Limits Of Sovereignty Research Articles

The Real Problem in U.S.–Israeli Relations

Of all the foreign relationships of the United States, perhaps none is as closely watched and incessantly scrutinized as its relationship with Israel. Like a couple in counseling, U.S.—Israeli relations are the subject of endless analysis. Both supporters and critics are forever on the lookout for the slightest signs of tension or unease, with the former anguishing over them, and the latter celebrating. While there was little to pay attention to during the years of the Bush administration, given its tight and largely uncritical embrace of Israel, the tenure of the Obama administration has provided ample opportunities for U.S. —Israel watchers to speculate on the troubles between Washington and Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. By now, the nature of this debate is entirely

The EU and Its Monarchies: Influences and Frictions

Monarchies in Europe — Monarchs as embodiments of sovereignty — Implications for monarchy of the EU as a limitation of sovereignty — Effects of Union law on the prerogatives of monarchs — Monarchs as heads of state in the Union

Atlas Swam: Freedom, Capital, and Floating Sovereignties in the Seasteading Vision

Abstract: Political actors have long drawn on utopian imaginaries of colonizing marine and island spaces as models for idealized libertarian commonwealths. A recent inheritor of this tradition is the seasteading movement, which seeks to “further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous ocean communities [by] enabling innovations with new political and social systems” on semi‐stationary, floating platforms. Fueled by a cocktail of ideologies (techno‐optimism, libertarian secession theories, and strains of anarcho‐capitalism), seasteading is touted as the newest “frontier” in creative, entrepreneurial, and social engineering. Inherent in the project, however, are buried ideals about the nature of ocean space, the limits of sovereignty, and the liberatory role of technology and capitalism in the drive for social change and individual freedom. We explore these notions through an examination of seasteading's broader philosophical and economic underpinnings, and their deployment through multiple structural, legal, and social frameworks.Although seasteading is a highly speculative, and even fanciful project, it reflects attempts to resolve contradictions within capitalism: between, on the one hand, the need for order and planning, and, on the other hand, the desire to foster and lionize individual freedom. In the United States, this tension has most visibly entered mainstream discourse through the rise of the Tea Party movement, whose ideology combines adherence to classical liberal ideals about individual entrepreneurship with hostility toward government intervention. Although the seasteading movement, like its better known and more realizable libertarian contemporaries, proposes a solution that its leaders say will resolve this tension, our analysis reveals that it would merely rework it, and thus it unwittingly reinforces the structures it seeks to escape.

Perpetual what? Injury, Sovereignty and a Cosmopolitan View of Immigration

Can Kantian cosmopolitanism contribute to normative approaches to immigration? Kant developed the universal right to hospitality in the context of late eighteenth-century colonialism. He claimed that non-European countries had a sovereign right over their territory and the conditions of foreigners' visits. This sovereign prerogative limited visitors' right to hospitality. The interconnected and complementary system of right he devised is influential today, but this article argues that maintaining the complementarity of the three realms involves reconsidering its application to contemporary immigration. It situates Kant's Perpetual Peace within the context of debates about conquest and colonialism and argues that Kant's strict conception of sovereignty is justified by his concern in maintaining a realm of sovereignty that is complementary with cosmopolitanism and his prioritization of mutual agreements in each of the realms, particularly in a context of international power asymmetry. In Kant's time, European powers appropriated cosmopolitan discourses to defend their right to visit other countries and it was necessary to strengthen non-Europeans' sovereign claims. The strength and hostility of the visitors made limited hospitality and strong sovereignty act in tandem to keep away conquerors, expanding cosmopolitanism. Today, individuals from poor countries migrate to wealthier ones where they are subject to a sovereign authority that excludes them. Sovereignty and cosmopolitanism no longer work complementarily, but rather strengthen powerful state actors vis-à-vis non-citizens subject to unilateral rule. Maintaining the pre-eminence of the right to freedom, the article suggests that only through the creation of ‘cosmopolitan spaces' of politics can we reproduce today the complementarity that Kant envisioned.

Uneingeschränkte Solidarität

This article focuses on the analysis of the new strategic concept of NATO (Lisbon 2010) and its effect on German foreign and security policy. During the Cold War, the (old) Federal Republic of Germany had done well to recognize its limited sovereignty while at the same time expanding its economic and political influence in NATO and the EC/EU. This approach has not fundamentally changed with the unification of Germany in 1990. Since then Germany has been developing its imperial ambitions cautiously, embedded in the aggressive NATO military pact and the militarization of the EU. The credo of the new Germany is the enforcement of both;, German economic and geo-strategic interests as a nation cannot be achieved alone, but only within the range of existing alliances.

