Sovereignty

Sovereignty is a key concept in modern political thought. It is both a complex institution and an artificial political arrangement. As such, it must be understood in the context of its historical development and its various political applications. Nonetheless, its core features are relatively stable and allow a general framework to be drawn to clarify what is at stake when speaking about sovereignty.

Sovereignty regulates relations between the rulers and the ruled, as well as relations between sovereign entities in the international arena. In both domestic and international spheres, sovereignty encompasses three aspects. The first is institutional: Sovereignty is tightly linked to the emergence of the modern state and the peculiarities of the powers it exercises. The second aspect refers to its doctrinal underpinnings: Sovereignty operates as a legitimizing concept depending on who is deemed to be the holder of sovereignty (the monarch, the nation, the people, the state). Finally, the legal dimension of sovereignty refers to the limits of power exercised by the holders of sovereignty.

The meaning of sovereignty can be explained by reference to the emergence of the modern state at a time when medieval lawyers, in particular in France and Great Britain, sought to legitimate the rights of kings and princes to assert centralized authority over the numerous entities and communities (such as feudal lords, guilds, monasteries) that had until that time enjoyed virtual autonomy within their jurisdictions. They also explicitly, and successfully, challenged the constraints imposed by the nominally supreme authority of the Pope and Holy Roman Emperor. Indeed, the first doctrinal texts dealing with sovereignty mainly focused on the necessity to preserve the state from outside pressures and internal disorder. This primacy principle must be viewed in conjunction with the principle of exclusivity: A sovereign state is mainly a territorial institution because its exercise of exclusive authority is limited to the geographic perimeter of its territory. Sovereignty encapsulates the idea that there exists a final and absolute authority in the political community, and that no final and absolute authority exists elsewhere. [Page 911]To the extent that sovereignty is tied to the territorialization of power, it is also illustrative of the secularization trend. In this context, absolute authority also means that state sovereignty is indivisible, that is to say it cannot exist in degrees: A state is either sovereign or is not. Sovereignty also implies a unitary condition because the sovereign state is considered as a whole. As a result, all of the competences exercised by the sovereign state are ultimately attributable to and embodied by a single legal personality. Sovereign authority is mainly characterized by the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, along with an exclusive capacity to make and enforce legal norms. The making of rules and enforcement of authority are therefore the most important means to measure state sovereignty. This does not rule out the fact that some competences might be delegated to subentities (in the case of a federal state, for example) or supraentities (such as the European Union), but these political entities are still not considered to be sovereign and are not deemed to exercise a form of power characterized by the same traits.

...