## 1. A Definition of Sovereignty



In his classic, *The King's Two Bodies* (1957),
medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz describes a profound transformation in
the concept of political authority over the course of the Middle Ages.
The change began when the concept of the body of Christ evolved into a
notion of two bodies -- one, the *corpus naturale*, the
consecrated host on the altar, the other, the *corpus
mysticum*, the social body of the church with its attendant
administrative structure. This latter notion -- of a collective
social organization having an enduring, mystical essence -- would
come to be transferred to political entities, the body politic.
Kantorowicz then describes the emergence, in the late Middle Ages, of
the concept of the king's two bodies, vivified in
Shakespeare's Richard II and applicable to the early modern body
politic. Whereas the king's natural, mortal body would pass away
with his death, he was also thought to have an enduring, supernatural
one that could not be destroyed, even by assassination, for it
represented the mystical dignity and justice of the body politic. The
modern polity that emerged dominant in early modern Europe manifested
the qualities of the collectivity that Kantorowicz described -- a
single, unified one, confined within territorial borders, possessing a
single set of interests, ruled by an authority that was bundled into a
single entity and held supremacy in advancing the interests of the
polity. Though in early modern times, kings would hold this authority,
later practitioners of it would include the people ruling through a
constitution, nations, the Communist Party, dictators, juntas, and
theocracies. The modern polity is known as the state, and the
fundamental characteristic of authority within it, sovereignty.



The evolution that Kantorowicz described is formative, for sovereignty
is a signature feature of modern politics. Some scholars have doubted
whether a stable, essential notion of sovereignty exists. But there is
in fact a definition that captures what sovereignty came to mean in
early modern Europe and of which most subsequent definitions are a
variant: *supreme authority within a territory*. This is the
quality that early modern states possessed, but which popes, emperors,
kings, bishops, and most nobles and vassals during the Middle Ages
lacked.



Each component of this definition highlights an important aspect of
the concept. First, a holder of sovereignty possesses authority. That
is to say, the person or entity does not merely wield coercive power,
defined as *A*'s ability to cause *B* to do what
he would otherwise not do. Authority is rather what philosopher R.P.
Wolff proposed: "the right to command and correlatively the
right to be obeyed" (Wolff, 1990, 20). What is most important
here is the term "right," connoting legitimacy. 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.



But if sovereignty is a matter of authority, it is not a matter of
mere authority, but of supreme authority. Supremacy is what makes the
constitution of the United States superior to the government of
Pennsylvania, or any holder of sovereignty different from a police
chief or corporate executive. The holder of sovereignty is superior to
all authorities under its purview. Supremacy, too, is endemic to
modernity. During the Middle Ages, manifold authorities held some sort
of legal warrant for their authority, whether feudal, canonical, or
otherwise, but very rarely did such warrant confer supremacy.



A final ingredient of sovereignty is territoriality, also a feature of
political authority in modernity. Territoriality is a principle by
which members of a community are to be defined. It specifies that
their membership derives from their residence within borders. It is a
powerful principle, for it defines membership in a way that may not
correspond with identity. The borders of a sovereign state may not at
all circumscribe a "people" or a "nation," and
may in fact encompass several of these identities, as national
self-determination and irredentist movements make evident. It is
rather by simple virtue of their location within geographic borders
that people belong to a state and fall under the authority of its
ruler. It is within a geographic territory that modern sovereigns are
supremely authoritative.



Territoriality is now deeply taken for granted. It is a feature of
authority all across the globe. Even supranational and international
institutions like the European Union and the United Nations are
composed of states whose membership is in turn defined territorially.
This universality of form is distinctive of modernity and underlines
sovereignty's connection with modernity. Though territoriality
has existed in different eras and locales, other principles of
membership like family kinship, religion, tribe, and feudal ties have
also held great prestige. Most vividly contrasting with territoriality
is a wandering tribe, whose authority structure is completely
disassociated with a particular piece of land. Territoriality
specifies by what quality citizens are subject to authority --
their geographic location within a set of boundaries. International
relations theorists have indeed pointed out the similarity between
sovereignty and another institution in which lines demarcate land
-- private property. Indeed, the two prominently rose together in
the thought of Thomas Hobbes.



