Sovereignty

Sovereignty has its root in the term sovereign, which refers to an individual who wields authority over everybody else. It is important to keep in mind that the concept of sovereignty has different meanings, depending upon the field. In political philosophy, sovereignty is tied to the concept of exercising authority over a specific territory and its inhabitants.

While the term originally referred to a sovereign or monarch, in modern political philosophy, it is understood that the power of sovereignty is held by the people, who exert their sovereignty through the state and all government branches. Sovereignty is the maximum source of authority and refers to both material and immaterial aspects.

States make decisions over their territory and may not interfere in the sovereignty of other nations. This is known as national sovereignty. Many countries codify their sovereignty by way of a document, which may be a charter or a constitution. Other types of sovereignty exist, such as food sovereignty, maritime sovereignty, water sovereignty, and others.

Background

The concept of sovereignty has a long history, as rulers sought to consolidate their power over an often fractious nobility. Among the first scholars to delineate the concept of sovereignty was Jean Bodin (1530–96). For Bodin, the sovereign was empowered to impose his laws without the need to consult with others and without being subject to the laws meant for everybody else. Although not subject to his own laws, the sovereign was subject to divine and natural laws, that is, those imposed by the Church. In the mid-1600s, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) conceived of the sovereign as the sole legitimate source of power, who was not subject to natural laws. In Britain, after the Civil Wars that deposed the absolute monarchy of James I, the power shifted from the sovereign to parliament, enabling a fairer distribution of power.

In the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 –78) argued that sovereign power resided with the people. In this sense, "the people" refers to all citizens able to elect and be elected to a public or political position. In Rousseau's philosophy, all citizens are both subjects and sovereigns in whom national sovereignty resides. When they elect representatives, they delegate their sovereignty to public servants and politicians. These factors, for Rousseau, ensure that all citizens are equal and free. Along with other Enlightenment philosophers, Rousseau also ascribed to the people the power to depose a sovereign who no longer represented the interests of the people.

Sovereignty became the supreme authority of a nation or state over its territory and inhabitants. It is understood that sovereignty is essential to the autonomy and self-determination of any state. It protects the ability of a people to create laws, control its national resources, and shape its future. Because sovereignty is the power that a people exerts over their nation and for themselves, it may not be imposed upon them by any other nation or people. The violation of national sovereignty by another power or state may have a series of catastrophic consequences, such as the destruction of an entire social ecosystem, international sanctions, or war.

Impact

The modern concept of sovereignty is grounded in the Enlightenment idea of liberty: individual liberty as well as the liberty of a people to elect for themselves their forms of government, their representatives, and their future. This is known as self-determination. Sovereignty also refers to a state's jurisdiction over its national territory.

The concept of sovereignty, however, is no longer limited to the delimitations of sovereign territory and its political system. It also extends to issues that range from economic to cultural rights, as part and parcel of public goods and welfare upon which a people have the right to decide. Although concerns about sovereignty traditionally pertain to war, people and nations also defend their traditions and cultural patrimony from globalizing influences under the concept of sovereignty. In this sense, for instance, Indigenous Americans have tribal sovereignty in many regions of Canada and the United States. These rights also pertain to the sovereign right of a people to self-determination, to make decisions by themselves free from interference from other nations and, in many cases, from their own government as well.

In the twentieth century, claims of absolute national sovereignty entered into conflict with a growing body of humanitarian international law. In this sense, international law protects individual rights, sometimes against the will of the states in which they reside. For instance, international organizations may interfere with a sovereign nation in the case of humanitarian urgency.

The Geneva Conventions are a set of rules designed to protect individuals in cases of armed conflict. In 1864, the Geneva Convention sought to gain access to war arenas for medical personnel to rescue and provide relief to wounded combatants and civilians. In time, the rules expanded to regulate the actions of occupying forces and to codify the obligations and rights of combatants and civilians. It also created processes for investigation, mediation, and arbitration of international conflicts, as well as the control of certain weapons. Finally, the Geneva Conventions also apply to non-international disputes if the violence between the warring factions has reached a specific level of strife, such as a civil war.

The Geneva Conventions clash with classic interpretations of national sovereignty, which identify as sovereign the territory of a state, even if occupied by another nation at a time of war. The occupation of one nation by another, or by international organs such as peacekeeping forces, prohibits a sovereign state from exercising its powers of self-rule and self-determination in the occupied territory. Rules that allow international bodies to intervene in order to protect the Geneva Conventions served to modify, in a limited way, the self-determination of states as more nations began to accept the Geneva Conventions.

Most nations saw the benefits of the Geneva Conventions after the devastating wars of the twentieth century. International law rules over the behavior of an occupying force, prohibiting it from annexing or taking over an occupied territory and requiring it to govern according to international law. The rights of all noncombatants must be protected and their safety and well-being preserved, regardless of the sovereign status in the territory in which they reside. The rights of the previous sovereign state may or may not be preserved by the next regime, after war, or an occupation, but when it comes to the welfare of human beings, modern international conventions take precedence over sovereignty.

Bibliography

Grimm, Dieter. Sovereignty: The Origin and Future of a Political Concept. Columbia University Press, 2015.

Jackson, Robert. Sovereignty, the Evolution of an Idea. Polity, 2007.

Kahn, Jeffrey. "'Protection and Empire': The Martens Clause, State Sovereignty, and Individual Rights." Virginia Journal of International Law, vol. 56, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–49.

Kalmo, Hent, and Quentin Skinner, editors. Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Klosko, George. History of Political Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed., vol. 2, Oxford University Press, 2013.

Philpott, Daniel. “Sovereignty.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 17 Sept. 2024, plato.stanford.edu/entries/sovereignty. Accessed 21 Jan. 2025.

Schmitt, Jeffrey M. "Rethinking the State Sovereignty Interest in Personal Jurisdiction." Case Western Reserve Law Review, vol. 66, no. 3, 2016, pp. 769–805.

Sobel-Read, Kevin B. "A New Model of Sovereignty in the Contemporary Era of Integrated Global Commerce: What Anthropology Contributes to the Shortcomings of Legal Scholarship." Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, vol. 49, no. 4, 2016, pp. 1045–107.

Voils, Kyle. "Making Sense of Sovereignty: A Historical Understanding of Personal Jurisdiction from Pennoyer to Nicastro." Northwestern University Law Review, vol. 110, no. 3, 2016, pp. 679–706.

Wilson, Elizabeth A. "'People Power' and the Problem of Sovereignty in International Law." Duke Journal of Comparative & International Law, vol. 26, no. 3, 2016, pp. 551–94.