Neither the historiographical focus on sovereignty nor the concept of sovereignty is new. What is new is the stress on it as a negotiated concept, as a field for claims, and as a gray zone between the public and the private, the state and the individual. This new approach locates sovereignty not only with the sovereign, but also with the people over whom the sovereign rules; more precisely, it locates it in a field of force betwixt and between the two. Sovereignty is less a thing to be measured than it is a dynamic to be followed, a question to be asked, even a rhetorical device. Focusing on different kinds of actors, from colonial profiteers to NGO officials, this new lens allows one to see sovereign power from above as only one locus of sovereignty. Another is the individual. For her, protracted negotiations and staking of claims often define the general contours and limits of sovereignty.
The fact of being new does not, eo ipso, grant an idea its truth. Instead, concepts, historiographical ones no less than other scholarly or scientific ideas, are embedded in contexts, and these contexts either lend force to the ideas, allowing them to be heard, or act like blankets, smothering ideas with silence. Being an old idea, sovereignty, or rather the history of thinking about it, harbors both generative and quiet periods. What, then, is our situ? Where are we in the longue durée of sovereignty thinking?
The flexible understanding of sovereignty, as put forward by the authors and editors, does not operate outside the tradition of thinking about sovereignty. But it does stand in a certain tension to what is often thought of as the modern understanding of the term. The modern idea was first formulated when a unified Christian Europe broke apart, and, in particular, when the Huguenots challenged the unity of “one faith, one law, one king” as represented by the French crown. Not for the first time, or the last, truth and politics clashed, and some sided with politics as the only way out of the impasse.
The Sovereignty Concept
Jean Bodin, the great sixteenth-century political theorist from Angers, was one of them. In his Six Books of the Commonwealth, published in 1576, he argued that the indivisibility of the sovereign was crucial when warring religious factions were at one another's throats. The only solution, he thought, was for a worldly ruler to be above them, forcing them, as it were, into coexistence. Bodin did not intend this as a defense of autocracy, but rather as a way of determining the locus of sovereignty when questions of faith led to irreconcilable clashes. In Bodin's theory, sovereign powers were nevertheless far reaching, at least in their conception. They consisted of declaring and ending war, appointing magistrates and assigning duties, issuing and abrogating laws, and hearing and acting upon appeals.Footnote 1 If “war made the state, and the state made war,” as Charles Tilly famously said, the sovereign, in Bodin's formulation, does both: he makes war and the state.Footnote 2
Bodin's conception was a departure from earlier ways of understanding sovereignty, which gave rulers relative powers of sovereignty in relation to other sovereigns within a territorial space. A king was the sovereign of those who owed him obeisance, but so too, within their sphere, were the lords and barons beneath the king. This meant that within a given territory, there were many sovereigns. In the autumn of the Middle Ages, sovereignty meant the authority to make final decisions with regard to discrete issues. It was not coterminous with an unlimited, or absolute, right to rule.Footnote 3
Bodin did not describe things as they were in the 1570s. Quite the opposite. He outlined what would be necessary to avoid a “bellum omnium contra omnes,” as Thomas Hobbes would later put it. Indeed, Hobbes's famous work, The Leviathan, published three-fourths of a century later in 1651, likewise saw the solution to political-religious discord in the concentration of legitimate power in the figure of a ruler—if a mythical one, embodying, as the biblical sea monster was intended to do, the near omnipotence of the sovereign state.Footnote 4
In the lands that made up the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, Bodin's idea of undivided supremacy, to say nothing of Hobbes's more threatening Leviathan, was by no means a self-evident conception. Barons, princes, and kings had an emperor above them, but the emperor ruled over an empire that, as Samuel Pufendorf put it in The Present State of Germany (1667), was “an irregular body, like a monster, if at least it be measured by the common rules of politics and jurisprudence.”Footnote 5 The monster in question did not instill fear, for he was merely misshapen. According to Pufendorf, Germany was neither a “limited kingdom” nor “a body or system of many sovereign states and princes.”Footnote 6 Rather, it “fluctuated between the two” and could not, as a result, be pressed into Aristotelian categories of government. Far from serving the calm and tranquility of the realm, the monstrosity of the empire meant that it was beset by furious diseases.Footnote 7
One of these was the absolute power the Treaty of Westphalia seemed to give princes over subjects. This power was especially evident in the religious sphere. The principle cuius regio, eius religio (whose territory, his religion), coined by a Pomeranian jurist in 1612, and enshrined in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, stated that the sovereign prince could determine the religious denomination of his subjects.Footnote 8 The principle codified a process, often decades long, of “confessionalization,” by which sovereigns policed, disciplined, and shaped the religious practices and beliefs of those in their territorial jurisdiction.Footnote 9 The Peace of Westphalia also conferred upon the princes the right to make foreign alliances, so long as not directed against the emperor and the empire. By the mid-eighteenth century, the time of the Seven Years War, these alliances came to hobble the empire, and by 1801, the young G. W. F. Hegel, then thirty years old, even declared the empire dead. “Germany is no longer a state,” he wrote on the eve of its actual demise, denying the appellation to a place “deprived of its power to defend itself against foreign countries.…”Footnote 10 Bodin would have agreed. In the face of Napoleon, the old empire did not solve its sovereignty problem.