Supreme authority within a territory -- this is the general
definition of sovereignty. Historical manifestations of sovereignty
are almost always specific instances of this general definition. It is
in fact the instances of which philosophers and the politically
motivated have spoken most often, making their claim for the
sovereignty of this person or that body of law. Understanding
sovereignty, then, involves understanding claims to it, or at least
some of the most important of these claims.



Over the past half millennium, these claims have taken extraordinarily
diverse forms -- nations asserting independence from mother
states, communists seeking freedom from colonialists, the *vox
populi* contending with *ancien regimes*, theocracies who
reject the authority of secular states, and sundry others. It is
indeed a mark of the resilience and flexibility of the sovereign state
that it has accommodated such diverse sorts of authority. Though a
catalog of these authorities is not possible here, three dimensions
along which they may be understood will help to categorize them: the
holders of sovereignty, the absolute or non-absolute nature of
sovereignty, and the relationship between the internal and external
dimensions of sovereignty.



As suggested, diverse authorities have held sovereignty -- kings,
dictators, peoples ruling through constitutions, and the like. The
character of the holder of supreme authority within a territory is
probably the most important dimension of sovereignty. In early modern
times, French theorist Jean Bodin thought that sovereignty must reside
in a single individual. Both he and English philosopher Thomas Hobbes
conceived the sovereign as being above the law. Later thinkers
differed, coming to envision new loci for sovereignty, but remaining
committed to the principle.



Sovereignty can also be absolute or non-absolute. How is it possible
that sovereignty might be non-absolute if it is also supreme? After
all, scholars like Alan James argue that sovereignty can only be
either present or absent, and cannot exist partially (James 1999,
462-4). But here, absoluteness refers not to the extent or
character of sovereignty, which must always be supreme, but rather to
the scope of matters over which a holder of authority is sovereign.
Bodin and Hobbes envisioned sovereignty as absolute, extending to all
matters within the territory, unconditionally. It is possible for an
authority to be sovereign over some matters within a territory, but
not all. Today, many European Union (EU) member states exhibit
non-absoluteness. They are sovereign in governing defense, but not in
governing their currencies, trade policies, and many social welfare
policies, which they administer in cooperation with EU authorities as
set forth in EU law. Absolute sovereignty is quintessential modern
sovereignty. But in recent decades, it has begun to be circumscribed
by institutions like the EU, the UN's practices of sanctioning
intervention, and the international criminal court.



A final pair of adjectives that define sovereignty is
"internal" and "external." In this case, the
words do not describe exclusive sorts of sovereignty, but different
aspects of sovereignty that are coexistent and omnipresent. Sovereign
authority is exercised within borders, but also, by definition, with
respect to outsiders, who may not interfere with the sovereign's
governance. The state has been the chief holder of external
sovereignty since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, after which
interference in other states' governing prerogatives became
illegitimate. The concept of sovereignty in international law most
often connotes external sovereignty. Alan James similarly conceives of
external sovereignty as constitutional independence -- a
state's freedom from outside influence upon its basic
prerogatives (James 1999, 460-462). Significantly, external
sovereignty depends on recognition by outsiders. To states, this
recognition is what a no-trespassing law is to private property
-- a set of mutual understandings that give property, or the
state, immunity from outside interference. It is also external
sovereignty that establishes the basic condition of international
relations -- anarchy, meaning the lack of a higher authority that
makes claims on lower authorities. An assemblage of states, both
internally and externally sovereign, makes up an international system,
where sovereign entities ally, trade, make war, and make peace.


