new ground. He approached novel themes with the enthusiasm of a child. His desire to contribute to a world ruled by norms and institutions rather than by force or by the ‘law of the jungle’ led him to embrace the evolution of international economic law—this time in the area of international money and finance—with boundless optimism and energy. The birth of WTO was for him the fulfillment of an intellectual dream, which he had designed in part. And it is those dreams of a better World that also led him to link with younger academics, to reach out to other disciplines, to think conventionally and unconventionally in order to solve the complex issues involved in the proper functioning of the international financial system. 1

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

"Our Natives" and "Wild Blacks": Enumeration as a statistical dimension of sovereignty in colonial Western Australia

This paper investigates the Western Australian colonial authorities' attempts at defining and categorising a "politically relevant" Aboriginal population from first settlement in 1829 until 1850. Studies of colonial enumeration allow us to understand how colonial authorities viewed the spaces and boundaries of settlement and beyond, and who would be included as part of the community inhabiting that space. Enumeration of Aboriginal people in this period mirrored the Western Australian colonial authorities' conception of their sovereignty: the territory which they could effectively control was not the entire western third of the continent, as the map dictated, but rather the surveyed country, within the "limits of settlement." While other studies of colonial census making reveal enumeration as an instrument of control, this paper identifies colonial census making about Indigenous Western Australians in this period as an instance of state incapacity to govern and control. While "control" was the colonial authorities' key objective in their enumerations, the census reports reveal their inability to know the Aboriginal population.

Theoretical Issues of Sovereignty in Russia and Russian Law

AbstractThis article examines the background and the framework of discussions about the concept of sovereignty and its limits. It begins with a short historical analysis of the processes which took place in Soviet Russia leading to the 'parade of sovereignties' in the early 1990s. Afterwards, the author sketches the different approaches and doctrines upheld by the Russian Constitutional Court in several landmark decisions concerning sovereignty problems. The article focuses on the vertical dimension of sovereignty, i.e., on different conceptions adopted by federal and regional powers in post-Soviet Russia regarding the legal status of the member-republics (subjects) of the Russian Federation. The development of the doctrine of the Constitutional Court of Russia in this matter is quite illustrative as to the legal arguments used to protect the integrity of the Russian Federation against the diverse disintegrative strategies pursued by the regions.

The Wide World of State Recognition

The international politics of recognizing new states, as the author of Recognizing States: International Society and the Establishment of New States Since 1776 readily concedes, could be thought of as “a somewhat arid, even tedious, topic” (p. 2). Thankfully, in this case there is no need for such self-deprecation. For in the right hands, telling the story of the politics of recognition actually reveals a great deal about the formation and ongoing evolution of our international system, as this fine book amply demonstrates. This is because the practice of recognition, important of itself, is also intimately connected to a host of related principles and practices of international relations: the many dimensions of sovereignty both internal and external, standards of legitimacy, arguments and practices surrounding self-determination, the principle of territorial integrity, the rights of conquest, and more. Because he deftly weaves all these in with the titular “recognition,” Mikulas Fabry's study of system membership standards in effect addresses the history of the international system itself, making important contributions along the way.

The UK and the European Union: Dimensions of Sovereignty and the Problem of Eurosceptic Britishness

Sovereignty is at the core of the UK's chronically contentious relationship with, and within, the European Union (EU). In order for EU membership to be an expression rather than an erosion of British sovereignty governments must influence the direction of European policy and the level of UK involvement. Labour has, it is argued, established an effective accommodation between continued membership of the European Union and British parliamentary sovereignty understood as the continued efficacy of executive power. Nevertheless, this policy has lacked a wider legitimacy and in key respects Euroscepticism has been reasserted by the Labour leadership. Consequently, when viewed from the perspective of popular sovereignty, the nation and the people, the UK's relationship to the European Union remains highly contested and unresolved. It is this aspect of sovereignty that is central to the Conservative Party's continued Euroscepticism. In the political mainstream, it is argued that Eurosceptic Britishness has become politically dominant however this is complicated by the UK's multi-nationalism and the rise of pro-Europeanism in separatist and regional politics. Alongside this it is proposed that British conceptions of economic sovereignty are in flux following economic crisis, contributing to an overall uncertainty in the UK's European trajectory.

