Academic Council on the United Nations System Meeting, Oslo, June 2000

Notes for oral presentation only

AOn The Future of Sovereignty@

R.B.J. Walker

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It is not entirely clear to me why I agreed to talk on a topic having to do with Athe future of sovereignty,@ even if I=m allowed to say something about its history first.

This is not only because of all the well-known difficulties of talking about either such a huge topic, or of even speaking of the future at all (remember Hegel=s Owl of Minerva, or Benjamin=s Angel of History).

But for two very specific versions of this general problem:

1. Sovereignty has to do with politics, and politics is largely concerned with engagements with the contingent, with chance, with fortuna, with time, with the unforeseen.

2. Moreover, modern sovereignty already tells us how to deal with the contingent. Modern sovereignty already expresses a very specific account of space and time as well as of legitimate authority.

It does so largely by seeking to draw lines and jurisdictions and containments in space.

Consequently, there is a logical puzzle in that

(i) modern sovereignty, as a specifically modern account of the character and location of legitimate authority in space and time, already tells us how to think about all spaces and all times, including the road to the future. Generally speaking, and very crudely, it tells us that either there will be sovereignty forever, or there will not be sovereignty forever, in which case all will be either heaven or hell, depending on whether you like your metaphors to be written in claims about globalization or in claims about anarchy;

(ii) consequently, there is a problem in simply taking sovereignty=s own story of the future for granted, but also

(iii) we cannot pretend that we can easily stand outside of modern sovereignty and tell a different story.

This, in brief is the problem as it has been articulated by the great theorists of modern sovereignty, Hobbes, Kant, Weber, Schmitt.

But enough is enough; we don=t want to go off into theoretical space in such a short time; except to insist that it is impossible to say much about sovereignty unless we do because sovereignty is precisely a practice that seeks to express a theoretical space.

One might start instead by trying to say what sovereignty is; except that we immediately run into another paradox: Sovereignty works by giving authority to definitions, and to start with a definition is already to think about sovereignty on terms given by sovereignty. This is why all the basic literature on sovereignty insists on the importance of thinking about sovereignty in the context of practices of authorization, including the ways in which various claims about what sovereignty is gets authorized.

Here we at least can specify a key problem: who authorizes the sovereign who can then authorize.

This was Hobbes= central problem. It is known as the paradox of founding, and it goes back a very long way before Hobbes.

Hobbes way of responding to it is still largely our own. But it is in this sense that we have to begin making some distinctions between sovereignty and the specifically modern concept of sovereignty.

Despite the difficulties of prognosis, in this case I would like to make the fairly easy prediction that whatever the future of sovereignty turns out to be, it will involve some fairly profound changes to the way in which we engage with the paradox of founding. The basic intellectual problem here is how we can begin to think about the future of sovereignty without simply assuming all the very basic assumptions about time, space and political identity that Hobbes used to solve the paradox of founding in a very specific way.

Again, this may all sound like the usual mumbo jumbo of the political theorist. I do not apologize for this. I want to insist that there is no point even in talking about sovereignty if one treats it as a thing, a hard, brute material reality that has to be engaged without getting into some strange theoretical terrain. The whole point of modern sovereignty is that it does not exist, and yet it has tremendous effects, it does not exist and yet it is constantly enacted, it has no foundations yet it is always foundational. Whatever it is, it is a very strange beast.

So, as a way of trying to maintain a sense of its very strange status without confronting its strangeness directly, let me jump quickly to another tack and try to come at the problem from a different angle.

Sovereignty is a term that covers too many sins, too many practices. It seems to me that some quite extensive conceptual unpacking is called for. In order to think with any clarity about how we view our possible futures in terms set by sovereignty, it seems important to distinguish between at least five different though related phenomena:

1. the problem of sovereignty; that is, the question of how legitimate authority gets to be constituted and under what conditions, and thus how we come to terms with (i) attempts to distinguish claims about authority and those about power, or (ii) claims about power from those about knowledge, or (iii) claims about sovereignty and those about subjectivity Bjust to name three key sites at which we can expect to see intense negotiations for quite some time.

2. the specifically modern framing of the principle of sovereignty; that is, all those practices that enable us to believe we can draw a very sharp line between the legitimate and the illegitimate, the authoritative and the non-authoritative.

3. the application of this claim to the territorial jurisdiction of modern states; that is, to all those practices that enable us to believe that we can draw lines within spatially the delineated jurisdictions legally claimed by modern states.

4. the embodiment of this claim in specific state institutions; that is, all those practices through which the claim to sovereignty is reproduced in a multiplicity of contexts and sites by institutions that have themselves been enabled by claims about sovereignty and its proper territorial articulation

5. the reproduction of this claim in the practices of modern political subjects; that is, all those practices through which the principle of sovereignty is inscribed in the identities of peoples, most obviously in practices of nationalism, citizenship, and human rights, but also in the cultural codes of, say, gender formation and the authorization of personhood

One could go much further than this. In each of these five cases, I believe it necessary to distinguish between how sovereignty works as a principle, as a practice and as an institution. That makes 15 basic sites for examination.

Furthermore, I would want to insist that each of these 15 sites has to be read both domestically and internationally, and read in such a way as to get a sense of how the internal and external expressions of sovereignty constitute each other. This makes 30 sites.

And then one could start to pick out some specific sites in which sovereignty intersects with some other concepts with great intensityBsovereignty, rights, and so onB and where the specifically modern forms of sovereignty have hardly caught on at all.

Right. I will stick with only the five rather than the thirty.