## 2. The Rise of the Sovereign State: Theory and Practice



Supreme authority with a territory -- within this definition,
sovereignty can then be understood more precisely only through its
history. This history can be told as one of two broad movements
-- the first, a centuries long evolution towards a European
continent, then a globe, of sovereign states, the second, a
circumscription of absolute sovereign prerogatives in the second half
of the twentieth century.



It was at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that Europe consolidated its
long transition from the Middle Ages to a world of sovereign states.
According to historian J.R. Strayer, Britain and France looked a lot
like sovereign states by around 1300, their kings possessing supremacy
within bounded territories. But as late as the beginning of the
Reformation in 1517, Europe remained distant from Westphalia. It was
just around then that a great reversal in historical momentum occurred
when Charles V of Spain ascended to the throne, uniting Castile,
Aragon and the Netherlands, at the same time becoming Holy Roman
Emperor, gaining prerogatives over lands in Central Europe, while
taking on the role of enforcer of the Catholic Church's still
significant temporal prerogatives inside the Empire, especially its
enforcement of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. But within the Empire,
Charles V was not sovereign, either, for princes and nobles there
retained prerogatives over which he exercised no control. In 1555, a
system of sovereign states gained important ground in the Peace of
Augsburg, whose formula *cuius regio, eius religio*, allowed
German princes to enforce their own faith within their territory. But
Augsburg was unstable. Manifold contests over the settlement's
provisions resulted in constant wars, culminating finally in the
Thirty Years War, which did not end until 1648, at the Peace of
Westphalia.



What features of Westphalia make it the origin of the sovereign states
system? In fact, not all scholars agree that it deserves this status
(see Krasner 1999). Nowhere in the settlement's treaties is a
sovereign states system or even the state as the reigning legitimate
unit, prescribed. Certainly, Westphalia did not create a sovereign
states system *ex nihilo*, for components of the system had
been accumulating for centuries up to the settlement; afterwards, some
medieval anomalies persisted. In two broad respects, though, in both
legal prerogatives and practical powers, the system of sovereign
states triumphed. First, states emerged as virtually the sole form of
substantive constitutional authority in Europe, their authority no
longer seriously challenged by the Holy Roman Empire. The Netherlands
and Switzerland gained uncontested sovereignty, the German states of
the Holy Roman Empire accrued the right to ally outside the empire,
while both the diplomatic communications and foreign policy designs of
contemporary great powers revealed a common understanding of a system
of sovereign states. The temporal powers of the Church were also
curtailed to the point that they no longer challenged any
state's sovereignty. In reaction, Pope Innocent X condemned the
treaties of the peace as "null, void, invalid, iniquitous,
unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for
all time" (quoted in Maland 1966, 16).



Second, Westphalia brought an end to a long era of intervention in
matters of religion, up to then the most commonly practiced abridgment
of sovereign prerogatives. After decades of armed contestation, the
design of the Peace of Augsburg was finally consolidated, not in the
exact form of 1555, but effectively establishing the authority of
princes and kings over religion. Although intervention in matters of
religion did not come to an absolute end, it became exceedingly rare,
this in stark contrast to the previous 130 years, when wars of
religion sundered Europe. As the sovereign states system became more
generalized in ensuing decades, this proscription of intervention
would become more generalized, too, evolving into a foundational norm
of the international system.



Again, not all scholars agree that Westphalia deserves its
'founding moment' status. Daniel Philpott has argued for
the orthodoxy in (Philpott, 2001). In recent years, though a number of
scholars have come to argue that the Westphalia myth ought to be
deconstructed and discarded (Krasner, 1999; Carvalho, Leira, and
Hobson, 2011; Nexon, 2009; Osiander, 1994; Osiander, 2001; Teschke,
2009). Generally, these scholars stress that important elements of
statehood were around long before Westphalia and that important
elements of 'hierarchy', or circumscription of sovereignty
from above, perdured long after Westphalia. Only the long-term
consensus of scholars can determine how Westphalia will continue to be
regarded.



