Abstract
The aftermath of the Cold War signalled a decline of the international norm of sovereignty. The ‘triumph’ of the Liberal International Order during a brief unipolar moment challenged traditional principles of sovereignty, notably non-intervention. However, recent years have seen a resurgence of affirmations of sovereignty in political discourse, coinciding with a broader narrative on the Liberal International Order’s erosion. This article attempts to make sense of this fall and rise of sovereignty. Motivated by genealogical concerns, it historicises political and scholarly conversations on the concept. First, it examines the perceived decline of sovereignty following the Cold War. Second, it traces the proliferation of sovereignty discourses in the European 2000s and 2010s back to debates surrounding the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. Third, it explores the concept of sovereigntism, charting its move from political discourse into academic debates. Finally, the article concludes with a reflection on the trajectory of sovereignty in a post-Liberal International Order world.
Affirmations of sovereignty have thrived over the last quarter-century. Debates surrounding the 2016 vote on Brexit were marked by the mobilisation of ‘sovereignty’ by Remainers and Leavers alike (Rone, 2023). In France, the term has become associated with all kinds of epithets. While in most cases the mention of sovereignty still evokes, if implicitly, the state, the nation, or the people, French politicians and media nowadays invoke digital sovereignty, cultural sovereignty, energy sovereignty, but also financial, agricultural, industrial, technological, and pharmaceutical sovereignty. Eurosceptic populist actors have brandished the catch-all notion, finding in its normative substrata legitimating principles for their position against regional integration and international migration (Basile and Mazzoleni, 2020), while President Emmanuel Macron, a vocal proponent of further European integration, has called for ‘European sovereignty’ (Eijsbouts and Reestman, 2018). In China, assertions of sovereignty have been rife since the ‘century of humiliation’ (Carlson, 2005; Carrai, 2019). Claims of sovereignty over airspace and maritime regions have expanded in recent years as new assertions of sovereign rights over food, education, and the Internet have emerged (Carrai, 2019: 2, 194–204). Sovereign equality is said to be central to China’s worldview under Xi Jinping (Foot and King, 2021). It was indeed in the name of sovereignty that the Chinese regime sought greater sovereign prerogatives in Hong Kong, most notably with the adoption of a National Security Law in 2020 (Pattiradjawane, 2020; Su, 2020). In Qatar, the regime condemned the sanctions imposed on it by its regional detractors between 2017 and 2021 as a blockade infringing upon its sovereignty (El Taki, forthcoming). In Cuba, the COVID-19 pandemic afforded the regime, which has supported the development of five homegrown vaccines, an opportunity to showcase its vaccinal sovereignty, as it were (Yaffe, 2021). This variant of sovereignty was championed in the very naming of the vaccines, three of which featured the
Examples abound all the more if one accepts that advocacies of sovereignty need not adopt the concept as a slogan, nor do they strictly need, for that matter, to take the discursive route altogether. After all, expressions of nationalism are not squarely limited to occurrences of the term ‘nation’ and the same can be said of ‘race’ and racism, ‘the people’ and populism, and ‘class’ and classism. There are myriad ways of asserting sovereignty in discourse, leveraging such notions as independence, autonomy, non-interference, equality, freedom, or even honour, for instance. Beyond discourse, though seldom without it, agential affirmations of sovereignty are prevalent on a global scale and appear to be flourishing. Gone, it seems, is the heyday of the Liberal International Order (LIO) and, with it, what perhaps looked in the aftermath of the Cold War like an irreversible triumph of internationalism, collective problem solving, and shared sovereignty. The contestation of the LIO’s tenets is today increasingly appealing as is the return to some fantasised golden age of sovereignty, not only in the order’s periphery but also in its very core (Adler-Nissen and Zarakol, 2020). The UK’s vote to ‘take back control’ and the United States’ espousal of ‘America First’ under the presidency of Donald Trump have become classical examples in that regard. In France, champion of national sovereignty Marine Le Pen has achieved unprecedented scores for herself and her party in the presidential election of 2022 and legislative elections of 2022 and 2024. Also, Russia’s war on Ukraine has revived apprehensions about the day when China’s sovereignty claims over Taiwan might materialise.