Perhaps this is why Thomas Nipperdey famously began his history of Germany in the nineteenth century with, “In the beginning there was Napoleon.” And perhaps this is one reason why Hans-Ulrich Wehler felt compelled to reply (in his Gesellschaftsgeshichte): “In the beginning there was no revolution.”Footnote 11 Circa 1800—in the German lands—questions of sovereignty—who had it, what it was derived from—were utterly central. And not just circa 1800. Shadowing the opening sentences of Gordon A. Craig's Germany, 1866–1945 and Richard J. Evan's The Coming of the Third Reich, one might well ask: Is it a mistake or wrong to see the modern history of Germany as determined by competing loci of sovereignty?Footnote 12
Throughout the nineteenth century, a time of significant stretches of peace and lower levels of war-induced lethality than in any century since the sixteenth, Germany continued to flourish amid sovereignty arrangements that would have appalled Bodin. The German Confederation was certainly more than a geographical concept, as Metternich said of Italy. But it remained a polity without a major army under its direct command, bereft of a major bureaucracy, and lacking an independent judiciary. Indeed, the Deutsche Bundesakte (the German Federal Act) of 1815, the floor plan of the Confederation, saw the new polity as the “international union of sovereign German princes and free cities, to preserve the independence and inviolability of the states joined in the confederation.”Footnote 13 Essentially intended to protect the sovereignty of its member states, the German Confederation was certainly not a sovereign state in Bodin's sense. Sovereignty did not rise like the sun at an appointed time, to turn a phrase from E. P. Thompson. Rather, in the German Confederation, sovereignty was renounced at its own making.
If the statesmen at the Congress of Vienna worried about Napoleon, they also feared the revolutionary doctrine of popular sovereignty. Born of colonial resistance in the Americas and the radical thinking of the Enlightenment, this doctrine flourished during the breakup and dissolution of Poland, and in the crucible of the French Revolution. To the statesmen in Vienna, it seemed the most ominous threat, and not just at the level of the German Confederation. In the half century after the Congress of Vienna, almost all the individual states within the German Confederation eventually conceded constitutions that constrained monarchical or princely sovereignty.Footnote 14 Monarchies became constitutional monarchies and thus saved themselves. Princes made concessions to the people and in this way held onto power. At their very heart, these new monarchies and princely states were negotiated sovereignties in a political context in which people made claims on, but did not yet have, sovereign power.
