Joan Cocks’s book On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions encourages us to disavow the treacherous language and practice of sovereign power. She questions adeptly what my book takes for granted: that there is some value in sovereign authority. Our books pursue different targets, but we share a concern with the oppressive, destructive power of the state, whose perceived legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens and outsiders gives it the power to steamroll over masses of people in the name of self-determination or national interest. And we both seek to challenge the concept of sovereignty as it was handed down from those who first imagined it as an unmovable, fixed building block of our universe.
In some ways, Joan Cocks has her sights set much higher. Whereas I seek to constrain sovereign power to render it truer to its promise of protecting the citizens’ most basic rights, Cocks recommends a complete decoupling of political autonomy and sovereign power. The book is structured into three chapters. The first is a wide-ranging reflection on the contested nature of political concepts, and sovereignty especially. The second chapter underlines the foundational violence that accompanies projects of sovereign creation by focusing on the crimes committed against native peoples by the new United States as it became independent from British rule. The final chapter discusses the complicated and ongoing struggle between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs set in motion by the birth of the Israeli state.
In Cocks’s view, sovereignty is troubling because it carries with it an illusion of freedom that is in fact a reality of domination, exclusion, and violence. Sovereign nations have emerged through violent take-over of groups that previously enjoyed decentralized, local rule (p. 51). Colonialism is an example of such foundational violence, but so are the French and American revolutions. For example, the self-founding myth of the United States, which tells of a people fighting to replace the constraints of absolute monarchical power with a new constitution that places freedom as its core, overlooks the obliteration of the indigenous people’s way of life, mode of organization, and values. “American democracy,” Cocks reminds us, “did not simply emerge on the ground from which Indians and their life world was being cleared but owed its very existence as a radical democracy to that clearance” (p. 64).
After sovereign power is established, groups that are dominated, oppressed, and mutilated seek to reenact sovereign power on their behalf, perpetuating the cycle of concentrating the power that ultimately leads to more harm, and further demands for sovereign recognition. Cocks claims that one can see this cycle clearly in the struggle between the Israeli and Palestinians. The Israeli state was instigated by crimes against European Jews, and has in turn led to the dispossession and marginalization of Palestinian Arabs who now look for state recognition as a way to protect themselves against Israeli overreach (p. 87).
But is sovereign autonomy truly a delusion? Are those who look to it as a liberating political practice and those who speak on its behalf so irretrievably mistaken to consider sovereign authority to be the expression of a self-governing political community? Are they wrong to imagine that its constitution, political institutions, the array of rights and duties for its citizens are an expression of the community’s values? That these can be protected from outside meddling as well as internal collapse through the instruments of sovereign power such as law and order, national security, and international law? Cocks believes the answer is yes. Sovereignty amasses power on behalf of oppressed minorities but it transforms them in turn into oppressors of their internal groups. Unlike autonomous self-rule, sovereignty “signals the presence of a master” and a subjected population (p. 78).
Such a stance is bound to invite dissent. Those that believe that states can be a vehicle for justice, equality, and inclusion will point to the many instances in which minorities have been uplifted from positions of marginalization, rights protections have strengthened over time, and ever widening circles of citizens have benefited from equality of treatment and extended opportunities, especially in western, liberal, democratic states. Resisting Cocks’s account is not to reject her vivid portrayal of the ills of political sovereignty. But it is to acknowledge that sovereign power has a positive, transformative potential that has been realized, albeit incompletely and variably, across the landscape of sovereign states asserting their authority today. By portraying this potential as an illusion, Cocks denies successful democracies their real achievements that are rightfully objects of emulation elsewhere.
For example, she agrees with her intellectual hero Hannah Arendt that there is much that is extraordinary about the American founding (p. 59), but declines to follow the implications of such uniqueness for her understanding of sovereignty. Can sovereignty ever be emancipatory, rights enhancing, protective, and inclusive? One can’t help but think there is another side to the story of sovereignty, and however much one might want to challenge it once it is told, it would be great to allow it to unfold.
Perhaps part of Cocks’s skepticism of sovereignty as a political form comes from a slight idealization of pre-political societies, where she claims authority is decentralized, there is much less group distinction or conflict, and individuals see themselves as members of one human race. For example, take her belief that before they had access to the violent tools of sovereign power, Native American tribes relied on “persuasion, example, consensus” to communicate with each other (pp. 77, 49). Such contrast is bound to make sovereign power look like the inferior option, but only if the idealization holds true.
Another similar assumption is that before sovereign states, communities were more inclusive, more accepting of difference, and more disposed to live and let live. In contrast, sovereignty is a “negative, exclusivist ideal” (p. 23). It not only does violence to people’s pre-existing ways of life, but differentiates between insiders and outsiders, “us” and “them,” allies and enemies (p. 49). But the disparity dissolves once we accept the idea that people crave meaningful communities, with strong bonds and shared practices, and forging such bonds is destined to create insiders and outsiders regardless of whether they take the form of sovereign states or tribes.
Cocks argues that sovereign power is under increasing pressure from contemporary social and economic forces that may render it outdated as a mode of political organization. She makes common ground with a growing chorus of observers concerned that states are losing “even the semblance of mastery” over their internal affairs due to the pressures of globalization, natural resource exploitation, mass migration, and terrorism (p. 22–24). Yet states never had total control over their territory or the economic forces that shaped the lives of their citizens. Even their monopoly on violence has always been under pressure. We see those pressures taking different shapes nowadays, but we also see states retaining real mastery, including their ability to preserve order and peace, and to provide important public goods for their citizens. We are also able to discern state mastery in the harms they are able to inflict within and across their borders. States which lose mastery look more like failed states—Somalia, Honduras, and DR Congo—and many states are not like that. Moreover, these are failed or weak states precisely because they have never been strong to begin with.
This is of course, in a way, one of the main worries of the book. Sovereign power neither performs well the functions it is entrusted with, nor can be limited in its ability to harm the very people it is meant to protect. This alone is a valuable contribution, and it is a truth that is worth repeating. The reader will however want to learn more about possible alternatives to sovereign states as modes of political organization. The fundamental distrust of sovereign power that permeates the book could make common cause with either that of anarchists of various stripes, who imagine communities along more voluntarist lines, or with those who, like James Bohman (Democracy Across Borders, 2007), reimagine democratic life around communities that span national borders—an overlapping, decentralized system of networks with individuals organized around shared interests rather than shared territory. It would be illuminating to see where Cocks places herself on this spectrum of alternative possibilities.
On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions exposes eloquently the dark side of sovereign power, and does so with well-developed examples, skillful questioning of political dogma, and arresting insight. Scholars and students of politics alike will be enriched by reading it, but most of all made to question deeply held views that masquerade as immutable features of our political life.
