The S-Word

One of the most ridiculous scenes this year was watching W congratulate his British stooge—Tony Blair—during the European summit meeting because the United States had handed over sovereignty to a puppet government in Iraq. W and his gang were so desperate to field a so-called sovereign government in Iraq that they accepted—no, sought—UN involvement in creating an interim Iraqi government. W wrote "Let Freedom Reign" in the margin of the memo slipped to him by Condi. I guess W couldn't spell "Ring." W's illiteracy aside, his foolish assertion that he could hand over sovereignty as if it were a bowl of peas betrays the depth of his ignorance. Our puppet regimes in both Iraq and Afghanistan are headed by men who were—prior to the War on Terror—on the CIA payroll. Neither Iyad Allawi nor Hamid Karzai has any claim to legitimacy because both of them were CIA stooges. W doesn't get it. Condi doesn't get it. However, in all likelihood, we're going to get it and it won't be pleasant. If this is (fair & balanced) geopolitics, so be it.

[x The Chronicle of Higher Education]
Violating 'Sovereignty': Questioning a Concept's Long Reign
By CARLIN ROMANO

Everywhere the S-word wreaks havoc. Iraqi terrorists kill hundreds of Americans and Iraqis to protest infringement of sovereignty by the Great Satan. Africans massacre other Africans because European-imposed "sovereign" borders clash with tribal allegiances.

Serbs and Albanians, Irish and British, Indians and Pakistanis, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Russians and Chechens, Georgians and Abkhazians, French and Corsicans, Spanish and Basques, Mexicans and Zapatistas, Kurds and Turks (not to mention Kurds and Iraqis, or Kurds and Syrians), Chinese and Taiwanese (not to mention Chinese and Tibetans, Chinese and South Koreans, Chinese and Russians, Chinese and Indians ... ), all want to split heads over sovereignty.

It doesn't end there. In the United States, less bloody battles -- some more than 200 years old -- continue between the states and national government over sovereignty. In Europe, the evolution of the European Union into what some already call the "United States of Europe" now provokes regular battles about where E.U. law violates national sovereignty. In the rarefied world of international law, lawyers -- regular customers of the many international institutions, from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization, that routinely crimp national sovereignty -- shake their heads and wonder what all the fuss is about.

Who says murky ideas don't matter?

But head shaking tends to be a silent art form, like mime. Onlookers observe it for a few minutes, then pass on. So an odd contrast persists.

As an explosive real-world political idea, sovereignty propels international armies and costs untold lives. As a historical concept within political philosophy -- roughly defined by one scholar as "supreme authority within a territory" -- it remains a back-alley matter, outside the main arena.

Compared with idealistic de jure notions like "justice" and "democracy," it's often a de facto embarrassment. Compared with relatively coherent concepts like "desert" or "entitlement," it's a mongrel: born in "divine right" theology and circumstance, barely coherent at best, terminally ambiguous at worst, preternaturally dangerous.

That Alan Cranston (1914-2000), the four-term Democratic senator from California, left among his papers an important essay defying the disconnect between fuzzy jurisprudential idea and volatile real-world catalyst makes perfect sense. As a young journalist in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Cranston published a tabloid English translation of Mein Kampf, with anti-Nazi notes, selling half a million copies for 10 cents each before Hitler's publishers blocked its distribution by suing him for copyright infringement.

He knew the power of ideas.

Cranston's posthumously published essay, recently issued as The Sovereignty Revolution (Stanford University Press), begins dramatically: "It is worshiped like a god, and as little understood. It is the cause of untold strife and bloodshed. Genocide is perpetrated in its sacred name. It is at once a source of power and of power's abuse, of order and of anarchy. It can be noble and it can be shameful. It is sovereignty."

An indefatigable international diplomat, Cranston insists on his subject's enormous sway: "The fires of passionate crusades to achieve, assert, or defend sovereignty for one purpose or another or to avenge some breach of it light up the night skies of our time like some giant uncontrolled forest fire raging all over the world."

Most of Cranston's essay alternates between reporting the bare bones of multiple world crises rooted in the vagaries of his subject, and advancing a few basic positions. He argues that when people understand sovereignty as the absolute power of a government over its own territory and citizens, a shield against the intervention of other governments, nongovernmental organizations, and outside powers, it is an illegitimate and dangerous medieval idea. At best, sovereignty should be understood as the right of people to determine their own destinies. Such sovereignty, he maintains, delegable to governments through democratic process, is the only legitimate form, and political history in the West happily continues to head in that direction.