Founded in 1871, Imperial Germany, a “permanent alliance” of states, also rested on divided sovereignty. So complex was the constitutional arrangement that jurists divided over whether it was even a sovereign state in the sense that Bodin intended the term. No doubt, as Oliver F. R. Haardt has recently shown, Imperial Germany became more centralized over time, pulling ever more sovereignty to it.Footnote 15 But some imperial jurists took the sovereignty debate in a completely different direction. In his Allgemeine Staatslehre of 1900, Georg Jellinek separated the close connection, existing since Bodin, between sovereignty and power, and described sovereignty as but only one characteristic of state power. The thrust of Jellinek's position was not to elevate power over sovereignty, but rather to argue for the limitations on power within constitutions and to embed the concept of state within a concept of law. Such states, he claimed, not only regulated and limited power, but also codified the relationship between the state and the individual. In both descriptive and normative terms, Jellinek argued, a codified system of state power, not indivisible sovereignty, constituted the essence of the modern state.Footnote 16
Jellinek's elegant synthesis would not hold for long, however. For in the twentieth century, as the authors of this special issue argue, Germany belonged to the countries in the world in which the dynamic back and forth between different loci of sovereignty was severe. Oscillating between various forms of overlapping sovereignties and what the editors call “hyper sovereignty,” Germany arguably endured a more complicated and vexed history of sovereignty than any other major Western nation. In one year alone, 1917–1918, it went from being a kind of monarchical constitutionalism to a de facto if not de jure military dictatorship under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff; then, in October 1918, it became a constitutional monarchy (under Prince Max von Baden); and finally, a month later, it transformed into a dual revolution, in which sovereignty, understood in its classic sense, either emanated from the Council of the People's Deputies, headed by Friedrich Ebert, or from the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Subsequent history, as all students of the German past know, did not give respite from what was often a vicious back and forth over the question of who rules whom in whose name. Within five years of the German Revolution of 1918, the allied powers had come to occupy a significant part of the country, the Rhineland, while in January 1923, France and Belgium also occupied the Ruhr; the currency had become worthless; and separatist movements in the Rhineland and Bavaria threatened to spread to Saxony, Baden, and Hanover.
It is no accident that this German time of troubles witnessed significant articulations of sovereignty. Just after the repression of the January uprising in Berlin in 1919, Max Weber delivered a lecture in Munich to the “Free Students Union” of Bavaria, in which he defined the state as “an entity that possesses a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force with a certain territory.”Footnote 17 Soon after, and likewise in the chaos of the early Weimar Republic, Carl Schmitt first enunciated his concept that “sovereign is who decides on the state of exception” and that the political realm ultimately rests on “the differentiation between friend and foe.”Footnote 18 The militarization of the concept of sovereignty, its new emphasis on sheer force and not merely the distribution of decision-making competencies, reflected the brutality of the new century and the tenuous hold on power evident in early Weimar. This tenuous hold was reflected in the fact that between 1918 and 1925, constitutionally sanctioned emergency decrees became an ordinary, if still intermittent, form of conducting government business—President Ebert, according to one counting, used them “no fewer than on 136 separate occasions.”Footnote 19 The Weimar constitution located sovereignty in the “people,” but these emergency decrees essentially allowed presidents to grant chancellors the possibility of running the country without parliamentary majorities. When, during the height of the Depression, this strategy was evidently failing, the president, who was by then Paul von Hindenburg, allowed a clique of conservative chancellors without a democratic mandate to hand over power to Adolf Hitler, who made short shrift of constitutional constraints.
From a moribund democracy to an energized dictatorship: the transition was extremely swift. By the summer of 1933, sovereignty was with an individual, Hitler. It was also with a political movement that relied on the excessive use of violence. And it was with the significant portion of the German population that supported the nationalism, militarism, and the broad racism (centered on antisemitism) for which the regime stood. The titles of two major interpretations of the Third Reich (Martin Broszat's The Hitler State [1969], and Karl Dietrich Bracher's The German Dictatorship [1969]) bear eloquent testimony to the unanswered question of where precisely sovereignty lay and where historians have sought to find it.Footnote 20
What was clear, however, is that the notion of self-limitation was no longer central to the concept of sovereignty, as it had been in the long tradition of discourse about the idea. To be sure, this was not clear right away. Ernst Franekel's The Dual State (1941), one of the most insightful early analyses of the Third Reich, still treated Nazi Germany as having essentially two loci of sovereignty: the “normative state” and the “prerogative state.” The former, the normative state, was as yet “an administrative body endowed with elaborate power for safeguarding the legal order as expressed in statutes, decisions of the courts, and activities of administrative agencies,” whereas the latter, the prerogative state, constituted a “governmental system which exercises unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees.”Footnote 21 At the same time, a second major work, written by a friend and colleague of Fraenkel, developed a different view. In a book with the subtitle, “The Structure and Practice of National Socialism,” Franz Neumann implicitly argued that Fraenkel's normative state had disappeared and that even a Leviathan, “a political system of coercion in which vestiges of the rule of law and of individual rights are still preserved,” was no longer apt. “Since we believe National Socialism is—or tending to become—a non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness and anarchy, which has ‘swallowed’ the rights and dignity of man, and is out to transform the world into a chaos by the supremacy of gigantic land masses,” Neumann presciently wrote, “we find it apt to call the National Socialist system: The Behemoth.”Footnote 22
Who Shapes “Sovereignty”
Thus far the discussion has focused on states. Yet a central contribution of this special issue is to expand our sense of who shaped state sovereignty. Common to all of the articles is the presence of extraterritorial actors, and the involvement of actors and institutions that are not part of the actual apparatus of the state in the way that Bodin would have recognized.
