Sovereignty

Sovereignty in Domestic Affairs

Within any geographical area, entities compete for power. When the concept of sovereignty developed in the Renaissance, there was competition between ecclesiastical and secular entities. Today, the competition might be between transnational corporate and secular entities. The concept of sovereignty assumes that there is a winner in any competition. This winner would possess the highest power and be able to exercise it independently of other entities. This victor's decisions would govern affairs throughout the area and would be final. This victor would be said to possess sovereignty.

The concept was defined well in Jean Bodin's Six Books of a Commonwealth (1576) and reiterated in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651). Both Bodin and Hobbes assumed a strong state, one that in their time would have been associated with a strong ruler such as a monarch. In the next hundred or so years, John Locke, Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau challenged the assumption that sovereignty rests in such a ruler. They instead invested power in the people or, at least, in a governmental [Page 777]body thought representative of the people. Although the concept of sovereignty and the idea that the state possesses this characteristic survived this challenge, these philosophers generated more democratic thinking, further texturing the concept of identity and democracy.

For example, if the sovereign state is said to possess the highest power, how can that be if the people are ultimately superior, especially if they can demonstrate that superiority by either voting the governors of the state out of power or by reversing the governors’ decisions by referenda? Furthermore, if the people as voters have this ultimate power and if those who govern are aware of its existence as they act, how can the governors’ decisions be said to be truly independent? Are not the decisions to some extent swayed by public opinion?

Many of the emerging democratic governments featured a system of checks and balances among those engaged in ruling the state. If an elected assembly's will can be overruled by an elected executive's veto, then is not that assembly's sovereignty at least qualified? Furthermore, if that assembly's will can be overruled by a court engaged in judicial review, is not that assembly's sovereignty still further qualified? The answer, in cases such as these, may well be to hold the government in its totality sovereign or to posit that a document such as the U.S. Constitution is sovereign, possessing power that is higher, more final, more generally applicable, and more autonomous than any governing body or agent that the document may establish and define.

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