Beyond Sovereignty

So why the salience of the idea of sovereignty? Why are there so many detours on this road, or workarounds, that are not in the common sensibility? In fact, people still demand and want sovereignty.

That is a very good question. My answer, maybe it's deep and profound and maybe it's just banal: there's no better alternative. There have been alternative institutional structures, historically, in Europe. The Sinocentric system in China wasn't a system of equal sovereign states or anything like it. It was a hierarchical system in which you had China and then tributary states. None of these systems has ever worked perfectly, because the international environment is too complex. Sovereignty has worked pretty well for a long period of time.

One of the central questions of our time is whether it still works well enough. The fact that it has also been flexible enough to work around, especially if you did it voluntarily, is something else that relieves the pressure to find alternative institutional arrangements. One of the things I find fascinating, and I observe this without having a good explanation for it, is that the European Union is a new, new thing in the international environment. It is not a sovereign state. It is not just an international organization; its member states are no longer fully sovereign. And yet we don't have a name for it.

If you look at, for instance, the World Trade Organization, both the European Union, represented by the Commission, and the individual member states are members of the WTO and sign off on WTO treaties. So you're in a situation in which you have patterns of behavior which are completely inconsistent with what we think of as how sovereignty should function. The European Union has been around for quite a while, it's extremely successful, and yet we haven't even as yet given it a different name. Part of this might be that it's not in anybody's interest to do it. France doesn't want to give up its vote on the UN Security Council. The members of the EU have no interest in presenting the EU as a challenge to sovereignty, even though it is.

What then is the answer as we look ahead in today's world? Are we going to need different forms of organizing entities in the international politics than we now have? We're confronted with a world in which we have failed states, failing states, states that aren't delivering, some states that are committing human rights violations. Will we have to come up with new patterns of organization that are legitimated, and diminish the notion of sovereignty?

I would say the question is new patterns of organization which either diminish the notion of sovereignty or provide some alternatives to it. The question that you pose is exactly the right one. Sovereignty has functioned pretty well for a couple of hundred years. I wouldn't say it's functioned for much longer than that, but it's functioned pretty well. It is appealing, in many ways, to statesmen. If you can get recognized as a sovereign entity, you get international legal recognition, you get to go to the UN, you get access to the World Bank and the IMF. If you're a ruler of one of one of these countries, you get a certain amount of dignity and resources just by being recognized.

The other side of this is that for quite a period of time after the Second World War, one advantage of sovereignty was that major states didn't have to feel any obligation to deal with some of these faraway, very messed-up places. book cover The Congo has festered for twenty or thirty or even forty years, with episodic efforts on the part of the United Nations and major powers to do something about it. But the fact is we didn't have to put a lot of resources -- we, the United States, or we, Russia, or whoever it might have been. Because sovereignty said, "Hey, they're another sovereign entity. It's not our responsibility. Our responsibility is within our own borders." The U.S. and the Soviet Union but resources into the Congo during the Cold War only because they thought it served their security interests.

The problem we confront in the contemporary world, then, is this: there have been many situations, as I've argued in my work, in which these consensual sovereignty norms have been compromised, violated in many different ways -- sometimes voluntarily, sometimes coercively. It's worked okay up to now. The question is, given the kinds of issues that we're confronting now, in 2003, the ones you alluded to -- terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, rogue states, ineffective states -- if you look at much of Africa, most sub-Saharan countries have had an absolute decline in their per capita gross national income in the last twenty years. This means that peoples' lives are worse. Their governments are often autocratic. They don't have decent human rights. They don't have a decent way of living. So that you're in a situation in which many governments have proven to be utterly ineffective. Under these circumstances, we need something other than sovereignty as a way of organizing political life. This will require a leap of imagination.

If we wrestle with that problem, there seems to be two ways of doing that on the table. One is through multilateral formulas, and the other, an emphasis on action by the imperial or the dominant power in the system. Are those the extremes? And what lies in the middle range of possibilities?

