Politics Without Sovereignty
A critique of contemporary international relations
Christopher J Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe, Alex Gourevitch (editors)

Ravi Bali
posted 15 June 2007

This tightly-argued book emerges from the work of the Sovereignty and Its Discontents workgroup, and is an effort to confront some of the developments amongst international relations theorists who have argued that the concept of national sovereignty is no longer a useful framework within which politics can and should be conducted.

The contributors define sovereignty as the idea of the supreme political authority in a given territory, admitting that the political action entailed in this idea has limited scope, but arguing that those who attack sovereignty offer an even more impoverished vision of human agency. It is this desire to defend human agency and allow it the greatest possible scope that informs each of the essays in this volume, showing how either in motivation or in consequence those who attack sovereignty are intellectually justifying a diminished role for the collective subjectivity of people in being able to shape the world.

Their vision of sovereignty links with the ideas of democratic accountability that emerged with the 1789 French Revolution. It is an idea of popular sovereignty founded through and shaped by the participation of masses of people in the political process. The subsequent decline in this mass participation in political life means that the possibilities of what society can achieve seem much narrower and limited today.

The classic liberal conception of sovereignty as famously articulated in Rousseau’s Social Contract, the contributors argue, should be defended against its current detractors because at least it enshrines the autonomy of politics as a separate realm. This realm is one in which individuals group together to articulate their demands as to how society should be organised. In this process, the state as the ultimate authority forms as a public power rising above any particular interest, by uniting the will of all citizens for the general good. This view of politics relies on a contest between those offering alternative programmes of action in their effort to win people’s hearts and minds; it is indeed the bedrock of the democratic process. Those on the losing side of the political contest still respect the outcome because they accept how the result is achieved. The sovereign (in the sense of the individual or group that represents ultimate political authority, rather than in the narrow sense of the royal head of state) assumes responsibility for the enactment of its people’s will.

This in theory means that within the boundaries of the nation the sovereign acts as the universalising force expressing the general will. The idea does run into problems at an international level, when one sovereign state confronts another, then the universalising impulse becomes divided against itself. It is precisely the legitimation process of a sovereign power within a nation and its absence at an international level, that has traditionally led international relations theorists to see a contrast between order at the domestic level within nations and anarchy at a global level between nations.

Each of the essays makes a very convincing case for how the attacks on sovereignty lead to a further denial of human agency. The opening chapter by the editors takes up the ‘reflectivist’ theories of constructivism and post-structuralism (so called because they were supposed to allow much greater scope for change than the determinism of the old realist model based on autonomous sovereign states).

Constructivism starts from the premise that the old idea of pre-existing nation states with fixed identities and interests is too rigid. Instead we are encouraged to see a more fluid situation in which the constant interaction and negotiation between national political actors at an international level actually helps to constitute their identities and allows for the reconsideration of what is in their interests. This inter-subjective process of identity formation and interest formulation is divorced from any tangible relation with the domestic pressures coming from a country’s own population. Despite having the appearance of being more fluid and susceptible to change, constructivism actually denies sovereignty and the agency of national populations that this implies.

Post-structuralism asks whether the anarchy that exists at an international level due to the egotism of individual states shouldn’t lead us to question whether sovereignty itself, is desirable. Those adopting post-structuralism suggest that the very boundary constituted by a nation state by definition excludes important political possibilities. It is the inability of post-structuralists to situate historically why national sovereignty is the necessary form of political subjectivity under capitalism, that leads them to reject political agency itself in the present.

Tara McCormack’s chapter on ‘human security’ looks at the expansion of the category of security to encompass all manner of problems beyond that of safeguarding against direct physical threat. This leads to a confused and incoherent view of what is political. The lending of urgency to a variety of social problems by recasting them as security questions takes them out of the scope of political choice making. Since security has always been seen as a precondition for politics – because without it there can be no meaningful debate – presenting an objective as a security question de-politicises it by posing it as a necessity.

The two chapters on ‘State Building’ and ‘Country Ownership’, by Christopher Bickerton and John Pender respectively, look at why there needs to be an organic development of state institutions from the political life of a society for them to be sufficiently rooted to address that society’s needs. These chapters look at why the attempts to build institutional capacity from the outside lead to the bypassing of this process of internal generation. This makes the new institutions an imposition on those it is supposed to serve. In examining the relationship between aid giving by developed countries to developing countries it is argued that this imposition is disguised, which in turn allows the elites of the rich nations to evade responsibility for the problems they cause the poorer nations of the world

In a chapter looking at the development of the European Union, James Heartfield argues that the creation of a Europe-wide bureaucratic elite is more to do with the exhaustion of political life within each of its member states than any positive dynamic towards integration. This again shows how there is an institutional reinforcement of the trend towards political disengagement and how the European project becomes one of evading responsibility.