Whether the sovereign states system was consolidated at Westphalia,
took full shape at a later time, or always remained heterodox, its
basic form nevertheless spread worldwide over the next three
centuries, culminating in the decline of the European colonial empires
in the mid-20th century, when the state became the only
form of polity ever to cover the entire land surface of the globe.
Today, norms of sovereignty are enshrined in the Charter of the United
Nations, whose article 2(4) prohibits attacks on "political
independence and territorial integrity," and whose Article 2(7)
sharply restricts intervention.



While the section that follows this one will detail the
circumscription of sovereignty following World War II, this broad
historical trend should not obscure respects in which sovereignty has
persisted and even resurged in recent years. In an important article,
international relations scholar Roland Paris (2020) makes the case
that global politics is seeing the reemergence of pre-Westphalian
notions of sovereignty, including "extralegal" and
"organic" versions, which contrast with Westphalian
sovereignty and its norms of the legal equality of state and
non-interference in domestic affairs. Paris documents this reemergence
in Russia under President Vladimir Putin, China under President Xi
Jinping, and the United States under President Donald Trump. 



As the sovereign state was occupying the European continent, piece by
piece, in early modern times, eventually forming the system that came
to occupy the globe, contemporary political philosophers embraced this
form of polity and described what made it legitimate. They were not
originators of the concept, for even during medieval times,
philosophers like Dante and Marsilius of Padua advocated a separation
of temporal and religious powers that would be achieved through a
transfer of prerogatives into temporal ruler's hands. Then, in
early modern times, there were two roughly contemporary philosophers
who did not write explicitly or consciously of sovereignty, yet whose
ideas amounted in substance to important developments of the concept.
Machiavelli observed the politics of city states in his Renaissance
Italy and described what a prince had to do to promote a flourishing
republic in terms that conferred on him supreme authority within his
territory. Manifestly, he was not to be bound by natural law, canon
law, Gospel precepts, or any of the norms or authorities that
obligated members of Christendom. Rather, he would have to be prepared
"not to be good," and to be ready to perform evil, not
because evil was no longer evil, but because it was sometimes
necessary to further an end that was central for Machiavelli, an end
that amounts to the unifying idea of his thought: the strength and
well-ordering of the state. The obligation of the prince was
*raison d'etat*. He was supreme within the
state's territory and responsible for the well being of this
singular, unitary body.



Purveying sovereignty from quite a different perspective was Martin
Luther. His theology of the Reformation advocated stripping the
Catholic Church of its many powers, not only its ecclesiastical
powers, but powers that are, by any modern definition, temporal.
Luther held that the Church should no longer be thought of as a
visible, hierarchical institution, but was rather the invisibly united
aggregate of local churches that adhered to right doctrine. Thus, the
Catholic Church no longer legitimately held vast tracts of land that
it taxed and defended, and whose justice it administered; it was no
longer legitimate for its bishops to hold temporal offices under
princes and kings; nor would the Pope be able to depose secular rulers
through his power of excommunication; most importantly, the Holy Roman
Emperor would no longer legitimately enforce Catholic uniformity. No
longer would the Church and those who acted in its name exercise
political or economic authority. Who, then, would take up such
relinquished powers? Territorial princes. "By the destruction of
the independence of the Church and its hold on an extra-territorial
public opinion, the last obstacle to unity within the State was
removed," writes political philosopher J.N. Figgis (72). It was
this vision that triumphed at Westphalia.



