Loss Of Sovereignty Research Articles

What If You Can’t Protest the Base? The Chagossian Exile, the Struggle for Democracy, and the Military Base on Diego Garcia

The people of the Chagos Archipelago were forcibly removed from their homeland in the Indian Ocean’s Chagos Archipelago in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the US and British governments created a military base on the people’s largest island, Diego Garcia. Since their expulsion, the people, known as Chagossians, have struggled to return to their homeland and win proper compensation. Because US and UK law bar most suits challenging military and foreign policy and because the Chagossians are a people of around five thousand taking on two world powers, they have generally avoided protesting the base responsible for their exile. On the one hand, this peculiar situation has constrained the people’s movement by impeding coalition building and causing tensions with some antibase activists. On the other hand, while theirs is explicitly not an antibase struggle, it shares much in common with other antibase struggles in challenging the loss of sovereignty over occupied land, in demanding fundamental democratic rights, and in opposing unchecked government power and the archaic vestiges of colonialism on which all extraterritorial bases rely.

Howling Plants and Animals: Kim Suyŏng's Sovereign Language and Rereading "Grasses"

Young Jun Lee analyzes the poetry of the modern Korean writer Kim Suyŏng (1921-1968) in the context of the turbulent social-historical transformations involving Korea's loss of sovereignty, threats to individual life, and the disruption of a sense of belonging to the larger secular and sacred orders. Lee argues that Kim, in response to his times, questioned, and reduced to a state of silence the received meanings of language, and that from this liminal state of silence, or "speechless words," he produced new meanings. Kim Suyŏng located the lyric self in liminal positions, between the North and the South, night and day, transcendental heaven and immanent earth. Through his poetry he thus tried to transcend the sorrowful reality of a confrontational world and to retrieve the sovereign subjectivity of the modern Korean language.

Promoting Domestic Reforms Through Regionalism

There is a strong presumption among economists that domestic reforms are promoted by regionalism. Yet strong empirical evidence for this proposition is lacking. This chapter examines both the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence on this issue, drawing on the relevant economic, political, and legal literature. The authors argue that in general, the case for reciprocity in domestic reforms is weak. In the one case where a regional agreement appears to have promoted domestic reform—the European Union (EU)—the enforcement mechanisms used by the European Court of Justice played a significant role. But those mechanisms are not unique. Instead, the authors argue that the EU’s success was because domestic constituents were empowered to take action against uncompetitive regulation. Thus the EU promoted economic reform in sensitive, behind-the-border areas because it overcame the problem of loss of sovereignty by internalizing the political battle to domestic interests, and yet still provided a non-political frame of reference for the debate.

Improving UN Intelligence through Civil–Military Collaboration: Lessons from the Joint Mission Analysis Centres

Fearing a loss of sovereignty, UN member states have historically been hesitant to provide the UN with an intelligence-collection mandate. The increased size, length and complexity of peacekeeping operations, compounded by severe security threats to UN personnel, make a stronger UN intelligence capability in the field increasingly necessary. The article examines the contribution of the UN's Joint Mission Analysis Centre (JMAC) to UN intelligence capabilities and concludes that, in larger missions in particular, the multidisciplinary JMAC structure has delivered valuable intelligence to senior mission management. Nevertheless, in all missions improved information-sharing procedures are necessary to ensure that the JMAC is able to fulfil its intelligence mandate.

Explaining State Commitment to the International Criminal Court: Strong Enforcement Mechanisms as a Credible Threat

This article examines the puzzle of state commitment to the International Criminal Court. It asks why some 100 states would join an international human rights treaty like the ICC treaty which has relatively strong enforcement mechanisms to punish bad and noncompliant behavior. After all, by joining the ICC, states agree that an independent prosecutor may try the state’s own nationals for mass atrocities should the ICC conclude the state is unwilling or unable to do so domestically. Thus, although states regularly join the many international human rights treaties that only require states to self-report compliance, I theorize that states will view the ICC’s enforcement mechanisms as a credible threat and will be more likely to commit only if calculations about the ability to comply with treaty terms show that commitment will not lead to a significant sovereignty loss. In this case, states should consider (1) the strength of the anticipated enforcement mechanism and (2) the state’s ability to comply with the terms of the ICC treaty. I test this argument empirically and find support for the credible threat theory. In contrast to prior studies empirically examining state commitment to international human rights treaties, I find that states with poorer human rights practices are less likely than states with good practices to commit to the ICC. I conclude that although this means that member states tend to have relatively good human rights practices, the ICC and its relatively strong enforcement mechanisms can still positively influence state behavior. Indeed, the ICC is uniquely situated to improve international cooperation on human rights matters since it has been designed so that commitment requires compliance. All states that have joined the court – including those with poor practices – will have to comply or face sovereignty losses.