Attenuated Sovereignty: An Immodest Proposal for Addressing Ethnic Diversity

The conventional sovereignty that has prevailed for the past several centuries restricts the options open to ethnic minorities in multiethnic populations that are subject to a single sovereign authority. Minorities will either trend toward integration with majority populations or else the direction of change will be toward separation and the establishment of new, smaller sovereign states. There are serious problems with both options. The present proposal is for a form of diluted or “attenuated” sovereignty whereby, in its most basic form, a particular ethnic minority would be afforded limited sovereignty in a specified area within an existing sovereign state’s overall territory. An attenuated-sovereignty government established in the specified area would be answerable to—and have authority over—only those persons of the designated ethnic minority who have opted to affiliate themselves with it. Distinctive to this proposal, all other persons, irrespective of their ethnicity, could remain in the delimited area and remain subject to the pre-existing, conventionally sovereign authority. This proposal includes various strategies to make attenuated sovereignty a practical, workable option. The notion of attenuated sovereignty is not as fantastical as it may seem at first glance. Re this assertion, the conventionally sovereign state is everywhere at bay. Its best days are behind it. Under the circumstances, in some situations, attenuated sovereignty could prove advantageous to both ethnic minorities and majority populations willing to accommodate them in the creative manner here proposed.

Participative Sovereignty: The European Union and Scottish Independence, or ‘Independence in Europe’

There have been politically organised expressions for an independent Scottish state which predate the European Union institutionalisation process. The process of European political integration, however, has had a significant impact upon the argument for Scottish independence in which 'Independence in Europe' has become the mainstream of political thought concerning Scottish Independence. The sovereignty which is therefore envisioned for Scotland has shifted considerably from the traditional concept in which, it was assumed at least, central government had absolute autonomy within its mutually recognised territory. Traditional sovereignty seems all but a meaningless anachronism for most, with limited sovereignty, or multi-levels of sovereignty, being the current paradigm with which to understand the world of states. All the while, processes in the European Union would seem to further distance modern European statehood from such traditional ideas as member states participate with a unique degree of external influences. It is the issue of participation with European Union processes, it would seem, that has had the greatest political effect on the concept of Scottish independence and, therefore, 'Independence in Europe', to be understood fully, must be understood as

Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty (review)

Reviewed by: Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty Rachel Potter Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty. Andrew John Miller. New York: Routledge, 2008. Pp. vii + 222. $110.00 (cloth). There was a profound crisis of sovereignty in the early twentieth century, whether we consider this in relation to the emergence of new kinds of territorial sovereignties across Europe after the First World War or whether we are attuned to the philosophical arguments about sovereignty which marked the period. Carl Schmitt, for example, argued influentially and controversially that sovereignty should be transferred from the people to the authoritarian individual “who decides on the exception” while thinkers on the left such as Harold Laski insisted that the workers should maintain their sovereignty in the face of the growing demands of the state. An understanding of the emergence of the new sovereign state of Ireland in 1922, for example, and the way that this in turn destabilized existing concepts of British sovereignty, is important for the interpretation of modernist writers such as Yeats and Joyce, Eliot and Lewis. An awareness of the conflicting political and philosophical arguments in the 1920s about where sovereignty should lie, in the president or prime minister, the people or the parliament, is also important when considering modernist texts, not least because many modernists were critical of parliamentary democracy. In this new book Andrew John Miller engages with the fascinating question of modernism’s relationship to sovereignty, focusing in particular on the conflict between nationalist and mass democratic claims to state and authorial authority. His is a specific take on this question. We are perhaps used to thinking about the way that “deterritorialized fantasies of ethnic nationalism overwhelm the fragile mechanisms of civic nationalism” in contemporary politics (ix). Miller argues that this model can also tell us much about the narrative and poetic imaginations of early twentieth century writers. He argues, then, that W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf cultivate what Donald Pease has theorized as a “postnational” perspective, which he describes as the use of “national discourses in a provisional, as opposed to an essentialistic, fashion.” (98) In practice this means that modernist writers were interested in forms of affiliation which were at odds with territorial sovereignty. Yeats’s writing, then, registers and imagines non-geographical kinds of sovereignty, such as those of the Irish diaspora and the networks of imaginary affiliation at work in a global economy. Eliot explores the conflict between the universal and international claims to sovereignty of the Christian tradition and what he sees as the procedural and litigious claims of territorial sovereignties. Woolf meanwhile criticizes patriarchal and imperialistic nationalisms in the name of a feminist cosmopolitanism which is specifically beyond nationality. There is much to enjoy in this book. Chapter Four illuminates the vexed issue of Eliot’s relationship to national and institutional structures of liberal democracy. While a number of critics have discussed this question in previous books and essays, Miller helpfully takes the argument forward by considering the competing claims to sovereignty in Eliot’s views on the Christian Church and the nation state. Chapter Five, which focuses on Woolf’s Between the Acts, also constructs a fascinating and subtle argument about the limits of sovereignty in her writing. Miller discusses how “Woolf’s efforts to think beyond the collective narratives of the nation-state are conducted in conjunction with a broader questioning of the patriarchal lineage of sovereign authority” (144). This is to work within and perceptively extend established accounts of Woolf’s politics. Chapters Two and Three, which focus on Yeats’ work, are perhaps the most contentious. Miller is particularly keen to argue against accounts of Yeats’s “Irish” literary identity, seeking to problematize the stable entity of “Ireland” which would make such claims possible. Yet, at this point the book would have benefited from a more extensive explanation of the specificity of the “postnational” perspective: many key theorists of Yeats’ nationalism, for instance, register [End Page 820] the provisional and changing, rather than essential, nature of nation. Miller dismisses some of these critics a bit too quickly. There is a long section attacking Michael North’s account of Yeats’s choice between a “citizenship based...

