Read an Excerpt
SOVEREIGNTY AND THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT
A New History
By LUKE GLANVILLE THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-07689-8
CHAPTER 1
The Social Construction of Sovereign Responsibilities
Sovereignty is a key organizing principle of international society, yet it is notoriously difficult to describe. More than one hundred years ago, Lassa Oppenheim noted, "There exists perhaps no conception the meaning of which is more controversial than that of sovereignty. It is an indisputable fact," he continued, "that this conception, from the moment when it was introduced into political science until the present day, has never had a meaning which was universally agreed upon." More recently, Michael Fowler and Julie Bunck have observed, "The concept of sovereignty has been used not only in different senses by different people, or in different senses at different times, but in different senses by the same person in rapid succession." As this chapter and, more broadly, this book make clear, it is not a categorical or timeless definition of sovereignty that we seek. Nevertheless, there is a need for adequate tools for talking about sovereignty—for discussing how it is constituted and practiced and for articulating change in its meaning and content.
This chapter lays a conceptual foundation for the examination of the historical development of the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility that follows. I argue that sovereignty is not an objective and unchanging principle but something that demands conceptual and historical inquiry, and I outline a framework for examining the social and historical construction of sovereignty that allows for consideration of the responsibilities assigned to sovereignty in different historical periods. The chapter proceeds in three sections. The first examines how sovereignty has been understood in international relations theory. I demonstrate the pervasiveness of the conventional story of sovereignty, as described in the introduction, before considering the work of theorists who have challenged the assumptions of this story and subjected sovereignty to conceptual and historical scrutiny. I defend a constructivist understanding of sovereignty, which emphasizes its historically contingent and contested nature, against Stephen Krasner's argument about sovereignty, which acknowledges historical deviations from the conventional story but refuses to allow that the meaning of sovereignty may have changed over time. In the second section, I outline a framework for conceptualizing the social and historical construction of sovereignty that enables us to understand the development of its relationship with notions of responsibility. I suggest that the constructed meaning of sovereignty at a given time can be fruitfully understood through examination of its historically contingent "rules." These rules include the requirements that must be satisfied for a claim to sovereign authority to be recognized and the rights and responsibilities that flow from recognition. I consider the nature of these rules and their relationship with each other, emphasizing that they are each constructed rather than given and that they have varied and evolved over time. In the final section, I briefly outline how I will interpret the social construction of sovereignty in the remainder of the book.
SOVEREIGNTY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY
The conventional story of sovereignty commonly told by scholars of international relations ascribes to sovereignty a natural and timeless definition that was supposedly established sometime in the seventeenth century and that remained unchanged for several centuries. In its "traditional" or "Westphalian" guise, sovereignty meant that states had an indefeasible right to autonomous self-government, free from outside interference and intervention. Sovereigns were responsible and accountable to none but themselves. In recent years, so the tale goes, this meaning of sovereignty has come under challenge, only for the first time, by the emergence of human-rights norms and notions of sovereign responsibilities.
The conventional story of sovereignty is told and retold in introductory international relations texts. One such text declares, "Sovereignty ... means that the government has the right, at least in principle, to do whatever it wants in its own territory.... Sovereignty also means that states are not supposed to interfere in the internal affairs of other states ... they are not supposed to meddle in the internal politics and decision processes of other states." Another speaks of "the traditional legal rule of state sovereignty and its corollary—the non-intervention norm prohibiting external interference in the internal affairs of states," which has recently been "revised" with the emergence of international human-rights law. The result of this revision is said to have been "the collapse of the Westphalian principle that what a state does within its own boundaries is its own business." A text on human rights in international relations similarly maintains, "Prior to 1945, the relation between an individual and a state controlling 'its' citizens was a matter for that state alone. The state was sovereign in an almost absolute sense, exercising supreme legal authority within its jurisdiction." It goes on to explain that, because of the emergence of international human rights, by "about 2000 ... reference to the idea of state sovereignty no longer provided an automatic and impenetrable shield against international action on issues once regarded as essentially domestic."