A false dichotomy? The binationalism debate and the future of divided Jerusalem

Divided cities within contested states are a category in their own right, in that their division is driven by issues of national sovereignty as well as ethnic, religious and linguistic cleavages. Reconstituting them as integrated urban spaces, therefore, requires policy shifts on many levels—local, municipal and state—but too often these are hampered by fears of loss of sovereignty and external domination. The case of Jerusalem in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a prime example of how national sovereignty issues can be seen as having an impact upon urban divisions. One option that is proposed for the resolution of this conflict, which has generated intense debate on both sides, is that of a binational Israeli-Palestinian state. This article argues that there is a false dichotomy concerning the competing benefits of binational and two-state models in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It contends, on the one hand, that the binational model comprises many forms, some of which are more confederal in structure. On the other hand, for the two state model to function effectively a high degree of interstate coordination is required which brings it close to some forms of confederalism. The article examines the discussions on divided Jerusalem to explore this argument and highlights the degree of interstate coordination that is required if any of the plans being put forward for the future of the city are to work. It concludes by relating the Jerusalem example to the wider issue of divided cities in contested states.

Aristocratic Politics and the Crisis of Scottish Kingship, 1286–96

In the ten years from 1286 Scotland experienced a crisis of royal succession and sovereignty which by 1296 seemed to have left it a conquered land in the hands of the English king. The activities of Scotland's leading magnates and prelates in this period have been analysed in terms of the divisive effects of a disputed royal succession and of the defence of collective liberties as a self-conscious community of the realm. However, as with political crises in other medieval realms, the leaders of this community also acted as individual lords with concerns of land, lordship and office. Such concerns were normal features of political life but between 1286 and 1296 had to be resolved in exceptional circumstances of interregnum and the loss of sovereignty. Events which derived from the interplay of aristocratic politics included the murder of Duncan, earl of Fife, the legal dispute over the lands of Macduff and rivalries between leading Hebridean lords. Issues like these fed into and shaped the issues confronting the Scottish guardians and King John and were significant elements in the crisis which engulfed the realm.

Promoting Domestic Reforms Through Regionalism

There is a strong presumption among economists that domestic reforms are promoted by regionalism. Yet strong empirical evidence for this proposition is lacking. The purpose of the paper is to examine in some detail both the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence on this issue, drawing on the relevant economic, political and legal literatures. The paper argues that in general, the case for reciprocity in domestic reforms is weak. In the one case where a regional agreement appears to have promoted domestic reform — the European Union — the enforcement mechanisms used by the European Court of Justice played a significant role. But those mechanisms are not unique. Instead, the paper argues that the EU's success was because domestic constituents were empowered to take action against uncompetitive regulation. Thus the EU promoted economic reform in sensitive, behind-the-border areas because it overcame the problem of loss of sovereignty by internalising the political battle to domestic interests, and yet still provided a non-political frame of reference for the debate.

European Criminal Law and Resistance to Communautarisation after Lisbon

The abolition of the third pillar can rightly be considered as one of the most significant constitutional developments brought about by the Lisbon Treaty. The Treaty has to a great extent ‘normalised’ European criminal law, by placing legislation in the field (its proposal, nature, negotiation, agreement and scrutiny) in principle under the ordinary supranational constitutional framework of the Union. However, this ‘communitarisation’ of European criminal law has been met with resistance by Member States, concerned about their potential loss of sovereignty in the field of criminal law. The aim of the article is to provide an overview of the many levels of resistance to communautarisation as reflected in the text of the Lisbon Treaty, and as applied after the entry into force of the Treaty in the process of adoption of EU criminal law post-Lisbon. The complexity of the post-Lisbon constitutional framework related to criminal matters and the challenges such complexity poses to the future development of EU criminal law will be highlighted in this context.

Foreign Direct Investments, Strategic Assets and Sustainable Development: A Critique of International Investment in Nigeria’s Steel Sector

Advocates of trade liberalisation that include the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs) and their adherents in the third world encourage foreign direct investment as a means of stimulating economic development in these economies. The arguments in favour of foreign investments are that it provides among other benefits, the required capital for development, facilitates technology transfer, and improve infrastructure development. Foreign direct investment is however criticised for its negative impact on the economies of the third world for a number of reasons. Multinational corporations (MNCs) that account for the highest contributors to FDI through private capital investment are accused of sharp practices that include exploitation, corruption, unethical business practices and environmental degradation. Through their activities, MNC engender loss of sovereignty and policy-making by host economies and loss of control over resources among other negative impacts. One instrument used by Foreign Capital to subjugate developing economies is the control of management of projects and programmes into which investments are made. Management control is therefore a primary objective of investors and this is usually accomplished right from the time agreements are reached between the host states and the investors. The study concluded that more often than not, the implication of management control over investment on developing economies include the desire to recoup capital invested at the shortest possible time, total dependence of the sector on investors for future development, reaping huge profits at the expense of local communities, damaging social networks and instigating political instability by the non-recognition and lack of respect for existing social conditions. Certain measures are therefore inevitable if FDI is to engender sustainable development.

