Sovereignty as an Antidote to Hegemony
BY OMAR DAHBOUR
International relations in the second half of the 20th century has been marked by persistent criticisms of the norm of sovereignty previously considered a key to peaceful relations among states. It was frequently claimed that by accepting sovereignty generally, it became harder to question the legitimacy of aggressor states. Furthermore, territorial states seemed increasingly irrelevant to the achievement of important ethical goals such as human rights, global justice, or environmental sustainability.
The result has been an almost universal affirmation of transnational or cosmopolitan norms of “global governance” by international jurists and ethicists in the last generation. If a just world government proved an impossibility, this did not mean that some other governmental mechanism could not be designed to realize these laudable goals. Certainly, sovereign states had not proved equal to the task.
But the beginning of the 21st century has shown this to be a chimerical view. Far from allowing international relations to be reconstructed on a nonstate basis, the Cold War’s end removed certain limitations on the United States’ hegemonic ambitions, ushering in a period in which it either ignores or violates central principles of international relations, most especially the prohibitions on nondefensive military actions against other states. Currently, we may be witnessing the early stages of the re-emergence of other great powers of a more or less traditional nature — whether in the case of the ascendancy of China to global power or the coalescence of Europe into a “superstate.”
It seems that international relations cannot do without the assertion of the rights and reasons of states in some form due to the paradox of sovereignty: in order to override the sovereignty of states, another sovereign entity of some kind is required. The form such sovereignty might take — a hegemonic state, an emergent institution of world government, an alliance of sovereign states, or something else —does not matter. The general point is that sovereignty is correlative with politics (or more broadly with all types of power), in the sense that political life, from the local to the global scales, seems to generate a need for asserting the sovereignty of those political institutions empowered to make decisions and take actions
The right ethical question to ask is not whether we can live in a world without states, but what kind of sovereignty is appropriate to the changing conditions of the world? What institutions can most legitimately claim sovereignty? At what scale are they entitled to claim it? We cannot escape the task of specifying the nature and limits of sovereign power without recreating these very conditions of sovereignty in other ways.
My general claim is that sovereignty, properly understood, gives us a critical tool opposing the misuse of power internationally, especially by hegemonic states. I make this case in three stages. First, I distinguish external sovereignty of international recognition from the internal sovereignty characterizing relations between states and their peoples. Second, I argue that hegemonic states necessarily violate the principle of external sovereignty as hegemons. Third, I maintain that we can revitalize the principle of sovereignty for the changing circumstances of the 21st century, making it a powerful ethical and legal resource for opposing such global abuses of power.
EXTERNAL SOVEREIGNTY AS A NORM OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Two important aspects of the contemporary philosophical criticism of political sovereignty are first, that the principle assumes the possibility of states having absolute or unrestricted authority over a territory, and second, that this means having such absolute authority over the inhabitants of territories–treating them as subjects of a ruler rather than citizens of states. Both criticisms are inapplicable to the principle of sovereignty if we understand it as a principle of external sovereign power. While internal sovereignty concerns the relation between states and their members, external sovereignty concerns the relations among different states. It is in the latter guise that sovereignty is an important principle of international relations.
There are two reasons why these criticisms have been taken so seriously. First, the phenomenon of globalization has received wide attention–and acceptance as a fundamental change in international relations–and this suggests that states can no longer aspire to, much less attain, any real independence from global economic forces. Second, the progress of democratization in modern history suggests the illegitimacy of any notion of sovereignty that regards reasons of state as a more important consideration in the determination of state policy than the popular will.
But it is important to recognize what external sovereignty is — and what it is not. Sovereignty is the recognition of an ultimate authority over a territory, though this authority need not be absolute or unlimited. The authority of states has always been limited in one way or another; the fact that many states have been weakened in the face of economic or political pressure by other governments or corporations does not mean that their authority is illegitimate. If anything, it means the opposite, since what is important about sovereignty is the recognition that there is no higher authority than the sovereign territorial state recognized externally by other sovereignties and internally by a people. So sovereignty is the recognition that transnational institutions, multinational corporations, and powerful states have no greater authority or legitimacy than the state that is constituted by a people living within recognized boundaries and that the sovereign territorial state has the right to resist any encroachments or impositions by these other entities.
Regarding internal sovereignty, states do not have rights against a people or over their purported subjects — this notion has lacked justification since Locke, Rousseau, and Marx’s criticized it over two centuries ago. However, this does not mean that states lack external legitimacy since this is precisely what gives a people the means to defend itself from the imposition of undemocratic rule from abroad. Without a claim to political sovereignty, democratic revolutions from 17th century England to 21st century Latin America would have lacked the means to justify defending themselves against reactionary interventions to restore dictatorial or neocolonial regimes. The internal sovereignty of peoples not only is consistent with the external sovereignty of states, but requires it.
Finally, external sovereignty entails the equal recognition of all other sovereign states. This “equality provision” is built into the sovereignty principle, since the principle mandates that all other international actors recognize the authority of a sovereign state over its territory. This mandate is a universal principle of recognition: all sovereign territorial states are accorded equal status and legitimacy — no less and no more. This recognition of sovereign states’ equal status, despite variations in scale and power, is an ethical and legal stance that is critical of great-power aggrandizement since the use of such power violates in fact, if not in word, this equality of sovereign states.