The 25th anniversary of the
To this end, the article is organised into four sections. First, I historicise scholarly discourses on sovereignty, tracing its ‘fall’ in the aftermath of the Cold War. Second, I examine the ‘rise’ of the concept in Europe, heralded by debates around the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and culminating, in the United Kingdom, in Brexit. Third, I turn to the notion of sovereigntism, tracing its travel from the world of politics to that of disciplinary politics. The term, which originated in Canada among partisans of Quebec’s independence, has taken hold in continental European countries. It has also made its way into academic language, in the social sciences and law, where political actors and scholars have endowed it with various acceptations, informed by distinct political cultures and contexts. Fourth and finally, I conclude with a reflection on the future of sovereignty after the LIO.
Sovereignty after the Cold War
Debates on the possible demise of sovereignty did not suddenly rise as the Berlin Wall fell. The decline of sovereignty alongside the consolidation of interdependence has been discussed since the beginning of the past century (Kalmo and Skinner, 2010: 5–6). Former US Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote in 1921 that the ‘interdependence’ of states would eventually bring about ‘world sovereignty’ (Lansing, 1921: 14). Later, the 1970s saw the surge of ‘interdependence’ as a buzzword in International Relations (IR) literature (e.g. Jacobson, 1979; Keohane and Nye, 1971, 1977; Rosenau, 1976, 1980, 1984), challenging neorealist, state-centric accounts of international politics and, with them, those of the supremacy of state sovereignty.
Yet it was with the end of the Cold War that sovereignty was dealt its strongest blow. The ‘triumph’ of the LIO and the subsequent humanitarian interventions gave momentum to the argument that state sovereignty had been fragmented so much that it has become obsolete. Globalisation and sovereignty were seen through zero-sum lenses as global networks, global markets, and human rights, including interventions and the Responsibility to Protect, reduced states’ supposed earlier sovereign agency (e.g. Mills, 1998; Rosenau, 1995; Strange, 1996). Writing in the mid-1990s, Gene Lyons and Michael Mastanduno argued that ‘constraints on state sovereignty’, while not new, ‘have been
Sceptics have dismissed these claims by arguing that eulogies of the modern state and its sovereignty were inaccurate. Raia Prokhovnik (1999) maintained in the very first issue of
Debates on whether the aftermath of the Cold War rendered sovereignty obsolete thus disagreed on what sovereignty is and what it has historically been. These disagreements have great significance for our understanding not only of sovereignty but also of IR more generally. Sovereignty has indeed been described as the ‘sine qua non of international politics’ (de Carvalho, 2018: 502). It demarcates the inside from the outside, distinguishes the domestic from the international, and identifies in-groups from out-groups. The boundaries that sovereignty sets make of it the condition of possibility of IR, so much that efforts to rewrite the histories of sovereignty have in many cases amounted to rewritings of the histories of IR. In the 1990s, seminal works by Walker (1993), Weber (1995), and Bartelson (1995) put into relief the contingent and constructed nature of sovereignty. In this vein, more recent works by Historical IR scholars have historicised its emergence (Bartelson, 2018; Branch, 2012, 2014; Buzan and Lawson, 2015; de Carvalho, 2018, 2021); criticised the myth of Westphalia that erected 1648 as a supposed turning point in world history (Costa Lopez and de Carvalho, 2018; de Carvalho et al., 2011), building on earlier works that astutely deconstructed it (e.g. Beaulac, 2000; Krasner, 1993; Osiander, 2001); and proposed non-Eurocentric histories of sovereignty (Mukoyama, 2023, 2024; Park, 2017; Zarakol, 2018, 2022). The questions raised and answers provided by Historical IR scholarship have thus not only provided insights into when sovereignty emerged, but have also disrupted IR’s established meta-narratives, reconsidering the centrality of Europe to the history of both sovereignty and IR.