Finally, sovereignty as a defense against outside intervention to stop extraordinarily unacceptable behavior by a government against its people is always, in Cranston's view, heinous and unjustified. International covenants on genocide and human rights similarly demonstrate the world community's declining appetite for claims of such absolute state sovereignty.

The late senator doesn't crowd these views with pages of historical scholarship in his slim book, but the approach accords quite well with that material. With any luck, The Sovereignty Revolution will draw some much-needed learning into current public debate. For even light skimming of sovereignty's history reveals its crucial impact on today's events.

Some scholars, such as the medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz, trace sovereignty's essence back to the enduring mystical authority thought to survive a pope in the Roman Catholic Church. Most trace sovereignty back historically to the Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648 (which ended the Thirty Years' War and curtailed internecine religious warfare and the power of the Holy Roman Empire), and philosophically to the work of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. By the Peace of Westphalia, Europe's leaders agreed not to interfere in one another's affairs (though, of course, they continued to do so). Hobbes, in his work, contended that sovereignty resided absolutely, in all matters, in a power (e.g., the "Leviathan") presumptively above the law.

Dan Philpott, the University of Notre Dame political scientist who offers the definition of "supreme authority within a territory" in his excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the subject, draws attention to facets of the concept important for current purposes. He writes that if sovereignty assumes authority, then authority, as the philosopher R.P. Wolff outlined, assumes both a right to command and a right to be obeyed. Philpott, author of Revolutions in Sovereignty (Princeton University Press, 2001), notes that a "holder of sovereignty derives authority from some mutually acknowledged source of legitimacy -- natural law, a divine mandate, hereditary law, a constitution, even international law. In the contemporary era, some body of law is ubiquitously the source of sovereignty." Yet much media discussion of sovereignty ignores the issue of whether a thug regime -- e.g., Saddam Hussein's -- has in any sense earned a right to be obeyed, and thus earned sovereignty.

Similarly, Philpott observes, "territoriality is now deeply taken for granted" in the sense that simple presence within a geographical area presumptively places someone under a particular sovereignty. But a case such as that of the Kurds, a stateless people who have suffered under Turkish, Iraqi, and Syrian sovereignty without any moral acceptance of that rule, shows how sovereignty often plays out merely as a recognition of power, not an acknowledgment of just power.

Such historical and philosophical perspective suggests that moral foreign policy must cut through the threshold concept of sovereignty instead of allowing it to be a conversation stopper. It must push on to sovereignty's etiology, to issues of justice, democracy, and legitimacy. Debates that reflexively criticize, for instance, the United States for violating Iraqi sovereignty, or Israel for violating Palestinian sovereignty, or Russia for violating Chechen sovereignty, make little sense if one doesn't explain why the supposedly violated sovereignty deserves that status.

Yet too many participants in public debate fail to scrutinize sovereignty, just as they fail to dissect most political concepts more abstract than an oil pipeline.

Statesmen and officials often take the concept for granted despite knowing from diplomatic experience that its contours shift like a sea-beaten shore. At the same time, political theorists too rarely educate the public on the ideas that political theorists know best. Only a few modern thinkers, such as Bertrand de Jouvenel and Jacques Maritain (the latter of whom thought we must "get rid of" sovereignty), have given the notion the attention it deserves, building on criticisms of absolute sovereignty once voiced by Hugo Grotius and Francisco Suarez.

Newspaper and TV pundits perform worst of all. They simply put their minds in park, brandishing the concept as one more club instead of parsing its dimensions. To be fair, even if pundits possess the learning to explain sovereignty's intricacies, they may well think, "Why step into something so deep when Hannity or O'Reilly will cut me off after 20 words, or the Times op-ed page is giving me just 450 words?" "Sovereignty" thus gets bandied about as if it were an ostensible natural kind, like "apple" or "cow."

Not every political scientist, it should be noted, opposes sovereignty's influence in public policy. In The Case for Sovereignty (AEI Press), a recent study, Cornell government professor Jeremy Rabkin contends that a "post-sovereign" world would encourage terrorism, erode national loyalties, and spur even greater international conflict.

Of course, an even bolder "pro-sovereignty" world might alternately encourage Russia's 89 "semi-autonomous" republics, Indonesia's roughly 250 ethnic groups, and Africa's 2,000-odd tribes toward national ambition. Maybe every person should be an independent country. Can't beat those diplomatic passports.

But let the public debate begin. There's nothing more important for scholars to analyze than a political concept arguably driving much of the world's violence. The disconnect between public innocence about sovereignty, and the scholarly world's wisdom about the notion, victimizes everyone.

Carlin Romano is critic at large of The Chronicle and literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education