There is much to admire in the way this book tries to situate the loss of confidence in the merits of democratic accountability, which at least is offered as a possibility in the idea of national sovereignty. The book exposes how new developments in international relations theory and practice represent a degradation of human agency from the high point represented by Enlightenment ideals. The nagging doubt I had after finishing this book, was whether the framework of sovereignty was being asked to bear too heavy a burden, in terms of re-articulating a sense of agency in today’s circumstances. The introduction argues:

The ebbing away of a vigorous idea of the sovereign state reflects the ebbing of a wider model of robust, determined political individuals, pursuing their idea of the good life in a more rational social order. The limited sovereign state of the day mirrors the depleted, withdrawn individual of contemporary society.

This is the liberal conception of the free and independent individual for whom relations with others are undertaken on a basis of mutual advantage. The spheres of politics and economics become defined as instruments for meeting and reconciling the conflicts of individual wants through the market and the ballot box respectively. It is instructive to look at the United States as the example of the country that most reflects and understands itself through these liberal concepts (more so than say France today where many of these ideas originated but now there is a popular acceptance of state welfare).

Alexander Gourevitch’s chapter on the changing view of America’s national interest is interesting because it shows the centrality of class conflict within the domestic sphere to this process. The threat posed by the demands of the working class were what gave rise to the articulation by the state of America’s ‘national interest’ on the international stage. The promotion of the national interest was to contain the demands of the working class by subordinating them to the fight against the Communist menace perceived to threaten all Americans. The projection and pursuit of a national interest abroad was in this way to deal with the problems arising from working class activity in the domestic arena.

As long as the working class existed as a political force, it was impossible to ignore. The situation today is quite different, no longer is there a working class whose very existence makes the establishment nervous because of its potential to destabilise society. In the absence of this ‘universal’ or ‘international’ class, much of the progressive potential of an idea like national sovereignty is removed. So when the introduction says that ‘subjectivity in its political form even pushes beyond the state, insofar as it seeks a universal basis for collective action’, an implicit appeal is being made to a political subject that is no longer there.

The Enlightenment ideal of the rational individual had a progressive role when the revolutionary capitalist class pushed to establish a new social order, but even then its universal aspirations obscured the particular interests they were serving. It was possible to pose sectional interests as a universal claim for liberty and justice for the very reason that it was also progressive and took society as a whole forward.

To point out how the representatives of today’s moribund elites have abandoned these idea is fine as far as it goes. An appeal to Enlightenment values does not seem a sound basis on which to articulate any sense of agency today, however. The appeal to a democratic sensibility and its violation in practice seems too great an abstraction to deal with the systemic nature of a world divided into a small number of powerful states and a much greater number of weak ones. The balance of power may shift between nations, but a world dominated by a few strong states still holds sway. The imbalance of power that exists in the international order still requires a challenge to imperialist domination, and an appeal to democratic norms does not addresses the central problem of political agency. To whom or what is the appeal for non-interference in weaker states or to respect national autonomy addressed?

David Chandler’s chapter dealing with the advocates of the idea of a global civil society exposes much of the context of the end of mass politics. He shows how the suspicion of local autonomy in developing countries results in a lack of any real accountability by those working for non-governmental organisations or international institutions. He shows the abstract character of an appeal to the authority of ‘the international community’.

Even accepting that the nature of imperialist domination of the globe is now primarily conducted for different reasons from the past, there are still vested interests in its maintenance. Instead of a search for raw materials, cheap labour, new markets or any narrowly ‘economic’ reasons, the new form of colonialism is much more about a political search for legitimacy. This does not detract from its systemic character or the fact that the elites of the world’s leading powers are heavily invested in this process of domination. The conscious decision not to discuss the working class is understandable - but if not proletarian internationalism, then on what basis would an anti-imperialist consensus be built today?

This thought provoking book doesn’t address this question, but brilliantly clarifies much of why it is still one of the most pressing issues facing anyone interested in progressive politics.