Sovereignty and Europe
If the aftermath of the Cold War triggered questions about the demise of sovereignty, the 1990s also planted the seeds of its rise to come in Europe. During this period, pleas for the defence of national sovereignty started to emerge in response to the perceived ‘threat’ of further European integration. The debates surrounding the 1992 Maastricht Treaty were a milestone heralding the proliferation in the 2000s and 2010s of sovereignty talk. The treaty, laying out a path for the creation of a common currency, introducing the concept of European citizenship, and providing for a common security and foreign policy, was seen by segments of European elites as an attack on national sovereignty. The United Kingdom and Denmark, where domestic debates rallied to the defence of national identity, sovereignty, and independence against a creeping federalist European Union (EU), secured opt-outs from the Maastricht Treaty (Adler-Nissen, 2014). In France, those who came to be known as ‘anti-Europeans’ and ‘Eurosceptics’ right about that time decried an impending loss of sovereignty (Le Dréau, 2009: 134–135). In a memorable indictment of the treaty project delivered in the Assemblée nationale, Gaullist deputy Philippe Séguin warned that Maastricht ‘buries the concept of national sovereignty and the great principles of the French Revolution’, adding, ‘1992 is literally the anti-1789’ (Sénat, 1992).
Fundamentally, the issue at stake was whether sovereignty was divisible. This is an old debate, dating back to classical writings on the concept. Hobbes contended that the authority of the sovereign over the multitude, ‘made one person’ by a political covenant, is ‘indivisible’ (Hobbes, 1998 [1651]: 109, 121; see Skinner, 2010: 34–40). Rousseau (2002 [1762]: 53, 170–172), who instated sovereignty in the ‘general will’, also argued that it is ‘inalienable’ and ‘indivisible’. Like Vattel, he acknowledged that sovereignty has in practice been divided but, unlike Grotius, he dismissed such divisions as aberrations and errors (de Vattel, 2008 [1758]: 117; Keene, 2002: 44; Rousseau, 2002 [1762]: 171).
The Maastricht episode set the tone of domestic debates on sovereignty for decades to come. Critics of the EU across the Channel and beyond contended that sovereignty belonged to the nation and must not be shared (Baker et al., 1995; Le Dréau, 2009). Proponents of further European integration argued that, by pooling sovereignty, individual states enhanced their position in the world, thus bolstering, not undermining, their sovereign agency (Howe, 1990). In a sense, Brexit was an instantiation of the viewpoint that prevailed in this debate in the United Kingdom, at least institutionally, for now.
Naturally, invocations of sovereignty in Brexit debates have stimulated scholarly interest. In the
On the other hand, approaching the issue externally, Van Kessel et al. (2020: 67) observed that populist radical parties in continental European countries typically view the EU as a threat to the ‘sovereignty of the native people’. Adler-Nissen et al. (2017) analysed how Brexit was constructed abroad, noting the significance of sovereignty – its sharing and its supposed threatening by Brussels – in external framings of Britain’s departure from the EU. Brexit, the authors argue, served as a signifier that (re-)constructed images of the United Kingdom
Brexit held at least as much significance in international-political terms as in domestic-political ones. It was, or was claimed to be, about reclaiming sovereign agency at home, invoking various interpretations of the parliamentary sovereignty doctrine. Yet it was also about the nostalgia of Britain’s imperial past, its relative international status, and a sense of British exceptionalism compared with the rest of Europe and the world. This dual view of Brexit and sovereignty – domestic and international – reflects less on some peculiarities of the former and more on the very ontology of the latter. Sovereignty, Janus-faced as it is, looks inward and outward, bounding the internal vis-a-vis the external, making it a particularly effective discursive tool invoked by opponents of European integration and sovereigntists of various dispositions.