This same story of sovereignty is offered by both advocates and critics of the "responsibility to protect." Advocates portray the notion that sovereignty entails a "responsibility to protect" as a new and welcome alternative to the "traditional" view that sovereignty "meant immunity from outside scrutiny or sanction." Since the seventeenth century, they suggest, "the view had prevailed that state sovereignty is a licence to kill: that it is no one's business but their own if states murder or forcibly displace large numbers of their own citizens, or allow atrocity crimes to be committed by one group against another on their soil." It is to be celebrated then, they insist, that "sovereignty is no longer sacrosanct" and that the untrammeled rights that sovereigns have "traditionally" enjoyed are finally being challenged. Critics, on the other hand, lament that the supposedly "foundational" and "traditional" rights of sovereign peoples to autonomously govern themselves and to pursue their own conception of the good life, free from outside interference, are now being threatened by new and specious notions of sovereign accountability. They warn of the dangers of replacing "the traditional view that sovereignty implies non-interference" with a redefined concept of "sovereignty as responsibility," which "implies the right of interference if 'the community of responsible states' decides this to be in the interests of protection." Moreover, they argue that such new ideas are incoherent, since "a power which is 'accountable' to another, external, body clearly lacks sovereign authority."
This conventional story of sovereignty is supported by leading representatives of a range of schools of international relations who assume that the supposed "traditional" rights of states, particularly the right of nonintervention, represent the timeless essence of sovereignty. English School scholars, for example, have been sensitive to historical developments in the criteria for sovereign recognition, yet they have tended to treat sovereignty itself as a static institution entailing a right of nonintervention. R. J. Vincent, for example, contends that the rule of nonintervention "derives" from the principle of sovereignty and plainly declares: "if sovereignty, then nonintervention"; Robert Jackson asserts that the "normative logic" of sovereignty necessitates that nonintervention is one of its basic norms; and Barry Buzan labels nonintervention a "corollary" of sovereignty. Realist scholars have tended to devote little attention to the nature or history of sovereignty, instead treating it as an ahistorical and empirically measurable attribute of statehood. Those realists who have subjected sovereignty to conceptual inquiry have tended to assume that it necessarily entails nonintervention. Hans Morgenthau, for example, ties sovereignty to nonintervention by suggesting that nonintervention is a "logical precondition for the existence of a multiple state-system ... [and it] makes sovereignty as a legal concept possible." Stephen Krasner's well-known realist argument about sovereignty, an argument that I will consider in more detail shortly, is grounded in a static definition of what he terms "Westphalian sovereignty," the "fundamental rule" of which is that states should "refrain from intervening in the internal affairs of other states." Krasner catalogs numerous "breaches" of this model of sovereignty, suggests that these breaches "have been an enduring characteristic of the international environment," and labels this phenomenon "organized hypocrisy." Yet he perpetuates the conventional story by proceeding from the assumption that, while often compromised, "Westphalian sovereignty" has always been defined in terms of a right to freedom from intervention. Finally, even some constructivist theorists, despite their emphasis on the contingent and contested nature of social norms, embrace the supposed "traditional" definition of sovereignty. Daniel Philpott, for example, grounds his formidable examination of the historical construction of sovereignty in the ahistorical assumption that sovereignty "implies immunity from external interference." He then proceeds to repeat the conventional story, arguing that states have enjoyed a right of noninterference since Westphalia and suggesting that this right has only come under challenge with the emerging acceptance of humanitarian intervention in the aftermath of the Cold War. He offers the extraordinary claim that "in the history of sovereignty one can skip three hundred years without omitting noteworthy change." In a critique of Krasner's argument, Philpott takes the supposedly timeless Westphalian model for granted and merely insists that, rather than a case of organized hypocrisy, this traditional understanding of sovereignty is actually honored in the breaches that Krasner observes.
The supposed "traditional" meaning of sovereignty, then, is widely embraced in the study of international relations. It is posited not only as the definition of sovereignty that is thought to have obtained for several centuries but even as the natural and logical essence of sovereignty. The problem is that this argument is simply not borne out by history. As briefly outlined in the introduction to this book and as will be examined in much greater detail in the chapters that follow, sovereigns have not always enjoyed the supposed "traditional" right of freedom from external intervention. Even after this right was eventually articulated in the mid-eighteenth century, it was limited by an evolving range of exceptions and challenged by an accepted right of sovereigns to wage war until the first half of the twentieth century. The influential edifice that is the "traditional" meaning of sovereignty is the product of a tendency of scholars to write the present into the past and to either misunderstand or simply ignore sovereignty's rich history.