From Brezhnev to Brussels: Transformations of sovereignty in Eastern Europe

The year 1989 is widely feted as a turning point in the history of Eastern Europe: nation-states were liberated from the tyranny of Soviet rule and regained their sovereign independence. This article challenges the conventional wisdom by arguing that the ‘limited sovereignty’ of the pre-1989 period, formally declared by Leonid Brezhnev in 1968, has been replaced by a new form of domination, this time from Brussels. However, while Eastern European states still face constraints on their political autonomy and self-government, the nature of this domination is different. Specifically, it coincides with the post-Cold War revision of the concept of sovereignty itself, where the attachment to the formal rights of sovereign independence and equality is lost. Eastern European states have found that continued limitations upon their sovereignty are today celebrated as the realization of the essence of sovereignty itself.

The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War (review)

Reviewed by: The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War Richard Bensel The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. By Daniel W. Hamilton. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. 200. Cloth, $39.00.) Hamilton’s study of confiscation policy begins with a brief history of property seizures during the Revolutionary War. Confiscation was then grounded in republican principles under which property was only conditionally possessed, with one of those conditions being loyalty to the political community. Disloyalty could thus immediately extinguish a citizen’s right to possession, and the states, acting in the name of their respective communities, seized and disposed of a citizen’s property with little or nothing in the way of legal formality. Section 9 of Article I of the federal Constitution altered this republican frame by prohibiting bills of attainder, but this prohibition still left open the possibility of seizures under other constitutional clauses, most notably those related to the making of war. In his legislative histories of the First and Second Confiscations Acts passed by the Union Congress, the author shows how a still-powerful republican tradition and a newly emergent legal doctrine of property as a “natural right” shaped conflict between radical Republicans and more moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats. This legislative struggle between two competing doctrinal ideals produced a confiscation policy that was administratively ambiguous and hamstrung by litigious formalities. The end result was that Union confiscation was a nullity. But, Hamilton contends, both the debates in Congress that attended the confiscation acts and the [End Page 405] litigation that accompanied its very limited enforcement both reflected and strengthened the emergent principle that property was a natural right, not a conditional grant from a political community. The author’s account of the 1861 Confederate Sequestration Act varies from his treatment of the Union experience in two respects. First, he devotes little space to legislative history because, unlike those for the Union, the Confederate primary and secondary sources are much too thin to support much analysis of the ideational conflict between contending perspectives. This analytical choice is consistent with Hamilton’s conclusion that Confederate confiscation policy was much more consensual than that in the North. The second difference is that the Confederate account includes a thick description of the implementation of confiscation in the Western District of Virginia (where records of enforcement happened to survive the war). Analysis of these records allows the author to conclude that the Sequestration Act “met with widespread and painstaking compliance” by Confederate citizens, thus documenting “the deep reservoirs of patriotism tapped by the Confederate government” (113). In general, Confederate confiscation was startlingly consensual, effectively implemented, and resulted in massive property seizures throughout the South while Union policy was deeply conflicted, haphazardly carried out, and transferred almost no wealth from disloyal citizens to the federal government. The author’s primary contention is that Union confiscation policy both reflected and impelled the increasing prominence of “natural right” conceptions of property in the North. Thus, emerging constitutional scruples with respect to property rights were the ultimate cause of the Union’s failure to confiscate much property. And, for that reason, we should view Union policy within this larger historical trend toward natural rights during the nineteenth century. This reviewer, however, views the Union-Confederate comparison as the most important contribution of this book. In the first place, doctrinal constraints were cast aside by the South in this (as well as many other areas) as the Confederate state was built from the ground up. This revolutionary experience implies that the Union, too, could have cast them aside (as, in fact, it did in many other areas). In addition, the Confederate experience with confiscation comports well with what we now know of Confederate nationalism and state expansion, while Union policy, with its general respect for property and reliance on market arrangements, also seems consistent with recent interpretations. Finally, while postwar adjudication of confiscation policy in the federal courts was effectively integrated into the larger trend [End Page 406] toward more “a more liberal conception of property” the author does not convince the reader that those...