Sovereignty and sovereigntism
Alongside the soaring interest in contestations of the EU in the name of sovereignty, culminating in Brexit in Britain, an emerging body of scholarship has foregrounded the notion of sovereigntism. Several scholars have viewed the Leave vote as epitomising a sovereigntist politics. Writing in
Yet this concept is no more consensual than the radical of which it is an ism – that is, sovereignty – itself described as ‘ambiguous’ (Biersteker and Weber, 1996: 2), ‘misleading’ (Rosenau, 1995: 194), and even ‘absurd’ (Wallerstein, 1999: 22). The fragmented scholarship on sovereigntism has narrowly and variously approached it as denoting separatist nationalism, a rejection of the EU and globalisation, and a contestation of international and transnational law. The picture is further complicated by ‘geocultural’ divisions (Wæver and Tickner, 2009) between Canadian, American, and continental-European scholarship, each with varied and distinct understandings of the concept. In addition, the scholarship on sovereigntism is less prevalent in English than in continental-European languages. In the 25 years since the inception of
A brief genealogical enquiry into sovereigntism illuminates these divides. The various acceptations of sovereigntism do not stem from a single source or flow through a single genealogy. Rather, invocations of sovereigntism in political and academic discourses use the same term to signify opposition to different phenomena identified as threats to sovereignty. The notion first emerged in French, as
From Quebec, ‘sovereigntism’ travelled across the Atlantic and landed in continental Europe – as
The understanding of sovereigntism varies across these countries. In France, where the term has perhaps gained the most currency in recent years, critics of further European integration, derogatorily identified as ‘anti-Europeans’ and ‘Eurosceptics’ around the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, imported the term ‘sovereigntism’ from Quebec later in the 1990s to positively characterise their politics (Brustier, 2021; Le Dréau, 2009: 14–20). Yet, far from advocating separatism from an established and recognised state, their sovereigntism has opposed what they perceived to be a dilution of the nation-state’s sovereignty – France’s, in this case – within the supranational project of the EU. In Spain, where the term appears to have emerged in the late 1990s after its surge in France, ‘sovereigntism’ has had more conceptual affinities with its original Quebecois conception (de Ramón, 2019; Valls, 2000). As such, it has been used to refer to, and has been adopted by, actors calling for the independence of Catalonia. These differences in the meanings attributed to sovereigntism in different European countries are evident in authoritative dictionaries. Whereas the
In scholarly discourse, the conception of sovereigntism as a rejection of European integration has been primarily advanced by scholars based on the continent. Linda Basile and Mazzoleni (2020), distinctly investing in a conceptual effort, contend that sovereigntism is distinct from populism, Euroscepticism, and nationalism.
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Populists have adopted a sovereigntist discourse, but sovereigntism is anterior to populism: ‘while sovereignism might exist without populism’, Basile and Mazzoleni (2020: 156) noted, ‘there is no populist discourse that does not include sovereignist claims’. In addition, while sovereigntism and Euroscepticism may share common orientations vis-a-vis the EU, they are distinct as the former, unlike the latter, ‘explicitly puts forward an alternative proposal for the distribution of authority’ – that is, at the level of the nation-state (Basile and Mazzoleni, 2020: 156). Moreover, although sovereigntism has in common with nationalism ‘the promotion of the nation, its superiority, self-determination, and exclusive right to decide’, the two concepts are distinct in that ‘sovereignism is a form of grievance, a reaction that aims at bringing back control within a specific territory, namely the nation state’ (Basile and Mazzoleni, 2020: 156). The rallying cry giving coherence to the various aspects of this sovereigntism is ‘taking back control’ (Basile and Mazzoleni, 2020; see also Baldini et al., 2020). This coherence is based on a common ‘looking-back’ dynamic, which idealises a past that sovereigntists, including Brexiteers, wish to restore. Aristotle Kallis (2018) argued that sovereigntism constitutes the common ground between European populists across the left–right divide who seek to resituate sovereignty away from European institutions and
