Divided Sovereignty pivots on the following conundrum. On the one hand, the coercive capacities of states allow them to protect their citizens from harm by other citizens, while the sovereign integrity of states gives them the right to protect their citizens from harm by other states. On the other hand, states can redirect their coercive capacities against their citizens, either by actively attacking them or by passively refusing to protect them when they come under attack by other members of society. In such cases, the non-interference principle that governs international relations morphs from a benefit into a drawback, at least if one looks at politics from a moral point of view. Carmen Pavel’s solution to this conundrum is a division of sovereign power both between states and international institutions with the muscle to put a stop to egregious human rights abuses, and among international institutions of a variety of types, with the International Criminal Court in the lead.
While lucidly defending this complex division, Pavel puts warranted pressure on three intellectual postures at odds with her own. First, she chastises political theorists who float in a heavenly sphere of “oughts” without attending to the earthly sphere of “is” or, more specifically, without thinking about the institutions that would align reality with some approximation of their ideals. In insisting that political theorists focus on, not pure abstractions, but regulative ideals that make sense in established contexts and are plausible for institutions to actualize, Pavel displays a certain affinity with the critical realist school of political thought, which contends that political theory should consider ideals not in the abstract but as those ideals are intimated in and enabled by concrete political actualities. Second, in viewing fundamental human rights violations as cause for international intervention in state affairs, Pavel pits herself against classical IR realists who take an absolutist view of the sovereign independence principle and mistrust international cooperation for being either utopian or a cover-up for the pursuit of big-power interests. Third, Pavel’s pitch for institutional pluralism without the umbrella of a higher authority or master plan challenges global governance advocates who see a world state and cosmopolitan demos as antidotes to regional economic inequality, border-crossing ecological disasters, and the difference in luck between those born in liberal democracies and those living under repressive regimes or in conflict zones.
Pavel comes out for and against modern states when she opposes both sacrosanct sovereign state power and the subordination of the state inside a hierarchical governance structure. On the plus side, states are our political “facts on the ground”—and they are good facts when they protect individual citizens from harm and support the national self-determination of peoples. Thus, as long as they respect jus cogens norms of justice against genocide, slavery, race discrimination, human trafficking, torture, and the targeting of civilians in civil war, their right to non-interference is legitimate. On the minus side, states sometimes don’t respect these norms, the cruelest states are least likely to submit to the authority of international institutions, and individuals trapped inside those states usually aren’t free to request outside help. International institutions and the states that have established them thus are justified in imputing consent for outside intervention to citizens suffering in silence from state brutalities.
As much as her call for coercive international institutions and her notion of imputed consent will put off classical IR realists, Pavel proposes a more modest revision of institutional realities than those who would ratchet up sovereign power from the national to the global level. She prefers divided sovereignty to a centralized world state because she rightly suspects that global governance would simply turn external conflicts into internal ones, and because, as alienated as many people feel from their own national authorities for being distant and bureaucratic or obtuse to local contexts or beholden to metropolitan elites, a global state would increase that alienation immeasurably. To fracture sovereign power among multiple institutions at multiple levels is, as Pavel declares, more conducive than centralized sovereignty to democratic self-government, even if Friedrich Hayek, whom she cites as a forerunner of her cause, is in fact more of a market-fundamentalist than a true fan of democratic pluralism and experimentation. Pavel is refreshingly relaxed about the messiness that institutional pluralism entails. She sees overlapping jurisdictions and redundancies of function among different “semi-sovereign” institutions as more beneficial than one supreme authority with every other element of life under its command. As to the identity of the beneficiaries—while she alludes occasionally to national peoples, collective identity and collective action don’t get much airtime here. The principals that concern her are primarily individuals and their rights, conceived of in prototypically liberal terms.
Two easy connected criticisms can be made of Pavel’s vision of coercive international institutions as guardians of fundamental human rights. One is the presumption that individual freedom and bodily security are the bedrock rights to be guarded, instead of, say, material equality, or faithfulness to religious truth, or environmental wellbeing, or the communal enjoyment of an inherited life world. The other is the danger that Western liberal democracies might forcibly impose their own schedule of values on other societies through imputing their citizens’ consent to outside intervention. However, the different question I wish to raise is whether Pavel’s rigorously institutionalist analysis takes us as far from abstract ideals to practical realities as scholars of politics need to go.
Pavel’s ideal international institutions appear to have no political agenda of their own; instead, they are antiseptic moral agents that swoop down into the checkered world of political interests when their principals’ fundamental human rights are at stake. Even the state as Pavel portrays it is almost a-political when it is acting as it should, which is to protect private individuals from harm, not to identify individuals with something larger and grander than themselves, or to mobilize them into friend/enemy relationships, or to prime them to knuckle under market dictations—all purposes that, for better or worse, have animated the life of states in modern times. Pavel’s ideal citizens, for their part, are moved by interests in their personal freedom and security rather than by fantasies, anxieties, and psychological investments in state power that sometimes can induce them to prefer, as Isaiah Berlin put it, a tyrant who is one of their own over a benevolent guardian from a foreign people and place. Finally, the oppression that international institutions are charged with counteracting is mainly that perpetrated by state institutions against citizens, or by the odd individual bad apple against good apples. What complications ensue for Pavel’s interventionist prescriptions when popular majorities or minorities are perpetrators of mass political crimes such as race domination and ethnic cleansing?
One other disturbing political reality has to do with the sheer pervasiveness of racism, human trafficking, the butchering of civilians in war, torture, and hyper-exploited labor in the world today. To halt even a small portion of all of this, international institutions would have to amass a tremendous concentration of coercive power. It follows from Pavel’s argument that supra-international institutions, with even greater coercive power, would have to be constructed to protect individual freedom and security from the dangers of that concentration. Where is the exit from this bad infinity?
On a more concrete note, I can’t help wondering how coercive international institutions might be expected to respond to the current Syrian catastrophe. To stop the suffering of Syrian citizens, such institutions could enter the war to try to end it. However, then they would have to fight not merely for the human rights of Syrians but with or against Assad, ISIS, Putin, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, with “dirty” political considerations thereby infecting the “clean” project of human rights protection. Trying Assad et al. for war crimes would better safeguard the moral purpose of international institutions, but at the cost of allowing human suffering to continue until the war grinds to a halt, with leading perpetrators punished, at best, after the fact. The one task that coercive international institutions could undertake without forfeiting, by commission or omission, the moral mission Pavel has assigned them is to resolve the refugee crisis in a way that supports the human rights of Syrian refugees and helps them regain or acquire political rights, without which, as Hannah Arendt once lamented, refugees remain on par with the animals that societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals seek to protect. Still, even coping with the refugee crisis would require international institutions to move out of the ethereal space of pure morality into the gritty space of politics, for that is where decisions will be made about how millions of Syrians are to be dealt with, which countries will be pressed to open their doors to them, and what they will find waiting once they walk through those doors.
In conclusion, I offer these thoughts not as criticisms of this finely chiseled and deeply serious book. Instead, they are reflections provoked by its meticulous effort to reconfigure sovereign power for the sake of those exposed to the worst potentialities of exclusive state control.
