Sovereignty

Issues of Definition

The proper source, locus, and scope of political authority have been subjected to constant debate in the history of political thought. From where does such authority derive its legitimacy? With whom should it reside? What are the proper limits of its exercise? While these are some of the questions that any account of political authority must confront, most modern definitions of sovereignty imply that such authority—quite irrespective of the sources of its legitimacy and its exact locus—must be both indivisible and absolute to qualify as properly sovereign and nothing else. While being indivisible implies that it must—at least in theory—reside with a single agent in a given polity, being absolute entails that this agent either is sovereign or not but nothing in between. These formal characteristics distinguish sovereignty from related concepts such as autonomy and independence, both of which are thought to be matters of degree. Insofar as sovereignty is defined in terms of [Page 2470]authority, it is also thereby distinguished from mere power, since the latter concept does not normally carry the same connotations of acceptance, obligation, or obedience as does authority. Taken together, these defining characteristics have raised the question whether sovereignty is best understood as a rule or as an empirical fact. In analogy with grammatical rules, we could say that the concept of sovereignty contains both descriptive and prescriptive elements. Sovereignty thus not only refers to a state of affairs but also implies that this state of affairs constitutes a norm to which political life ought to conform in order to be intelligible. Finally, there is a performative dimension to the concept of sovereignty, insofar as it is frequently used by various agents to claim supreme authority in different contexts.

Modern theories of sovereignty frequently distinguish between the internal and external aspects of sovereignty. Internal sovereignty is attributed to the governmental institutions of a state by virtue of fulfilling some or all of the above criteria, while external sovereignty is attributed to the state as a whole by virtue of being recognized as such by other states. Since the terms of recognition are dependent on the internal attributes of sovereignty, the requirements of external sovereignty have varied considerably over time. Recognition has been granted on different grounds, ranging from principles of dynastic succession, via national self-determination and territorial integrity, to the more recent requirement that states should be governed according to democratic principles to merit international recognition.

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