Danger and Opportunity in Katima Mulilo: A Namibian Border Boomtown at Transnational Crossroads**

Rapid construction of new ‘transport corridors’ across the SADC region is supposed to facilitate the free flow of commodities, tourism and investment between ‘valuable places’ in Southern Africa and global markets. Since the opening of a road bridge across the Zambezi in 2004, Katima Mulilo has become a busy stopover point along the Trans Caprivi Corridor (TCC), which links the Copperbelt of Zambia with Namibia's sea port of Walvis Bay. The new transport route has at last fulfilled the colonial dream that motivated the Anglo-German exchange of territory, which originally established the ‘access corridor to the Zambezi’ in 1890. Katima's current investment boom seems to give substance to the SWAPO government's official agenda of ‘bringing development’ to Caprivi, nearly a decade after an armed insurgency attempted its secession. But beyond the apparent success story, Katima Mulilo's boom is illustrative of a broader reconfiguration of the nature of state sovereignty, engendered by two distinct but interrelated processes. One of these processes changes the nature of state sovereignty from ‘above’. The TCC is a space for global business and transnational governance over which the Namibian state authorities have de facto limited sovereignty. The other process changes state sovereignty from ‘below’. It is manifest in the flourishing of illegal business activities in the Namibia-Zambia borderland, sprawling shanty towns and other societal phenomena that challenge SWAPO's idealised development agenda. The combined dynamics of opportunity for more-or-less legal private gain, on the one hand, and looming societal instability that accompany Katima Mulilo's current boom, on the other, continue the historical pattern of Caprivi as a site that threatens to colonise the centre of the state from its territorial and social margins.

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth: Loki, Óðinn, and the Limits of Sovereignty

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth: Loki, Óðinn, and the Limits of Sovereignty

Introduction: Notes on political economies of displacement in southern Africa

This special issue considers how contemporary forms of displacement in southern Africa may be approached and analysed in terms of multiple ‘political economies of displacement’. Drawing insight from classic concepts of political economy, but without adhering to the more rigid aspects of these frameworks, the five studies that comprise this collection explore how certain values related to identity, violence, movement and belonging may be generated, circulated and exchanged under conditions of violence and in the aftermath of upheaval. By tracing how the complex social and material experience of displacement extends inevitably beyond the universalistic assumptions of humanitarian labels, the collection emphasises the importance of local and regional political and economic dynamics, histories and geographies. This Introduction to the special issue highlights some of the more critical themes, some of which are developed more fully in the articles. These include the issue of scale and the challenge in quantifying displacement in southern Africa, the relationship between displacement and migration, as well as more specific questions related to the significance of work as well as violence and the limits of sovereignty.

The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. By Daniel W. Hamilton (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007) 200 pp. $39.00

The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. By Daniel W. Hamilton (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007) 200 pp. $39.00

