Carmen Pavel has put her finger on what other readers, too, may see as the three sins of On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions. First, the book is thought to reduce popular sovereignty—an ideal that has propelled so many collective struggles against oppressive political regimes—to its dark underside. Second, it recuperates tribal communities and classical empires despite the fact that the former were at least as exclusivist as modern nation-states (if also less inclined to top-down impositions of power), while the latter were more internally hierarchical and externally expansionist (if also more hospitable to ethnic and cultural heterogeneity). Third, it fails to provide a blueprint for organizing political power along non-sovereign lines.
Ironically, one might see Pavel as providing an antidote to Sin #3 in her recipe for dividing sovereign power between national and international institutions, as well as among international institutions of different types. My own approach to posing alternatives to sovereign nation-states is admittedly more gestural. At the micro level, I pursue intimations in the present of politics played in a new key, by highlighting exceptions to sovereign power in the cracks and crevices of the life of states today. At the macro level, I suggest that the world may be inching towards sovereignty-fracturing syntheses of multi-cultural heterogeneity (the positive moment of classical empires) and citizen equality (the positive moment of modern nation-states), even if it also often seems to be lurching in the opposite direction, towards reasserting the cultural homogeneity of the people as the bedrock of political order, or reinstating the domination of one ethnic or racial or religious group over other groups, and/or re-entrenching strongman rule over anxious or cowed individual subjects.
With respect to Sin # 2, my intention was not to romanticize tribal orders or classical empires but to puncture the conceit that the modern nation-state is the apex of political possibility and an unqualified advance on previously prevailing socio-political organizations. Politically, I mean to make the case that losses are involved in the triumph of the modern sovereign state form as well as gains, and that some of those losses might be retrievable under not yet fully imaginable but emergent modalities of political life. Philosophically, I mean to show how not merely the idea of the popular sovereign state but also the ideas of the sovereign ethnos, sovereign individual, and sovereign species are deeply problematic for resting on rigid distinctions between self and other, and for encouraging the subjects in question to seek freedom through controlling everything outside or beneath themselves that otherwise could impinge on them against their will. I illustrate this dynamic by turning to two pursuits of sovereign freedom—one civic-national and one ethno-national—that ineluctably became domination projects. Finally, I note the ecological reasons for rejecting the dominative impulse implicit in the idea of the sovereign freedom of humanity as a whole.
That leaves Sin #1, reducing sovereign freedom to its dark underside. As my above comments indicate, I mean to say something much more fundamental than the word “underside” conveys. In a nutshell, if monarchical sovereign power is delusional in that no prince can control subjects without their consent over the long run, a state operating under that delusion nonetheless may provide those subjects with a degree of security by restraining lesser concentrations of power inside and combatting equal concentrations of power outside its borders. Sovereign freedom is more delusional than that, for attempting to combine domination and freedom into a single couplet.