In “Buying Sovereignty: German ‘Weltpolitik’ and Private Enterprise, 1884–1914,” Steven Press cogently argues that in order to understand how sovereignty happens on the ground, historians have to take nonstate actors into their analytical purview. Focusing primarily on the colonial exploits of rapacious capitalists, Press depicts the many gradations of gray between sovereignty as defined by the annexation of land and its people by a sovereign power, on the one side, and the capitalist purchase, often in nefarious deals of colonial possessions with “sovereign rights,” on the other. Press underscores that the tight imbrication of sovereignty (a matter of the state) and sovereign rights (a question of capitalist acquisition) was not a German peculiarity. In its attempt to string together a “limited liability empire,” Germany acted like other leading colonial powers, just as the transactional practices of its actors did not differ in kind from that of other colonial empires. The significant contrast was between Europe and the colonial world. Denmark was a case in point, as Kaiser Wilhelm II's brusque dismissal of Danish inquiries about swapping the Virgin Islands for North Schleswig showed. In these transactions, imagined and real, the brutal colonial violence and harrowing abuses that otherwise govern our thinking about colonies seem less central. But this too raises a question about the extent to which the dark shadow of asymmetrical military power allowed these gray areas of sovereignty to emerge in the first place. To ask the question less abstractly: Was “private colonial sovereignty,” in which private businessmen acquired sovereign rights or their equivalent, thinkable without the threat of a final arbiter—such as the Prussian army or the German navy—that constituted an unmistakable state institution in the sense that Bodin would have recognized?
Similar questions may be raised with respect to Rüdiger Graf's detailed, precise, and compelling analysis of the Leipzig trials of the early twenties. The trials, in which Weimar Germany chose to try only a small number of accused war criminals, are usually considered in the context of the subsequent Nuremberg Trials—not the least because chief prosecutor Robert Jackson would cite the sliver of justice meted out in Leipzig as evidence that Germany could not be trusted to adjudicate its own war criminals. Graf shows convincingly that we learn much more when we consider these trials in three contexts: the emerging discourse on international law prior to World War I, the compromised post-Versailles sovereignty of the Weimar Republic, and the prevalence of the discourse of self-determination throughout central Europe. As the young republic was domestically pressed and vulnerable to attacks from its right, it could not endure further reductions of its sovereignty, the republic's leaders argued. The extradition of hundreds of war criminals (not to mention the former Kaiser) would have further destabilized an already precarious polity. By using weapons available to a weak state, the young republic created spaces of sovereignty for itself.
The question of creating spaces of sovereignty is also central to Philipp Müller's penetrating article on sovereignty trade-offs during the breakup of the IG-Farben conglomerate after 1945. A great deal has been written about the postwar restructuring of the relationship between large cartels and the state, especially with respect to the influence of the United States. One school sees the West German economy as shaped by state actors who essentially acquiesced to an American model, and the other sees nonstate actors, primarily representatives of big business, as modifying American influence. Seen from the standpoint of sovereignty, this leads to a paradoxical analysis, in which state actors acted to reduce West German sovereignty by inviting untrammeled American influence, while nonstate actors were able to alter, resist, and change American pressure to enhance West German sovereignty. This latter scenario ends up being closer to what actually happened, as initial concepts, which envisioned IG Farben as transformed into some seventy-five independent companies, were successfully resisted. As a result, IG Farben was broken up into only three main enterprises (Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst) with complementary, rather than competing, markets. To Müller, who intentionally works with a malleable concept of sovereignty, “It is not important whether components of state sovereignty are actually realized but rather whether they serve as conceptual aspirations that guide plans and strategies.” Yet what comes out as well is a question about the overlapping kinds of sovereignty. For in allowing the near reconstitution of a politically powerful corporate entity, with the means and ability to constrain the state, the Federal Republic of Germany also reduced its own political sovereignty in issues large and small over the next decades. States, in other words, should be careful about the kind of sovereignty they wish for.