Recent trends in extraterritorial jurisdiction — The Sarbanes-Oxley Act and its implications on sovereignty

This paper endeavors to analyze the current U.S. practice on the field of extraterritorial application of corporate governance law. As it is widely known, sovereignty is one of basic tenets of public international law, and its relevance is considerably debated in our age. Therefore, the main question of the paper is whether this qualitatively new U.S. practice on the field of extraterritoriality can contribute any insight for the better comprehension of the transformation of sovereignty. So, it will basically compare the lessons stemming from the adoption of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to the classical concept of sovereignty.In its first part the paper briefly introduces the reader into the basic notions of extraterritorial jurisdiction. In doing so, it analyzes some theoretical problems, the former U.S. antitrust law practice and the European approach. The second part of the paper deals with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act as an emblematic and very actual example of corporate governance law having extraterritorial reach. This part discusses the major provisions of the act in detail as well as examines the different arguments justifying or criticizing it. In the last part the paper tries to reflect the results of the earlier inquires to different dimensions of sovereignty. Through three different prisms-Legislatio, Legitimatio and Subordinatio-the paper compares each aspect of sovereignty to the lessons flowing from the case of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in order to get relevant insights concerning the transformation of sovereignty.In conclusion, the paper argues that the classical 19th century approach of sovereignty is outdated because of the transformation of the global economic and political context. But, sovereignty, as a legal basis and legitimizing factor is still in play if the question is the protection of fundamental national interests. As it exactly happened in the case of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which intends to protect a pillar-the confidence in corporate governance-of the basic structure of U.S. free market system.

Hong Kong's political influence over China: institutional, informative, and interactive dynamics of sovereignty

This article explores how Hong Kong has exercised political influence on China since the transfer of sovereignty in 1997, and tries to comprehend such seemingly impossible influences by reinterpreting the concept of sovereignty. It argues that the British Hong Kong existed as a ‘reference society’ for China's modernization and helped to change Chinese perceptions of capitalism. As this resulted in Chinese recognition of the legitimacy of Hong Kong's colonial institutions, which were featured with political legacies of civic freedom and the rule of law, it also reveals the institutional dimension of sovereignty. Secondly, the information flow from Hong Kong to China reflects a communicative (in contrast to coercive) nature of sovereignty, which highlights Hong Kong's central position in the Chinese world of information. Thirdly, Hong Kong's ongoing democratization challenges Chinese authoritarianism through societal interactions that are beyond state control. Conceptually, in this article, state sovereignty is argued as being something fluid and constantly reshaped in everyday practice with institutional, informative, and interactive dynamics; practically, it attempts to find some remaining ‘silver lining’ to the growing authoritarian Chinese clouds above Hong Kong as reversing the logic of examining external factors in democratization.

Azerbaijan's resource wealth: political legitimacy and public opinion

After considering how well Azerbaijan's economy follows the trajectory of a ‘resource curse’ state, this paper investigates the political dimensions of the resource curse evident in Azerbaijan. Of particular interest is how Azerbaijan appears to establish external and internal political legitimacy. These dimensions of sovereignty are not necessarily balanced or present in equal measure. The paper assesses the recent transition in leadership in Azerbaijan as well as Azerbaijan's interactions with, and assessment by, the international community. Additionally, national survey data provide insights into public concerns, satisfaction with government policy, and views on democracy and freedom of expression. The paper concludes that at present there appears to be sufficient public expectation for future benefits, combined with institutional stability, to stave off widespread political instability for the time being.

The psychic life of governmentality1

This paper presents a framework for understanding the psychic life of governmentality. It builds upon analyses of power developed by Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler to suggest the psychic dimensions of sovereignty and discipline, respectively, and uses Freud’s notion of the uncanny to develop an understanding of the psychic aspect of government. In so doing, it suggests that subjects’ complicity in their subjectivation cannot be understood as being purely the effect of their positioning within discourse. Rather, their complicity has an affective dimension. Where a regime of power is able to incite that dimension, it has an increased capacity to become totalising in its effects. The example of the psychology‐derived self‐help movement – as a mode of liberal governance – is used to demonstrate this point.