Independently of continental-European debates on sovereigntism, though sharing a common assumption about the normatively appropriate locus of political power, sovereigntism has been primarily conceptualised by US-based legal scholars as a challenge to international law’s encroachment on state sovereignty. Peter Spiro (2000: 9) dubs sovereigntism ‘international law à la carte’. The ‘new sovereigntism’, as he calls it, represents a school that is distinct from isolationism, favouring American international engagement and selectively subscribing to international laws and conventions of its choosing (Spiro, 2000: 9; see also Spiro, 2013). New sovereigntism, according to Michael Goodhart and Taninchev (2011: 1047), is shared by ‘a group of American scholars, intellectuals, and policymakers’ – such as John Bolton – who contest ‘the insidious creep of extra-constitutional, sovereignty-eroding international law’. For Judith Resnik (2007: 35), sovereigntism in the United States rejects ‘foreign law’ (including international law) on the premise that ‘the particularity of a specific legal regime is important to that nation-state’s identity’. This legal sovereigntism explains why the United States has not ratified, for example, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (Spiro, 2000: 10), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (Resnik, 2007: 54–56), and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Goodhart and Taninchev, 2011: 1049). Seyla Benhabib argues that legal sovereigntism is not specific to the United States but can be observed in Europe as well. Sovereigntism, she writes, is ‘not an expression of American exceptionalism’ but rather ‘a part of a growing resistance to the force of transnational law in the contemporary world’ (Benhabib, 2016: 110–111). Mireille Delmas-Marty (2016), which similarly takes a legal approach to sovereigntism, applies it to the European context. Sovereigntism, in her understanding, is an ideology by virtue of which ‘national constitutional principles’ are upheld contra European law (Delmas-Marty, 2016: 453). Thus Brexit, which has been approached as an instantiation of sovereigntism
While I have attempted to draw lines of distinction between different bodies of literature, it is important to note that much of the scholarship on the concept remains largely descriptive with little to no conceptualisation effort. Those works that took the pains to delineate the concept have done so separately and have therefore captured different and partial empirical manifestations of sovereignty claims. In addition, the usage of the term in public discourse, informed by various political cultures and contexts, points to different branches of a diverse genealogy of sovereigntism, despite a common appreciation of the state as the legitimate proprietor of sovereignty, in keeping with the terms of international political modernity. In scholarly works, though hardly in political discourse, one can also infer a similar, if implicit, ontological approach to sovereignty as divisible. The fact that the divisibility of sovereignty has been debated since its early formulations by the likes of Bodin, Hobbes, Grotius, and Vattel highlights the significance of that common ontological perspective, giving a degree of unity to the scholarship on sovereigntism amid all its conceptual and empirical rifts.
Sovereignty and the LIO
Mounting and resounding affirmations of sovereignty speak to debates on the predicament of the LIO. Some argue that the LIO is going through a crisis or that it has failed (Boyle, 2016; Buruma, 2016; Mearsheimer, 2018, 2019; Speck, 2016). Others acknowledge that it faces problems and difficulties yet contend it still has a future (Ikenberry, 2018, 2020). Still others discard it as a flawed concept or even a myth (Allison, 2018; Glaser, 2019). In any case, the LIO is challenged on a global scale, not only in states that have consistently rejected it but also within states that have promoted it (see Adler-Nissen and Zarakol, 2020).
The contestation of liberal order unfolds largely through sovereignty discourses. In states at the subordinate end of the order, notably in the non-Western periphery, such discourses are no complete novelty as liberal internationalism has been rebuffed for decades as just another deceitful disguise for sovereignty-constraining Western imperialism and American hegemony. The triumph of the LIO with the end of the Cold War eventually brought about greater resentment as the order ‘increasingly [. . .] erode[d] state sovereignty and reallocate[d] on a global scale the sites and sources of political authority’ (Ikenberry, 2009: 71). The United States’ political and military interventions in other states, not least with the 2003 War on Iraq, and its perceived machinations behind the Colour Revolutions and the Arab Uprisings, have further persuaded many in the periphery that Washington was ‘a revisionist power when it came to sovereignty norms’ (Cooley and Nexon, 2020: 113). Whence the rejection, in the name of sovereignty, of the LIO whose rhetorical repudiation of hierarchy and promotion of equality, human rights, and democracy have been seen as a disingenuous subterfuge enshrining hierarchy and its immediate corollary – the unequal sovereignty of states.