Sovereignty in the classic sense is the subject of Sebastian Gehrig's wide-ranging article on the German question, national division, and the United Nations during the Cold War. At the end of World War II, conceptions of sovereignty in the Bodin mold were alive and well. Gehrig quotes Hans J. Morgenthau, the dean of postwar realist political science, as stating “Sovereignty over the same territory cannot reside simultaneously in two different authorities,” qualifying only with, “that is, sovereignty is indivisible.” In the early years, German jurists could still pretend that sovereignty questions were German-German issues, decided under the watchful eye of the occupying powers. But the drive of the two German states to be recognized as legitimate soon brought the question of German sovereignty into a non-European sphere. Following Article 2 of its charter, the United Nations strove for the universal recognition of the sovereign equality of all its member states. Combined with the dramatic growth of newly independent, postcolonial counties, this principle transformed the General Assembly into a decision-making body that could, with a two-thirds majority, even outflank the UN Security Council. The key issue was the recognition of the People's Republic of China, which, when it occurred in 1971, had important repercussions for a series of divided countries, including Vietnam, Korea, and the two Germanies. It thus transpired that national sovereignty in Germany became inextricably bound with postcolonial developments.
The tension between supranational organizations and national sovereignty is also the subject of Laura Kaiser's article on “pathological” gamblers and sovereign consumers. Unlike the other authors in this special issue, Kaiser focuses more intently on individual sovereignty and how it is caught in a web of competing sovereign claims. Taking as her starting point the medicalization of excessive gambling as pathological by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) III in 1980, she shows how a new discourse of gambling liberalization emerged. Occasioned by Germany's attempt to exert judicial control over the gambling market in the era of European integration and advanced digitalization, the new pathologization of excessive gambling challenged neoliberal notions of consumer sovereignty by curtailing freedom of choice. It also showed a nation-state, Germany, attempting to reassert sovereign control after having ceded it to the European Union.
The Fate of “Sovereignty”
When the late Reinhart Koselleck completed the penultimate volume of Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, he dated the foreword, September 6, 1989. In that volume (vol. 6, St-Vert), there is a detailed chapter, comprising 155 pages, on “State and Sovereignty.” That the two concepts should be pressed together should not surprise. Jean Bodin had cast a long shadow over both concepts, and the history of thinking about them has almost always treated them as intertwined. The legal historian Hans Boldt, who wrote the final section on sovereignty, also hazarded a thought about the future of the concept and wondered whether the increasingly complex webs of sovereignty did not in fact render the concept of sovereignty obsolete, a “historical concept,” in Boldt's words, whose “use henceforth counts as anachronistic.”Footnote 23
Alas, however, as the last key of Boldt's typewriter hit the last page of his essay, interest in the concept of sovereignty began to explode. That explosion has many sources. Primary among them was the reorientation of the world after the end of the Cold War, which occasioned fundamental shifts in international organization, and these shifts had dramatic consequences for the problem of sovereignty—in the world generally, in Germany specifically, and for historians as well.
East Germany, as is well known, was brought down by a double revolution of voice, “We are the people,” and exit.Footnote 24 Within a few short months, its legitimacy, like a parched sandcastle on a scorching hot day, simply crumbled. Within a year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the state disappeared, and five East German states joined the Federal Republic. But as this “unification” transpired, neither West nor East Germany were fully sovereign states, and this did not change until the signing of the so-called “Two-Plus Four” Treaty, the final peace agreement of World War II. The transition to full sovereignty under an enlarged Federal Republic could occur only in dialogue with the occupying powers, and those powers hoped to embed Germany more permanently in the emerging European Union. The return to full sovereignty was thus entwined with the passing of sovereign rights to a supranational organization.
Here is not the place to delineate the many consequences that followed. Suffice it to say that in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, political scientists, historians, and pundits began to assume that nation-states were doomed to the dustbin of the long twentieth century and that the creation of partial sovereignties would become the norm. The future of political organization, according to this line of reasoning, would tend to involve increasingly complex overlapping and entangled sovereignties. For a while, sovereignty in Bodin's sense—as undivided—seemed absolutely dead. The European Union, the polity of the future, possessed sovereign rights but was not sovereign in a way the sixteenth-century theorist would have understood. It neither possesses a monopoly of legitimate force within its jurisdiction nor an army sufficient to repel invaders. It also does not possess a constitution, strictly speaking.