Review: Irresistible Empire

IRRESISTIBLE EMPIRE America's Advance through 2Oth Century Europe Victoria de Grazia Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 586 pp, US$i9-95 paper (ISBN 978-0674022348)On the eve of US entry into World War I, Woodrow Wilson spoke on international affairs to a congress of salesmen gathered in Detroit. As the president saw it, the nation faced the same options as the conventioneers: it could force its preferences on potential markets, as German monopolists did, or it could study the tastes and needs of the countries where the markets were being sought and suit [its] goods to those tastes and needs. That, insisted the president, was the American way, in statecraft as well as commerce (i). And that, suggests de Grazia, was the fundamental approach of what she terms the empire, a imperium with the outlook of a great emporium, a US enterprise commanded more by Rotary Club members, advertising executives, chain store magnates, and Hollywood producers than by government officials such as Wilson, who soon departs the stage, leaving the spotlight to shine on the profit-minded private sector (3).Whereas much of the literature on Americanization, in Europe and elsewhere, has emphasized popular culture, de Grazia emphasizes business practices such as distribution, branding, and advertising. Even her chapter on film centres on production systems rather than content analysis or viewer responses. This is a book more concerned with consumption regimes than consumers. Debates over standards of living and retail practices figure more prominently than shopping, eating, smoking, and the like.Aside from differentiating de Grazia's research from consumer-centred accounts, the emphasis on business practices also differentiates it from studies of Americanization that highlight the doings of the US government. In contrast to work on the promotional state, monetary policy, military occupations, the Marshall Plan, and so forth, Irresistible Empire generally disaggregates corporate initiatives from official programs, thus suggesting that US capital carved its own distinctive mark on 20th century Europe. Although those interested in policy may conclude that she has thrown the proverbial baby (the US government) out with the bathwater (popular culture studies), de Grazia has done an impressive job of refilling the tub.Of particular value is de Grazia's effort to identify the main features of the market empire. The first and most fundamental, she argues, was its tendency to regard other nations as having but limited sovereignty over their public space. second, it exported civil society along with trade goods and commercial practices. Third, it wielded the power of norms-making. Fourth, it preached a particular kind of democracy, one tied more to the value of consumer choice and individual acquisitiveness than to social solidarity. …

DANIEL W. HAMILTON. The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2007. Pp. 231. $39.00

On occasion, new scholars asking new questions of an old topic cast fresh light on historical questions that previous scholars had considered settled, insignificant, immaterial, or just plain irrelevant. Property rights and wrongs during the United States Civil War constitute just such a topic. Previous scholars have downplayed the significance of public policies such as the First and Second Confiscation Acts (1861, 1862) in the North and the Sequestration Act of 1861 in the South. But, as this carefully argued, instructive, and insightful monograph suggests, previous scholars have under-estimated the importance of these key public policies, both North and South, and they have failed to place confiscation into any larger historical understanding. Confiscation is a difficult legal issue to grasp; yet, as Daniel W. Hamilton states, “the ambiguity of confiscation is, historically, its most interesting feature” (p. 78). Hamilton presents four major themes: to separate the revolutionary experience with confiscation from the Civil War–era confiscations; to analyze the divisions within the Republican Party (radical, moderate and conservative) that resulted in the hodge-podge of powers and restrictions upon confiscation in the best-known 1862 Second Confiscation Act; to explain the ironic success of sequestration in the Confederate States, where centralized power was supposed to be limited and checked; and to explain how, after 1865, Associate Justice Stephen Field used litigation arising from wartime confiscations to craft greater judicial protections for all private property. Unlike the experience during the American Revolution, the United States Congress did not adopt sweeping legislative confiscation. Instead, a modern perception of the sanctity of private property caused new approaches to confiscation to be proposed in Congress; a perception that property needed to be protected from arbitrary government interference.

Daniel W. Hamilton. The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. vii + 231 pp. ISBN 0-226-31482-0, $39.00.

Daniel W. Hamilton. The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. vii + 231 pp. ISBN 0-226-31482-0, $39.00. - Volume 8 Issue 4

Daniel W. Hamilton, The limits of sovereignty: property confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007.) Pages 231. £25.00/US$39.00.

Daniel W. Hamilton, The limits of sovereignty: property confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007.) Pages 231. £25.00/US$39.00.

La aporía del soberano encadenado: análisis crítico de «las limitaciones jurídicas al soberano» del profesor Ernesto Garzón Valdés

En el presente artículo se realiza un breve comentario de los trabajos que el profesor Ernesto Garzón Valdés ha dedicado a analizar los problemas que plantea la limitación jurídica del soberano legal. Un tema, por otra parte, de perenne actualidad debido a la restricción a la que se ve sometida la acción del legislador en los modernos Estados democráticos de Derecho. La principal conclusión a la que se llega aquí —que es, a su vez, la divergencia principal con respecto a lo expuesto por Garzón Valdés— es que el concepto de soberanía es ya en sí mismo un concepto normativo. Un concepto que exige, por tanto, tener en cuenta las dos dimensiones que se engloban dentro del mismo por lo que referirse a él únicamente en términos formales conduce inevitablemente a una aporía lógica.

The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy During the Civil War

The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy During the Civil War