In the Western core of the LIO, sovereignty assertions rebuke the order promoted by cosmopolitan liberal elites that has subordinated the nation-state within regional and global hierarchies. National liberal elites, it is said, have ceded sovereign agency to bureaucrats in supranational and international organisations, weakened the state in the face of open global markets, taken a frail and naïve attitude towards non-Western rivals such as China, and undermined the nation’s identity through lax immigration policies. From this perspective, sovereignty entrepreneurs want enhanced sovereign status and agency – as they define them. The operationalisation of the kind of sovereignty ranges from leaving the EU and withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate change to imposing tariff increases on Chinese goods and restricting immigration (Baldini et al., 2020; Patrick, 2017). Such sovereignty affirmations can be found across the political spectrum from the right to the left and, unlike those in non-Western countries, they do have a looking-back dimension that aims to ‘restore’ the good old days of the nation-state’s sovereignty.
Whether the worldwide mushrooming of sovereignty talk can help outline what a post-LIO order might look like is an important yet tricky question. Not only am I sceptical, on epistemological grounds, of our ability to predict the future, but the sheer heterogeneity of the kinds of sovereignty discursively leveraged today is not particularly helpful for those more willing to venture a prediction. The typology of sovereigntism proposed by Delphine Alles and Bertrand Badie (2016) captures some of that diversity in sovereignty discourses. They identify three co-existing varieties of sovereigntism: ‘conservative sovereigntism’, championed by Western powers, striving to maintain the so-called Westphalian system and contesting the emergence of challengers; ‘neo-sovereigntism’, advanced notably by the BRICS, calling for equality and protesting hierarchy in IR; and ‘archeo-sovereigntism’, espoused by European right-wing populist parties, seeking to protect national identity in the face of globalisation. One may contend that, given the available evidence and considering the ‘rise of China’, the normative contours of the order to come are likely to be centred less on such liberal legitimating principles as democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, and more on sovereignty, equality, and non-interference. While that is certainly reasonable, the malleability of these principles – think, for instance, of the liberal transformation of sovereignty from a right to a responsibility in the 1990s (Annan, 1999; Deng et al., 1996) – does not allow us to foresee with any satisfying precision the substance of a post-LIO global order.
At any rate, the rise of sovereignty talk in political and scholarly discourses is not ready to subside anytime soon. Global developments continue to bring the notion of sovereignty to the fore, heralding yet more engagement with the concept. Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine are lambasted as a blatant violation of the latter’s sovereignty, yet simultaneously justified by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the very name of sovereignty. The Russian ‘special operation’, in the words of Putin, is a reaction to the West’s effort at the ‘de-sovereigntisation’ of countries unwilling to submit to its hegemony (President of Russia, 2022). In Palestine, decades-long colonisation and occupation has been framed as an enaction of ‘the sovereignty of the Jewish people’ (Will, 1982), while the war on Gaza following the massacre of 7 October 2023 is justified in the name of the sovereign right to self-defence. As genocide scholars and UN officials characterise Israel’s actions as genocide (Samudzi, 2024; Segal, 2023; Semerdjian, 2024; Shaw, 2024; UN Human Rights Council, 2024), Western governments’ inaction is increasingly seen in the Global South as yet another manifestation of their double standards, further undermining the remnants of the LIO (ElBaradei, 2024; Mansour, 2024). In such a changing global order, the legitimating power of sovereignty as a category shaping our understanding of politics is likely to remain salient, perhaps increasingly so, in the decades ahead.