Subjecting Sovereignty to Conceptual and Historical Inquiry
There has, nevertheless, developed a substantial body of theorizing that challenges the assumptions of the conventional story and subjects sovereignty to careful conceptual and historical inquiry. International legal scholars have long asserted that the meaning of sovereignty is not naturally given but historically contingent. Hans Kelsen, for example, claimed, "We can ... derive from the concept of sovereignty nothing else than what we have purposely put into its definition." He insisted that there were no rights intrinsic to sovereignty; all rights were historically contingent and could only be identified through analysis of positive international law. Martti Koskenniemi has more recently concurred: "The status of statehood can be associated with various sets of rights and duties. It carries no given, determinate, normative implications.... In other words, we cannot deduce the extent of a state's freedom of action from the mere fact of its statehood." Early English School theorists such as C. A. W. Manning built upon these international legal insights arguing that sovereignty simply meant the "constitutional insularity" or "constitutional independence" of the state. The rights and duties that this entailed, Manning insisted, were not given, but derived from the prevailing principles of international law and international morality developed by the society of states. Hedley Bull similarly argued that any rights that sovereign states possess are granted to them by international society:
Whatever rights are due to states or nations or other actors in international relations, they are subject to and limited by the rights of the international community. The rights of sovereign states, and of sovereign peoples or nations, derive from the rules of the international community or society and are limited by them.... The idea of sovereign rights existing apart from the rules laid down by international society itself and enjoyed without qualification has to be rejected in principle.
Since the early 1980s, critical theorists and, more recently, constructivists have developed such insights further, problematizing the concept of sovereignty and highlighting its contingent and contested nature. Instead of a natural and unchanging concept, they suggest, "sovereignty is a practical category whose empirical contents are not fixed but evolve in a way reflecting the active practical consensus amongst coreflective statesmen." Constructivists in particular have demonstrated that sovereignty is not a timeless and static organizing principle by tracing significant shifts in its meaning from the early modern period to the present. Given the historical variation in the meaning of sovereignty, a categorical definition of the concept is of little use. Indeed, R. B. J. Walker suggests that "the very attempt to treat sovereignty as a matter of definition and legal principle encourages a certain amnesia about its historical and culturally specific character." Likewise, Jens Bartelson warns us to hesitate before defining sovereignty because, as Nietzsche claims, "only that which has no history can be defined." Instead, constructivists view sovereignty as "a variable, practically constituted institution, its precise content and political implications varying with time and context."
Put simply, constructivists argue that sovereignty is a social construct. Christian Reus-Smit describes it as "a social norm, subject to the same constitutive processes as all other norms, rules and principles." Claims to sovereign status are forceful only because they represent shared understandings and expectations that have been produced and reproduced through intersubjective communication and practice. There is no essential, unchanging meaning of sovereignty. There is only that which is socially and historically constructed and reconstructed. "It is neither natural, nor ever fully 'completed.'" Certainly some of the rights of sovereigns are now so taken for granted that, as Alexander Wendt suggests, "it is easy to overlook the extent to which they are both presupposed by and an ongoing artifact of practice." However, constructivists insist, the meaning and implications of sovereignty are continually negotiated rather than fixed.
In developing his own influential argument in opposition to the claims of constructivists, Krasner has also treated sovereignty as something that demands conceptual and historical inquiry. As noted earlier, Krasner posits a static definition of what he terms "Westphalian sovereignty," which he suggests is based on "territoriality and the exclusion of external actors from domestic authority structures." Its "fundamental rule" is said to be that states should not intervene in each other's affairs. He then demonstrates that this model has been repeatedly "breached" and "compromised" since the seventeenth century and labels this phenomenon "organized hypocrisy." For Krasner, this hypocrisy reveals the limits of constructivist theorizing: "Norms, though not irrelevant, do not have the weight that constructivism has attributed to them." The frequent violation of the Westphalian model, he suggests, demonstrates that "rules, when they exist in the international system, are instrumental, not deeply embedded." However, Krasner provides no reason why a sociological approach needs to begin with his particular model of sovereignty. Moreover, he acknowledges that there has historically been no such thing as a Westphalian sovereign state in the sense in which he defines it. The Westphalian model, he observes, "has never been an accurate description of many of the entities that have been regarded as states." Indeed, he notes that a principle of absolute autonomy cannot even be found in the Peace of Westphalia itself. It should not be surprising, then, that Krasner finds his model of sovereignty to have been so regularly breached. As Hidemi Suganami observes, if there has never been any such thing as "Westphalian sovereignty," it makes little sense to label violations of this model as "hypocrisy."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from SOVEREIGNTY AND THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT by LUKE GLANVILLE. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