International Law In a Time of Climate Change, Sovereignty Loss, and Economic Unity

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Assembling Histories: J. G. A. Pocock, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the British World

AbstractJ. G. A. Pocock’s work has made major contributions to the two fields of history and political science. In this article, we investigate the significance of his contributions to a wider field of social science and, in particular, to the discipline of sociology. Pocock’s attention to the question of sovereignty and its constant reconfiguration throughout the British world is brought together with the concerns of authors writing in an actor network tradition. Pocock’s British world, a world that moves between and connects different archipelagos, is an assemblage, one composed of political arrangements that travel but also have to be stabilised. This process is only ever provisional but is played out, Pocock claims, in a unique way in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Arguing against the claimed certainties of postcolonial historiography he suggests that the Aotearoa/New Zealand case is composed of a range of different futures involving the securing of and/or loss of sovereignty. These are currently being renarrated by its historians. This process of renarration necessarily involves a public role for the historian and has led Pocock, as commentator from a distance, into making critical interventions in what he refers to as the debate over sovereignty in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Sovereignty, Bargaining, and the International Regulation of Foreign Direct Investment

While developing countries have undergone a remarkable transformation in their attitudes toward foreign direct investment (FDI) during the past decade, they still resist the establishment of a multilateral regime governing FDI. This is puzzling, first, because these states are liberalising their policies anyway, and second, because a multilateral regime offers several advantages over the patchwork of unilateral and bilateral arrangements that currently exist (for instance, by contributing to increasing FDI flows). What explains this paradoxical attitude? This paper critically examines a number of potential explanations. Concerns about losing sovereignty, lack of knowledge about the costs of FDI restrictions, or lingering suspicions of multinational corporations may play some role, but cannot account for unilateral and bilateral liberalisation. Another approach highlights the role of domestic groups in supporting or opposing a multilateral agreement. Yet the pattern of variation among the attitudes of developing countries casts doubt on this explanation as well. Finally, the paper puts forth an argument that focuses on how bargaining power affects the trade-off between economic gains and the loss of sovereignty. The host state's perceived attractiveness to multinational investors conditions whether or not the government resolves this trade-off in favour of supporting a multilateral regime.

The East African Community: The Bumpy Road to Supranationalism - Some Reflections on the Judgments of the Court of Justice of the East African Community in Anyang' Nyong'O and Others and East African Law Society and Others

While in many regions in the world States merely seem to play lip-service to the need for regional integration, States in Eastern Africa have made serious efforts to merge their economies, to cooperate in a series of fields and even to achieve political integration. While things seem to be moving in the right direction, there are also hurdles on the way on the road to East African integration. One of these hurdles involves the recognition and awareness that being part of a common project and a common supranational-like entity implies a loss of sovereignty and the possibility of being bound against one’s own will. Recent events demonstrate that that awareness has not fully sunk in yet among all parties involved. In November 2006 the EAC Court of Justice delivered an interim ruling preventing nine Kenyan parliamentarians from being sworn in as members of the East African Legislative Assembly on the ground that the Kenyan rules for electing members of the EALA were prima facie at odds with the EAC Treaty. The ruling met hostility and the Partner States responded in a manner that did not reflect great respect for the notion of an independent judiciary: they amended the EAC Treaty with a view to inter alia extending the grounds for removing judges from the Court of Justice. Amidst all the political turmoil, and in spite of the huge political pressure, however, the Court kept its back straight and concluded in two subsequent judgment that both the Kenyan elections rules and the treaty amendment infringed the Treaty.

A ‘War on Pollution’? Canadian Responses to the Automotive Emissions Problem, 1970–80

By the early 1970s air pollution from cars had reached such problematic levels in North America that ordinary citizens, environmentalists, and governments called for the regulation of emissions from automobiles. Though Canada's auto sector operated within a continentally integrated industry, Canada developed its own automobile emission standards that were significantly less stringent than regulations imposed by the United States on their own automobiles. Canadian policy makers justified these lower standards by citing economic concerns, national differences, and fuel consumption concerns. In the first great postwar test of continental integration and environmental regulation, there was no regulatory ‘race to the bottom’ or loss of sovereignty, which critics of free trade agreements have claimed will occur as continentalization and harmonization takes hold. Instead, Canadians exercised their national right to allow their automobiles to spew three, five, and even seven times the amount of pollutants that us cars did.