Luther's political theology explained all of this. He taught
that under God's authority, two orders with two forms of
government existed. "The realm of the spirit" was the
order in which Christ was related to the soul of the believer. The
realm of the world was the order of secular society, where civil
authorities ran governmental institutions through law and coercion.
Both realms furthered the good of believers, but in different senses;
they were to be separately organized. Leaders of the church would
perform spiritual duties; princes, kings and magistrates would perform
temporal ones. Freed from the power of the pope and the Catholic
Church, having appropriated temporal powers within their realm,
princes were now effectively sovereign. In that era, princes even
exercised considerable control over Protestant churches, often
appointing their regional leaders, as described by the doctrine of
"Erastianism." Though neither Luther nor other Protestant
reformers discussed the doctrine of sovereignty in any detail, they
prescribed for princes all of its substance. Again, Figgis:



> 
> The unity and universality and essential rightness of the sovereign
> territorial State, and the denial of every extra-territorial or
> independent communal form of life, are Luther's lasting
> contribution to politics. (91)
> 



Other early modern philosophers, of course, espoused the doctrine of
sovereignty explicitly, and are thus more familiarly associated with
it. French philosopher Jean Bodin was the first European philosopher
to treat the concept extensively. His concept of
*souverainete* featured as a central concept in his
work, *De la republique*, which he wrote in 1576, during
a time when France was sundered by civil war between Calvinist
Huguenots and the Catholic monarchy. He viewed the problem of order as
central and did not think that it could be solved through outdated
medieval notions of a segmented society, but only through a concept in
which rulers and ruled were integrated into a single, unitary body
politic that was above any other human law, and was in fact the source
of human law. This concept was sovereignty. Only a supreme authority
within a territory could strengthen a fractured community.



To be sure, Bodin thought that the body that exercised sovereignty was
bound by natural and divine law, though no human law could judge or
appeal to it. More curiously, he also thought that sovereignty rightly
exercised would respect customary and property rights. It is not clear
how such a restraint was to be reconciled with the supreme status of
sovereign authority. Possibly, Bodin thought that such rights were to
be features of a legal regime which was itself sovereign with respect
to other authorities. Indeed, he also thought the form of government
that exercised sovereign powers could legitimately vary among
monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, though he preferred monarchy.
Whatever the sovereign body looked like, though, it was not subject to
any external human law or authority within its territory. F.H. Hinsley
writes:



At a time when it had become imperative that the conflict between
rulers and ruled should be terminated, [Bodin] realized -- and it
was an impressive intellectual feat -- that the conflict would be
solved only if it was possible both to establish the existence of a
necessarily unrestricted ruling power and to distinguish this power
from an absolutism that was free to disregard all laws and
regulations. He did this by founding both the legality of this power
and the wisdom of observing the limitations which hedged its proper
use upon the nature of the body politic as a political society
comprising both ruler and ruled -- and his statement of
sovereignty was the necessary, only possible, result
**(**124-125).



Bodin's "statement of sovereignty" is the first
systematic one in modern European philosophy, and thus deserves a
landmark status.



The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes also wrote during a time of
civil war and also arrived at the notion of sovereignty as a solution.
For Hobbes, the people established sovereign authority through a
contract in which they transferred all of their rights to the
Leviathan, which represented the abstract notion of the state. The
will of the Leviathan reigned supreme and represented the will of all
those who had alienated their rights to it. Like Bodin's
sovereign, Hobbes' Leviathan was above the law, a mortal god
unbound by any constitution or contractual obligations with any
external party. Like Bodin, Hobbes also thought the sovereign to be
accountable to God and most likely to the natural law in some form.
Otherwise, though, law was the command of the sovereign ruler,
emanating from his will, and the obligation to obey it absolute.



Both Bodin and Hobbes argued for sovereignty as supreme authority. The
concept continues to prevail as the presumption of political rule in
states throughout the globe today, including ones where the sovereign
body of law institutes limited government and civil rights for
individuals. Over the centuries, new notions of the holders of
sovereignty have evolved. Rousseau, far different from Bodin or
Hobbes, saw the collective people within a state as the sovereign,
ruling through their general will. In constitutional government, it is
the people ruling through a body of law that is sovereign. That is the
version that commands legitimacy most commonly in the world today.