WHY SOVEREIGNTY IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH HEGEMONY
The history of states with hegemonic ambitions, from the ancient empires of China, Persia, and Rome to the modern global powers of France, Great Britain, and the United States, provide cases of the explicit denial of equality among sovereign states. Empires and hegemonic states tend to claim absolute authority not only over their present territories, but globally. The fact that such states never actually have this authority has not historically prevented them from claiming it as their right. So the first thing to be said about hegemonic states is that claiming the right to rule over or interfere with others’ lands and lives clearly violate the sovereignty principle. It should be added that such claims do not constitute the assertion of their sovereignty, as is sometimes thought, but the denial that the sovereignty principle is applicable at all. Without the equality provision mentioned above, sovereignty becomes meaningless.
Furthermore, hegemonic states tend to assert sovereignty internally over peoples inhabiting their territories. Peoples frequently come to be viewed as imperial subjects rather than state citizens because hegemonic states either are too centralized and dictatorial to admit self-rule or they are too large and diverse to allow for the formation of a self-governing people. Under modern conditions, the extraordinary scale of states such as the United States (or China and the European Union) facilitates internal political manipulation by powerful and self-interested elites.
Hegemonic states therefore tend to subvert internal sovereignty and they often refuse to recognize the external sovereignty of neighboring states, according them the provisional status of borderlands, along the imperial frontiers. Sovereignty requires the recognition of established boundaries and the territorial integrity of other sovereign states — and this is exactly what empires and hegemons often refuse to accept. It seems to be the case that any state that views its interests in expansive, not to say global, terms will come to violate the sovereignty principle sooner or later.
USING A SOVEREIGNTY PRINCIPLE TO OPPOSE HEGEMONIC STATES
Affirming a principle of political sovereignty today should not simply ratify existing diplomatic arrangements, since these arrangements often do not make crucial distinctions among different types of states such as national/multinational or hegemonic/nonhegemonic. Criteria for according sovereignty are therefore needed that make appropriate distinctions of this kind. Furthermore, sovereignty as a principle should be congruent with other widely recognized principles of international law such as the basic needs of persons, the protection of minorities, and prohibitions on certain kinds of warfare.
Two criteria for establishing sovereignty seem able to do this:
1) sovereign territorial states must be capable of self-government by a distinct people (a democratic criterion), and 2) they must be capable of recognizing other such sovereignties (a liberal criterion). Hegemonic states seem unable to meet these criteria. First, hegemonic states already or aspire to include, large, often noncontiguous territories and the heterogeneous populations inhabiting them. These features make it difficult for peoples in such states to assert their sovereignty over the states ruling them. Second, empires and hegemonic states commonly refuse to recognize the independence of other states. This means that hegemonic states often threaten the sovereignty of other peoples as well.
What sort of states would qualify as sovereign under these criteria? Two kinds would obviously do so: 1) states composed of self sufficient peoples and 2) states composed of federations of peoples.
The first type of sovereignty devolutionary since power devolves to the appropriate scale for self-sufficiency and the second type is federative since larger states could be sovereign to the extent that they adopt a federative form of government that could meet the two criteria of sovereignty mentioned above.
None of this is to suggest what may follow from denying sovereignty to some existing states. International organizations already have some experience of withdrawing recognition from nationalistic states that oppress minorities. Doing the same to imperialistic states that violate international law could be an extension of this practice–though what it would mean concerning membership of powerful, “rogue” states in international organizations remains to be seen. The main point here is that sovereignty should be understood as providing a critical stance to hegemony.
This will also mean that devolutionary or federative states must find ways to achieve independence from the reactions of hegemonic states to this assertion of sovereignty. For instance, devolutionary sovereignties may succeed in this either if they are geographically remote from the concerns or interests of more powerful states (as parts of Africa may be today) or if they enter into strategic alliances with other counter hegemonic states (as happened with the former nonaligned movement of the 1060s and may be happening today in Latin America).
Similarly, federative states may be able to achieve some autonomy if they are truly independent from entanglements with stronger states (e.g., not involved in military alliances such as N.A.T.O.) and if they can constitute themselves as economically self-sufficient. Of course, emergent states such as the European Union have the potential to take on hegemonic ambitions. The key here is to refuse this temptation by limiting the expansion of its territory and population to a scale that allows for internal democracy and economic self-sufficiency.
Reviving the principle of sovereignty may be the best way to oppose the actions of hegemonic states that continue to violate international law. On the one hand, alliances between small, relatively self sufficient states seeking self-determination and, on the other hand, organization into decentralized federations of peoples, may be the best options for avoiding domination by single global superpowers or conflicts between states that aspire to this status. Reviving the sovereignty principle can justify and legitimize these alternative routes to a more peaceful future.
Omar Dahbour (odahbour@hunter.cuny.edu) is associate professor of philosophy at Hunter College at the City University of New York (http:// www.hunter.cuny.edu/) and a speaker at Dehegemonization: The US &Transnational Democracy, a 2006 conference co-sponsored by CGS.