Globalisation and the rise of 'economic nationalism': takeovers and regulation within the European Union

The globalisation of markets, particularly the liberalisation of financial markets, has facilitated merger and acquisition activity on a global scale. New financial instruments and the growth of sovereign wealth funds have raised questions regarding the national security and the loss of sovereignty over key economic sectors. The European Union in its ambitions to complete a single market set out to establish a level playing-field: to enhance competitive performance. Policies towards mergers and takeovers were agreed by member states after many years of negotiation. These have encountered institutionally, embedded national differences resulting in some cases in transposition into national law facilitating greater national protection. This article will review the evolution of competition policy and its recent modernisation in the context of liberalisation and the Lisbon agenda. It will analyse the difficulties of harmonisation with the recent extension of liberalisation to include utilities, which in the aforementioned global context of heightened anxieties, has engendered a revival of 'economic nationalism'. This is exemplified in the current French position towards restructuring in the energy sector and its continued protection of 'national champions'.

Sovereignty Without Sovereignty: Derrida’s Declarations Of Independence

This article questions the common assumptions in legal theory regarding Derrida’s well-known Declarations of Independence. Through a close reading of this text, well-known ground such as the relation between speech and writing, the notion of representation, speech act theory, the signature, and the proper name is covered. The contribution that this analysis makes in the present context lies in the additional ‘step’ that it takes. The article seeks to give an explanation of the laws at work in Derrida’s thinking in the above respects and to explain more specifically how they find expression in Declarations of Independence. The article in this regard also investigates the importance and role of the ‘notions’ of death, loss of meaning, loss of ownership, and loss of sovereignty in Derrida’s thinking. The contention is that if we take account of Derrida’s reading in Declarations of Independence, it is possible to view constitutions in a very different way, more specifically their ‘origins’, with inevitable implications for constitutional interpretation.

Seeing Japan, Imagining Poland: Polish Art and the Russo‐Japanese War

On first inspection it seems unlikely that interests of Polish artists and writers in Japan at beginning of twentieth century?the theme of this essay?could be anything more than subject of a minor footnote in history of either country. Living as subjects of three aggressive empires that had partitioned nation over a century earlier, Polish intelligentsia was remarkably introspective. The widespread desire for national independence from Russian, German, and Austrian rule overshadowed most aspects of national culture. Art and literature in late nineteenth century were weighed on Polish scales: a poem or a painting was most highly valued if it captured national hopes or anguish. Patriotic writers and painters were claimed as authentic voice of a nation silenced by injustice.1 Polonocentrism was not, of course, limited to art: historians raked over past events in order to find explanations of misfortunes endured in present.2 National messianists, sharing a vision shaped by poet Adam Mickiewicz in mid century, claimed that wrongs done to nation would eventually be corrected by natural laws of justice and that Poland, like Christ, would arise again. Others saw causes for loss of sovereignty in terms of national failings; not least in anarchic system of government known as golden freedom (zlota wolnoic) which had operated during sixteenth and seventeenth-century Commonwealth. The Poles could not, however, be accused of ignorance or indifference to present events abroad. Contemporary political dramas in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Vienna, or elsewhere on international stage were invariably weighed up in terms of their impact on the Polish question. From Polish perspective, Russia's war with Japan in 1904-5 and turmoil which followed it throughout Vistula Country (Privislinskii Krai / Kraj PrzywiSlahski), as Russian Poland was known, was perhaps

Understanding developing country resistance to the Doha Round

ABSTRACT The Doha Round negotiations at the World Trade Organization have come to a halt. The vast majority of analyses of the (at least temporary) demise of the Doha Round have focused on the lack of the United States and the European Union to reach consensus on the agricultural proposals that were tabled during the round. Relatively little attention has focused on explaining the rationale for why a large part of the developing world would not agree to proposals on the table as well. Many developing country negotiators claim that the potential benefits of the Doha Round were relatively small while the potential costs in terms of a loss of sovereignty to deploy effective development policies were significant. This paper argues that developing countries took a respite from the negotiations because the possible gains from market access were not large enough to trade for giving up domestic policy space for development policy.

Trapped by their ideas: French élites' discourses of European integration and globalization1

Until relatively recently, French élites seemed to have found a winning combination for the communicative discourses through which they legitimated European integration and responded to globalization. First, the Gaullist discourse underplayed the loss of sovereignty by emphasizing the gains to interests and identity through French leadership in Europe. Next, the Mitterrandist discourse updated the ideas in the Gaullist paradigm to legitimate further institutional integration while it added a new rationale for greater economic integration: Europeanization as a shield against globalization. The discourse in the Chirac years did little to change or update this discourse. The problem today is that neither the institutional nor the economic ideas in the discourse are persuasive: the public is convinced that France no longer leads Europe and that Europe no longer protects against globalization. And yet, French élites seem trapped in the old discourse, unable to develop new ideas capable of legitimating France in Europe and the world. This was dramatized by the 2005 French ‘no’ vote on the Constitutional Treaty, and did not change with the 2007 French presidential elections.