In the two decades after the end of the Cold War, the aura of historical inevitability that surrounded the European Union created the ideational space for new discourses of sovereignty. No longer seen as a final arbiter but as a negotiation between levels, sovereignty was suddenly perceived as discursive, as a rhetorical device, and as something to be deployed to gain power and influence. This way of understanding sovereignty also had historical precedents. In Germany, proponents of this view saw legitimate precursors in the layered structure of the Holy Roman Empire—now no longer beset by furious diseases but instead praised for its malleability and longevity. Even late medieval conceptions of sovereignty—ones that emphasized multiple sovereignties within territorial units—suddenly received a hearing.Footnote 25
At the same time, the question of physical force, the second context of the new sovereignty discourse, was also being redefined—partly in the European Union, but more powerfully in the United Nations. Save for the important exception of the Korean War, the existence of two opposing ideological blocks made it virtually impossible for the UN Security Council to act militarily in order to halt civil war or intervene in gross violations of human rights during the Cold War. After the Cold War, the number of UN peacekeeping missions, and the resources put into them, have risen dramatically; more than 70 percent of these interventions have occurred since the fall of the Berlin Wall.Footnote 26 The same may be said of the United Nations' judicial body, the International Court of Justice. Its aggressive pursuit of perpetrators of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia have significantly changed the writ of international bodies of law. Though laudable and necessary on humanitarian grounds, these prosecutions also underscore the way sovereign rights face fundamental challenges. It may well be, as Kiran Klaus Patel puts it, that integration into the European Union has changed countries dramatically—so that “they become post-classical nation states that relinquish sovereignty in central questions in favor of international collaboration.”Footnote 27 But it remains equally true that the resistance to this change is significant, and, if Brexit is an indicator, that resistance is growing.
One cannot simply wish the difficulties away. States continue to guard national sovereignty jealously, and this guarding reflects the life experiences of citizens. Despite globalization, and record levels migration, more than 95 percent of the world's people still die in the same country they were born in.Footnote 28 Liquid modernity, to cite Zygmunt Baumann's evocative term, may be desirable, but it does not describe the experience of a Nigerian migrant encountering the Frontex-trained Libyan Coast Guard in the Mediterranean Sea or the Guatemalan laborer facing the imposing wall built by the United States along its Mexican border.Footnote 29 The Berlin Wall certainly came down, but others—in Jerusalem, South Africa, along the Rio Grande, and along the Evros (on the border between Greece and Turkey)—have since gone up. And arguably the world is now more widely walled than any in any time in its recent history.
The new global situation—somewhere between migration and homelands, routes and roots—has also created its own historiography, and it cannot easily leave the question of sovereignty behind. Some of the most important breakthroughs in the past two decades have been in the study of global history and in the focus on how empires work. Common to both is an emphasis on connections, flows, and spaces, but also on a plethora of sovereignty arrangements, different kinds of sovereignties across vast imperial territories and significant stretches of time, and legal and spatial anomalies that would have caused Bodin to shudder.Footnote 30 There is also considerable movement in legal history, with closer attention than during the Cold War paid to the history of thinking about sovereignty. One index is the attention paid to Carl Schmitt. According to one citation search of legal journals, he was referenced only five times in the 1980s—but 144 times in the 1990s, and nearly 500 times in the first decade of the new millennium.Footnote 31 Moreover, this index does not even scratch at the wider historical and philosophical debates—in particular the generative confrontation of Giorgio Agamben with Schmitt's argument that sovereign is who decides the state of exception and that politics ultimately comes down to who defines friend and foe. Influenced by Michel Foucault, Agamben has turned our attention to detention centers and concentration camps, where it becomes clear that the basic question of sovereignty involves the state and “bare life.”
This discourse too reflects our current biopolitical situ, which seems far removed from either the religious “bellum omnium contra omnes” that struck fear in Bodin and Hobbes or the mechanized mass warfare that forged the militarized concepts of sovereignty of Max Weber and Carl Schmitt. As the global incidence of war decreases, as it has dramatically since 1945, and the number of people per capita who die in violent armed conflict reaches historic lows, the question of sovereignty will, as the authors of this special edition show, be put to other uses. Among those other uses will be protecting “bare life” from the sovereign state.
