Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy by Stephen D. Krasner

The key point of Krasner’s book is that, although the concept of sovereignty has dominated political theory for over 200 years, neither its proponents nor its skeptics have accurately described it. He reasons that there is no final solution to the sovereignty debate because irreconcilable logical contradictions are inherent in the international system, i.e. nonintervention vs. democracy promotion. Furthermore, the lack of international authority and the uneven distribution of power between nations guarantee that the principle of sovereignty will be unequally adhered to across the globe. In other words, sovereignty is not a static principle that can be proved or discarded. It is instead a nuanced concept that will vary from nation to nation and moment to moment. Krasner divides the subject of sovereignty into four distinct realms:

1. International legal sovereignty - the practices associated with mutual recognition between territories that have formal juridicial independence.
2. Westphalian legal sovereignty - political organization based on the exclusion of external actors.
3. Domestic sovereignty - the formal organization of political authority within the state and the ability of public authorities to exercise effective control within its borders.
4. Interdependence sovereignty - the ability of public authorities to regulate the flow of information, ideas, goods, pollutants, or capital across their borders.

States do not neccesarily posses each type of sovereignty, nor do states exercise their types of sovereignty equally.

Krasner also questions the novelty of some aspects of globalization, pointing out that by some measures international capital markets were more open before the first World War than they are today (Obstfeld and Taylor 1997). I haven’t looked into Obstfeld and Taylor’s work as of yet, but it sounds like it might provide an interesting rebuttal to the “Globalization = No national sovereignty” crowd.

According to Krasner, almost all states (and a few non-state entities) have been internationally recognized; however, few have maintained Westphalian Sovereignty. Many states, such as the post-WWI remnants of the Ottoman Empire, have been forced to tolerate the intervention of external actors in their domestic affairs. To receive international recognition, the former Ottoman nations were compelled to incorporate minority rights into their constitutions. At the other end of the spectrum is the EU, in which countries have voluntarily sacrificed some of their Westphalian sovereignty in trade for other benefits.

This book has been the richest goldmine I have struck thus far in my research. Krasner takes the sovereignty issue to a greater depth and breadth than any other writer I have come across. If I get the time I would like to follow this up with another of his books, Problematic Sovereignty. If anyone has read it and has an opinion about it (or anything else on this blog) post in the comments.

Dr. Stephen D. Krasner is currently serving as the Director of Policy Planning in the US Department of State. You can find this book here.

“America’s Changing Place in the World: from ‘Periphery’ to Centre’? Spatial Variation in Politics. " by Alan K. Henrikson

In this paper Henrikson examines the position of the US in international affairs using the “core and periphery” dichotomy of the dependency school of thought. At the United State’s inception it was a counter culture, distinct yet inconsequential to European hegemony. By the 1940s, the US had crept to the inner limits of the periphery of global politics, able to excerpt a finite amount of influence. World War II provided the stage for US ascension to the global “center”. Henrikson examines each of these eras and the corresponding discourse in their contemporary cartography. In each example the maps convey an America-centric view of the world. Henrikson suggests that the 1970’s social and academic critiques of nationalistic policies compel us to employ more inclusive paradigms. Suggestive of Immanuel Wallerstein’s work, Henrikson introduces a number of “world-system” approaches that avoid the implications of just hegemony.

“The Effacement of Place? US Foreign Policy and the Spatiality of the Gulf Crisis.” by Gearoid Ò Tuathail

This paper describes the spatial conception of the US role in the first Gulf War and the discourse of Persian Gulf geography and history by the Bush administration. Additionally, Ò Tuathail focuses on the consequences of imaging technology on the ethics of war. He argues that the security issues recognized under the Bush administration were an attempt to recode global threats to US interests in the vacuum following communism’s collapse. Conspicuously ignoring the precedent of the Carter doctrine, Ò Tuathail attributes the US response to Kuwait’s invasion to some desperate search for a new model to sustain US hegemony engineered by the Bush administration. Kuwait’s description as “less a country than a family owned oil company” belittles its sovereignty and therefore the legitimacy of the US reaction.

Ò Tuathail also suggests that visual technology, whether that be aerial reconnaissance or GIS, has led to the dematerialization of space in conflict. Therefore the US military campaign in Iraq had the moral implications of a video game on the American participants. This article contains a lot of ancillary details and unqualified (and in my estimation, unscholarly) statements. For example, the non-sequitur on pg. 143 seems to suggest that the white, male, conservative makeup of the Bush administration contributed to the continuation of anachronistic foreign policy. Furthermore, Ò Tuathail never justifies his characterization of US military action as a “techno-frenzied slaughter”. This paper is more an emotional rant than a logical exposition.

“Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in Contemporary World Politics" by John Agnew

This article critically examines the historical interpretations of state power and sovereignty. Agnew points out that there is a discrepancy between many traditional accounts of state sovereignty and observed reality. The concept of the modern state, commonly considered to be a consequence of the Peace of Westphalia, casts the state as the “absolute territorial organization of political authority”. However, a number of current and past examples undermine such grand assumptions: shared sovereignty in late 20th Century Hong Kong, landless movements such as the Palestinian National Authority, and the extreme sums of power accumulated by international corporations.

Today, Agnew argues, governments require communication and infrastructure resources combined with a public cooperation, to successfully exert sovereignty. Globalization, continually erodes national sovereignty because the related policy and infrastructure necessitates shared and decentralized rule. Given the failure of classical sovereignty to explain many events in history, Agnew proposes a more nuanced classification of sovereignty: Classic (strong central authority with consolidated territory), globalist (strong central authority with open territory), integrative (weak central authority with consolidated territory), and imperialist (weak central authority and territorially open). However, Agnew cautions that spaces will rarely fall into these categories neatly. Instead, it is more important to recognize that political authority often supersedes the boundaries of the state.