Yet versions of sovereignty evocative of Hobbes' and
Bodin's have carried forth into the twentieth century.
Explicitly invoking both of these philosophers was the early twentieth
century German philosopher and jurist Carl Schmitt, for instance. His
book of 1922 opens with the line, "Sovereign is he who decides
on the exception" (trans. G. Schwab, 1985). Schmitt thought that
the sovereign was above any constitutional law and ought to be able to
"make a decision" on behalf of the good of the state
during a time of emergency. He had little respect for liberal
constitutionalism, which he thought wholly inadequate to contain the
power struggle that politics involves. By and large, there is little
indicating that, at least in this work, Schmitt thought the sovereign
to be bound by divine law or natural law. The liberal
constitutionalism of Weimar Germany was his chief piece of evidence
for this conviction; during the 1930s he fervently supported the
National Socialist regime, one whose emergency powers were just those
that he thought necessary.


## 3. The Circumscription of the Sovereign State: Theory and Practice



The rise and global expansion of sovereignty, described and even
lauded by political philosophers, amounts to one of the most
formidable and successful political trends in modern times. But from
its earliest days, sovereignty has also met with both doubters and
qualified supporters, many of whom have regarded any body of
law's claim to sovereign status as a form of idolatry, sometimes
as a carapace behind which rulers carry out cruelties and injustices
free from legitimate outside scrutiny. It was indeed after the
Holocaust that meaningful legal and institutional circumscriptions of
sovereignty in fact arose, many of which have come to abridge the
rights of sovereign states quite significantly. The two most prominent
curtailments are conventions on human rights and European
integration.



It was in 1948 that the vast majority of states signed the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, committing themselves to respect over 30
separate rights for individuals. As it was not a legally binding
declaration and contained no enforcement provisions, the declaration
left states' sovereignty intact, but it was a first step towards
tethering them to international, universal obligations regarding their
internal affairs. Over decades, these human rights would come to enjoy
ever stronger legal status. One of the most robust human rights
conventions, one that indeed curtails sovereignty, even if mildly,
through its arbitration mechanisms, is the European Convention for the
Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, formed in 1950.
Roughly contemporaneous, signed on December 9, 1948, was the Genocide
Convention, committing signing states to refrain from and punish
genocide. Then, in the mid-1960's, two covenants -- the
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights -- legally bound most of the
world's states to respecting the human rights of their people.
Again, the signatories' constitutional authority remained
largely intact, since they would not allow any of these commitments to
infringe upon their sovereignty. Subsequent human rights covenants,
also signed by the vast majority of the world's states,
contained similar reservations.



Only a practice of human rights backed up by military enforcement or
robust judicial procedures would circumscribe sovereignty in a serious
way. Progress in this direction began to occur after the Cold War
through a historic revision of the Peace of Westphalia, one that
curtails a norm strongly advanced by its treaties --
non-intervention. In a series of several episodes beginning in 1990,
the United Nations or another international organization has endorsed
a political action, usually involving military force, that the broad
consensus of states would have previously regarded as illegitimate
interference in internal affairs. The episodes have involved the
approval of military operations to remedy an injustice within the
boundaries of a state or the outside administration of domestic
matters like police operations. Unlike peacekeeping operations during
the Cold War, the operations have usually lacked the consent of the
government of the target state. They have occurred in Iraq, the former
Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Cambodia, Liberia,
Libya and elsewhere. Although the legitimacy and wisdom of individual
interventions is often contested among states -- the U.S. bombing
of Iraq in December 1999 and NATO's intervention in Kosovo, for
instance, failed to elicit U.N. Security Council endorsement, as did
the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- the broad practice of
intervention is likely to continue to enjoy broad endorsement within
the U.N. Security Council and other international organizations.



An explicit call to revise the concept of sovereignty so as to allow
for internationally sanctioned intervention arose with The
Responsibility to Protect, a document written and produced in 2001 by
the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, a
commission that the Government of Canada convened at the behest of
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. The document proposes a strong
revision of the classical conception by which sovereignty involves a
"responsibility to protect" on the part of a state towards
its own citizens, a responsibility that outsiders may assume when a
state perpetrates massive injustice or cannot protect its own
citizens. Responsibility to Protect has garnered wide international
attention and serves as a manifesto for a concept of sovereignty that
is non-absolute and conditional upon outside obligations.