There are two things you want to separate. One is, how would you move towards some alternative entity? I'll describe what I think we might want to do. We might want to think about an institutional form in which this political entity would have international legal sovereignty, would be recognized. There would be indigenous rulers. They would have a flag. They would have a currency, if they wanted one. They would sit in the UN, but in which there is no acceptance of Westphalian-Vattelian sovereignty, so that the domestic institutional structures in these countries would be crafted by entities which were both indigenous and transnational.

For instance, one thing we could think about doing in Iraq is establishing an Iraqi petroleum trust. The trust would have a board of directors. The board of directors would be composed of representatives from Iraq and representatives from, say, the World Bank. The trust would be responsible for collecting oil revenues on the one hand, and responsible for seeing that these revenues would be disbursed and spent in ways that were decided by a recognized, ideally democratic Iraqi legislature or political process.

We might need a name for this, which we also don't have and which I haven't been able to come up with, even though I've been thinking about this for a while, but it is to [describe] political entities which are not just transitioning to full sovereignty, but political entities in which you would have international legal recognition but you would also have, on a permanent basis, domestic authority structures being shared by indigenous actors and transnational actors.

Then your question is: How would you get to that? This is something that you would have to do multilaterally. It's certainly not something that the U.S. can do alone, or something that the U.S. or anybody else would be able to do in one step. Doing this would require legitimacy, and to the extent I've thought this through now (which I have not), ideally what you would want is a situation in which these new domestic authority structures -- in which power is shared between external and internal authority, with external and internal actors -- would be created as a result of a voluntary contract between domestic, indigenous authority, and transnational actors. So, for instance, you might have a court system in which the judges were a mixture of local judges and transnational judges.

To some extent, these kinds of structures exist now in places like Kosovo and Bosnia under the auspices of the UN. The UN has had something like thirty-eight peacekeeping operations. Some of them have been very extensive. And you do have, for instance, in Kosovo, international judges sitting in local courts now.

The problem with transitional administration, which is what the UN does, is that it sets up a situation in which if you're a local actor, for instance, in Bosnia, you're a leader of one of these nationalist groups. Your calculation has to be, "How can I maximize my power once these other guys leave?" And we know they're going to leave at some point. They don't have the legitimacy, authority, or resolve to stay. What that means is that it would be very difficult to create a stable environment. Creating a stable environment in these broken down places, or places that have had civil war, requires alternative institutional structures that will be there on a quasi-permanent basis. This is something that has to be done on a multilateral basis over time. It's not something that any one country or even a small group of countries could hand down ex cathedra.

What about nationalism in all of this? What comes to mind is the Palestinians. Following along the line of your suggestions, some sort of a solution like that, that includes dealing with security forces and so on, might be ideal; but in terms of Palestinian identity as it has emerged today and the assertion of Palestinian nationalism, it doesn't seem like it would be likely to happen.

That's why we may need a new legitimated format. Palestine is an interesting and illuminating example. There will be a Palestinian sovereign state. There will not be a Palestinian sovereign state that has full control of over all the activities that we usually associate with sovereignty. There will not be an agreement in which the Palestinian state has full control over its own security activities. Given conventional sovereignty, we don't have a solution in the Middle East. It's clear that any solution that we get would be one which would compromise Vattelian-Westphalian sovereignty.

However, doing it in a contemporary environment raises exactly the issue of nationalism. If you're a Palestinian and you're sitting in Palestine, you say, "I want full autonomy. I want full sovereignty." That's what you're supposed to have when you secure your independence. Any agreement we get will, in fact, compromise that, but it creates tensions. Let's say that we had another entity that was available out there, so that you become a sovereign state, but with an asterisk next to it, and people regard the asterisk as being fine, not a bad thing. If you're a sovereign state with an asterisk, it doesn't raise questions of nationalism. It's simply a recognition that you might be able to provide more effective governance if some of the authority structures that you have domestically are controlled by transnational, international, as well as domestic actors. But without having a name for this sovereignty with an asterisk, the nationalism problem will always remain. Now, it can be dealt with or worked around or pressured and fit into a box. But it would be eased if you had alternative legitimated forms.

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