Scholars of international relations, political theory, legal studies, the European Union, and globalization have been discussing the nature of sovereignty for several decades now. This volume brings diverse disciplinary voices together to explore the nature of sovereign authority; the goal is to develop a more sophisticated understanding of sovereignty and a common conceptual vocabulary.
This edited volume has several merits. Rather than looking for a grand theory, it explores how “sovereignty” has been claimed in diverse, and often contradictory, ways. The invocation of sovereignty is contingent: Sovereign authority claims are conditioned by the political realities of empire, state building, military intervention, and globalization. They are also informed by other “political” concepts like power, rule of law, the state, and just war. Short of a grand theory, in this context-dependent investigation, the contributors explore what the editors call the “grammar of sovereignty” and the reciprocal way in which this grammar has shaped and been shaped by political factors and ideas. The amazing ability of sovereignty to be adapted to varied legal and political contexts allows scholars to find its grammar in important legal and political debates, to analyze its logic in operation, and to have a sophisticated understanding about its future.
While sovereignty is mainly “an argumentative source,” it is irreducible to a strategic, instrumentalist logic. Its meaning, function, and evolution cannot be isolated from the meaning, function, and evolution of other fundamental concepts of politics. This is an important point that the contributing authors make, and case studies throughout the volume illustrate well the coconstitution and coevolution of sovereignty and other political concepts like legitimacy, authority, and power. Likewise, as the authors demonstrate, the use of grammar is a good metaphor for helping one to understand aspects of sovereignty.
The volume, however, lacks a theoretical discussion and clarification of the function and structure of sovereignty. Metaphors cannot substitute for theoretical discussion; the language of “sovereignty speech,” and “sovereignty grammar” remain undeveloped and undertheorized compared with the “logic of consequences” or “logic of appropriateness.” The volume would have benefited from a systematic engagement with the “logic of argument” literature developed by constructivist international relations scholars.
The editors rightly avoid a meta-narrative and a grand theory for sovereignty, that is, conventional Westphalian sovereignty. That said, their exclusive focus on European history, thought, and practice—essentially Western and Northern Europe and the EU—unavoidably constructs a European narrative that reflects a mostly liberal understanding of politics. The volume embeds sovereignty's past, present, and future in Europe's past, present, and future. For example, Quentin Skinner examines British constitutional debates in which sovereignty claims shifted from the ruler to the people, and then to the state. Denis Branger discusses sovereignty claims within the debates about legal codification and centralization in seventeenth-century France. Several other chapters explore sovereignty grammar within the historical context of concepts like rule of law, just war, coercion, and legitimacy. All are discussed exclusively within European thought and practice. While some of these discussions develop new arguments and concepts (like Jens Bartelson's argument for a “double bind” between sovereignty and self-defense), the discussion of sovereignty's past continues to revolve around the usual themes and personalities. Bodin, Hobbes, Grotius, and Austin appear extensively. Hobbes alone is discussed at length in several chapters. These European debates are, of course, important for understanding sovereignty, but limiting the analysis to them provides only a partial picture.
Such limited focus on Europe is unfortunate for a volume seeking to expand the frontiers of scholarship on sovereignty. It is also unfortunate because it ignores the critical and postcolonial work that explores non-European actors and ideas, European and non-European interactions in the evolution of dominant ideas about sovereignty, and the ways in which European debates about sovereignty were informed by European colonialism.
The future of sovereignty also takes on a distinctly European cast. In several chapters devoted to the EU, the authors consider whether the EU experience is transforming sovereignty. These chapters are illuminating, but in several places the discussions oscillate between juridical and normative language and sometimes confound the two. Juridical debates involve subtle technical issues about constitutional and treaty-making powers and bureaucratic decision making in Brussels. The normative tone appears to suggest the EU as a paragon for the future, with its innovative structure, rule of law, and state accountability—arguably an example of “‘optimal sovereignty’ or indeed optimal allocation of power” (p. 9). For many contributors, these are the most important sovereignty debates and arguably hold the key to understanding its future.
It may be true that any debate about sovereignty is incomplete without a consideration of the EU. Yet as Stephen Krasner suggests in his chapter, I am not sure if European sovereignty debates can tell us anything about the present and future condition of sovereignty in other places. The EU debates seem removed from many issues central to sovereignty, like military intervention and the use of force. Several American foreign policy actions of the last decade—intervention in Kosovo, “giving” sovereignty back to Iraq, American involvement in Iraqi and Afghani constitution making, the rise of private American military companies, American drone attacks into sovereign states, the debates about Pakistan's sovereignty in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and Guantanamo's jurisdictional status in American and international laws—as well as the various debates associated with these issues, seem to be more consequential than the European debates in understanding sovereignty and assessing its future. Similarly, it is not clear what the EU debates tell us about issues like the International Criminal Court's indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, the sovereignty of Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the status of the Palestinian Authority. The volume's exclusive focus on the EU has, in a sense, marginalized these issues.
A few contributors do offer an insightful counterpoint to the volume's liberal-Eurocentric orientation. Krasner, for example, questions the relevance of the EU experiment in understanding the future of sovereignty. He also brings issues of power into the debates. In a rather simplistic way, he categorizes 72 states with premodern sovereignty because they are “failed” or “badly governed,” thereby becoming a source of potential security risks for states with traditional sovereignty or, in the case of the EU, postmodern sovereignty. If the risks posed by these premodern sovereign states become realities, Krasner anticipates frequent military interventions and possibly a change in the rules of sovereignty. Concluding the volume, Martti Koskeniemi provides an excellent review of the common themes and raises insightful questions about sovereignty.
The volume establishes that sovereignty has been and will continue to be an integral part of the evolution of legal and political systems. Rather than having a grand theory, it advocates that we need to understand how sovereignty functions in a variety of contexts and how it interacts with other concepts central to politics and the political imagination. Sovereignty is a highly adaptive concept, varying by time periods, locales, and debates, all important points. The volume's attempt at a cross- and multidisciplinary fertilization has the potential to expand the frontiers of scholarship on sovereignty. However, the book would have benefited from the inclusion of non-European issues, concerns, and ideas in order to expand this frontier even further.