The other way in which sovereignty is being circumscribed is through
European integration. This idea also arose in reaction to the
Holocaust, a calamity that many European leaders attributed at least
in part to the sovereign state's lack of accountability.
Historically, the most enthusiastic supporters of European integration
have indeed come from Catholic Christian Democratic parties, whose
ideals are rooted in medieval Christendom, where at least in theory,
no leader was sovereign and all leaders were accountable to a
universal set of values. In the modern language of human rights and
democracy, they echo Pope Innocent X's excoriation of the Peace
of Westphalia.



European integration began in 1950, when six states formed the
European Coal and Steel Community in the Treaty of Paris. The
community established joint international authority over the coal and
steel industries of these six countries, entailing executive control
through a permanent bureaucracy and a decision-making Council of
Ministers composed of foreign ministers of each state. This same model
was expanded to a general economic zone in the Treaty of Rome in 1957.
It was enhanced by a judicial body, the European Court of Justice, and
a legislature, the European Parliament, a directly elected Europe-wide
body. Over time, European integration has widened, as the institution
now consists of twenty-seven members, and deepened, as it did in the
1991 Maastricht Treaty, which expanded the institution's powers
and reconfigured it as the European Union. Far from a replacement for
states, the European Union rather "pools" important
aspects of their sovereignty into a "supranational"
institution in which their freedom of action is constrained (Keohane
& Hoffman 1991). They are no longer absolutely sovereign. In
recent years, European integration has continued to advance in
important respects. On December 1, 2009, the Treaty of Lisbon came
into full force, pooling sovereignty further by strengthening the
Council of Ministers and the European Parliament, creating a High
Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy to
represent a unified European Union position, and making the European
Union's Charter of Fundamental Human Rights legally binding.
However, strains on European integration have emerged in recent years
as well. A treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe was signed by
the European Union's member states in 2004, but referendums in
France and the Netherlands in 2005 rejected it and prevented its
ratification. Then, in 2016, a referendum in the United Kingdom
resulted in a victory for the U.K.'s withdrawal from the
European Union, popularly known as "Brexit." 



This circumscription of the sovereign state, through international
norms and supranational institutions, finds a parallel in contemporary
philosophers who attack the notion of absolute sovereignty. Their
thought is not entirely new, for even in early modern times,
philosophers like Hugo Grotius, Alberico Gentili, and Francisco
Suarez, though they accepted the state as a legitimate institution,
thought that its authority ought to be limited, not absolute. The
cruel prince, for instance, could be subject to a disciplining action
from neighboring princes that is much like contemporary notions of
humanitarian intervention.



Two of the most prominent attacks on sovereignty by political
philosophers since World War II came in the 1950s from Bertrand de
Jouvenel and Jacques Maritain. In his prominent work of 1957,
*Sovereignty: An Inquiry Into the Political Good*, Jouvenel
acknowledges that sovereignty is an important attribute of modern
political authority, needed to quell disputes within the state and to
muster cooperation in defense against outsiders. But he roundly
decries the modern concept of sovereignty, which creates a power who
is above the rules, a power whose decrees are to be considered
legitimate simply because they emanate from his will. To Jouvenel,
sovereignty reached its peak in Hobbes, in whose "horrific
conception everything comes back to means of constraint, which enable
the sovereign to issue rights and dictate laws in any way he pleases.
But these means of constraint are themselves but a fraction of the
social forces concentrated in the hand of the sovereign" (197).
Despite their differences over the locus and form of sovereignty,
subsequent thinkers like Locke, Pufendorf, and Rousseau "were to
feel the lure of this mechanically perfect construction" (198).
This was "the hour of *sovereignty in itself*,"
writes Jouvenel, the existence of which "hardly anyone would
thenceforward have the hardihood to deny" (198).



