National Sovereignty

An Imagined Community

Nation is defined by Benedict Anderson as a community that is imagined as sovereign. The members of the nation do not and cannot possibly have face-to-face contact with every other member, and yet they imagine an affinity like a fraternity. Thus the nation can also be defined as an imagined social network in a general sense. National sovereignty works as long as it is considered as one of the rules and norms of this network that is accepted and maintained. The French Revolution of 1789 was the [Page 572]first implementation of the idea of national sovereignty. Related to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's definition of popular sovereignty, it was seen as indispensable, inalienable, and indivisible. With the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), state sovereignty was already codified in relation to territorial integrity and supremacy of the state.

With the French Revolution, the king as the possessor of sovereignty was replaced by the nation. As was noted by Ernest Renan in 1882, the nation's will started to be accepted as the only legitimate criterion. Consequently, state authority was solidified with the idea of national sovereignty, creating international institutions like the League of Nations after World War I and the United Nations after World War II.

The nature of this international order began to be debated among scholarly circles toward the end of the 20th century, especially during the last decade. Establishment and the acquired power of the global networks vis-à-vis the modern nation-states has been the main reason of this discussion. Global networks of trade, media, culture industries, and transnational corporations have changed the capacity of the modern nation-states to fully arbitrate national sovereignty. This change has been interpreted as the demise of the nation-state, enabling the move to a new, postnational global system instead of an international system. Yet the opposing camp argued that globalization has been too decentralized to have such a serious effect, drawing examples from the supremacy of the international system and the fact that nation-states are among the major players in these global networks. A third approach that has begun to gain considerable acceptance takes these two arguments to the point of accepting the change over the idea and implementation of national sovereignty, which is still a major part of the global system controlling how different networks relate to each other, albeit in novel ways compared to previous decades.

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