As his description of Hobbes intimates, Jouvenel views early modern
absolute sovereignty with great alarm. "[I]t is the idea itself
which is dangerous," he writes (198). But rather than calling
for the concept to be abrogated, he holds that sovereignty must be
channeled so that sovereign authority wills nothing but what is
legitimate. Far from being defined by the sovereign, morality has an
independent validity. Appealing to the perspective of "Christian
thinkers," he argues that "there are . . . wills which are
just and wills which are unjust" (201). "Authority,"
then, "carries with it the obligation to command the thing that
should be commanded" (201). This was the understanding of
authority held by the ancien regime, where effective advisers to the
monarch could channel his efforts towards the common good. What can
channel the sovereign will today? Jouvenel seems to doubt that
judicial or constitutional design is alone enough. Rather, he places
his hope in the shared moral concepts of the citizenry, which act as a
constraint upon the choices of the sovereign.



In Chapter Two of his enduring work of 1951, *Man and the
State*, Jacques Maritain shows little sympathy for sovereignty at
all, not even the qualified sympathy of Jouvenel:



It is my contention that political philosophy must get rid of the
word, as well as the concept, of Sovereignty:-not because it is an
antiquated concept, or by virtue of a sociological-juridical theory of
"objective law"; and not only because the concept of
Sovereignty creates insuperable difficulties and theoretical
entanglements in the field of international law; but because,
considered in its genuine meaning, and in the perspective of the
proper scientific realm to which it belongs -- political
philosophy -- this concept is intrinsically wrong and bound to
mislead us if we keep on using it -- assuming that it has been
too long and too largely accepted to be permissibly rejected, and
unaware of the false connotations that are inherent in it
(29-30).



Bodin's and Hobbes' mistake was in conceiving of
sovereignty as authority that the people permanently transferred and
alienated to an external entity, here the monarch. Rather than
representing the people and being accountable to it, the sovereign
became a transcendent entity, holding the supreme and inalienable
right to rule over the people, independently of them, rather than
representing the people, accountable to them. Like Jouvenel, Maritain
rues the exaltation of the sovereign's will such that what is
just is what serves his interest. This is idolatry. Any transfer of
the authority of the body politic either to some part of itself or to
some outside entity -- the apparatus of the state, a monarch, or
even the people -- is illegitimate, for the validity of a
government is rooted in its relationship to natural law. Sovereignty
gives rise to three dysfunctionalities. First, its external dimension
renders inconceivable international law and a world state, to both of
which Maritain is highly sympathetic. Second, the internal dimension
of sovereignty, the absolute power of the state over the body politic,
results in centralism, not pluralism. Third, the supreme power of the
sovereign state is contrary to the democratic notion of
accountability.



As a Catholic philosopher, Maritain's arguments run similar to
Christian philosophers of early modern Europe who criticized absolute
sovereignty. Witnessing the rise of the formidable entity of the
state, they sought to place limits on its power and authority. They
are the ancestors of those who now demand limits on the state's
authority in the name of human rights, of the right to quell genocide
and disaster and deliver relief from the outside, of an international
criminal court, and of a supranational entity that assumes power of
governance over economic, and now, maybe, military affairs.



The case for circumscribing sovereignty remains strong in the Catholic
and other Christian traditions. Pope Benedict XVI made a case for the
Responsibility to Protect, for instance, in his 2008 speech to the
United Nations. In recent years, political philosophers in the liberal
tradition have argued for the circumscription of sovereignty as well.
Two examples are Thomas Pogge (1992, and 2008, 174-201) and
Allen Buchanan (2004). Both accord sovereignty an important but not an
absolute moral status, seeking to make room for possibilities such as
humanitarian intervention approved by the United Nations and the more
robust development of global institutions for fighting poverty.