Three observations here:

i. We conflate these all very easily, not least because this is what we are supposed to do; everything converges on a monopoly of legitimate authority in a specific territory. This is our normative ideal, though it may not be our reality.

ii. Different people tend to fixate on one of these and think that it is the entire package; the parts of the elephant problem:

#1 is the preserve of philosophers and people who read sovereignty as an expression of philosophical and theoretical puzzles

#2 is the preserve of historians and theorists of modernity,

#3 is the preserve of constitutional and international lawyers and statesmen and sets the basic framework assumed by the conventional theorists of government and international relations

#4 is the preserve of students of domestic law and politics

#5 is the preserve of sociologists, psychologists, cultural studies

It is quite interesting to move from one set of scholars to another and find them all diligently working on their own bit of the elephant; when they do converge one generally sees varying degrees of hostility and incomprehension.

iii. One way of thinking about our possible futures, it seems to me, is that we might expect an increasing disaggregation of all these, and possibly other, different meanings or sites of political engagement.

It may be that classical definitions of sovereignty, not least that of Hobbes, insist that it is an all or nothing affair, that sovereigns either are or they are not. It may also be, if we accept these terms, that we court incoherence if we try to talk about sovereignty in terms of more and less, of the parceling out of sovereignty on this issue or that issue, to this jurisdiction or that jurisdiction. It seems to me, however, that we risk even greater incoherence, and indeed have succumbed to incoherence for quite some time, when we continue to fuse all such meanings into a simple definition.

What needs to be at issue is not the necessity of the definition but the conditions under which so many meanings can be fused together in a single necessary definition. We only have to think about the enormous political work performed by concepts like Anational interest@ or Anational security@ to see the practical effects of the way we take simple definitions at face value.

I might note that Stephen Krasner has also drawn attention to the need to unpack this concept, but not in a way that I find either persuasive or logically coherent. Krasner rightly insists that sovereignty has never been a clear cut thing, but then uses this lack of a clear ground of comparison to ground a claim that nothing has changed. My own sense is that the world has never been what the principle, practice and institution of modern sovereignty insists it must be B and remember it was always an expression of a normative claim not a fact of life B but that whatever it was once taken to be, both the world and the practice of organizing it according to the regulative principle of sovereignty is not graspable in simple binaries of stasis and change.

So just for the sake of illustration, in running through my five rather arbitrary categories, it is not unreasonable to imagine:

1. An increasing intensification of the problem of sovereignty as sources and sites of authority become increasingly inconsistent with any claim to a single authority in a specific territory. Thus it seems to me that one can read a very wide range of contemporary debates, not least about global governance, global civil society, or the strange status of the World Bank, the WTO, various so-called regimes, etc not in terms of some easy claim about the disappearance of sovereignty but precisely an intensification of the problem of sovereignty, and as a sense that this problem has to be posed on terms other than we have been used to. For all that modern social science has been able to churn out utilitarian accounts of regime formation and governmentality, it seems scarcely capable of even asking questions about legitimate authority. These are precisely the questions, it seems to me, that are raised by all those critical literatures that the social scientists tend to dismiss as trivial and irresponsible. This seems to me to be a rather profound mistake. Whether in the wider world or in claims about knowledge, the key issues are those of legitimate authority, of authorization. It seems to me to be quite clear that our futures will involve increasingly contested struggles over the authorization of authority. This is very largely what is at stake in claims about democratization, rights, and all the rest. Authority Blegitimate authorization Bis at the heart of our modern dilemmas. There is no point in pretending that we can respond to it by saying that sovereignty is still here or that its gone forever.

2. A decreasing plausibility of the specifically modern way of framing sovereignty as a relation between a specific pointBthe monopoly of legitimate authorityB and the drawing of sharp lines between either territorial spaces or between, say, public and private, politics and governmentality, friend and enemy. The specifically modern, which is to say spatially organized, account of where and what sovereignty must be is in serious trouble. Perhaps the easiest phenomenon to identify in this respect is the changing character of boundaries, which are increasingly porous and disaggregated, though it is certainly not the case that boundaries are going away; they may even be proliferating. This kind of idea has been extensively notedBRuggie, Sassen, etc. I would say simply that contemporary politics is characterized by an increasing difficulty of drawing the line, physically or metaphorically.

3. This trouble extends to the modern constitutions of states and the norms of the states system as well. It is here especially that there is a danger of falling into a misleading zero-sum game. States will be able to fudge this issue for quite some time, and in any case there will be huge variation across different states in different structural situations. But there is no clear reason to expect any clear correlations between any measures we might use to evaluate the powers, influences or scale of state institutions and the measures we might use to evaluate the state of a state=s sovereignty. Theses about the decline of state sovereignty understood as a monopoly of authority in a specific territory are quite compatible with theses about the continuing or even increasing scale, size, influence and so on of statist institutions. They are also quite compatible with claims about the proliferation of sovereignties as long as we don=t conflate the practices of sovereignty with the practices of state sovereignty; but then, of course, we run into very difficult questions about what it means to disaggregate political communities, identities and so on. (It has been noted that because sovereignty came late to economic/financial systems, contemporary changes in these areas are less important; except that state-econ-finance now complex.)

4. So as we move into #4, life gets very complicated because again we are encouraged to think of sovereignty as an all or nothing affair. What we see instead it seems to me is both a proliferation of sovereignties and a decline in the plausibility of claims about state sovereignty. Moreover, where state sovereignty was conceived as a more or less unchanging spatial, territorial affair, fixed on land, modern sovereignties seem to be highly mobile. It is not clear to me that anyone has got a clear conceptual grip on this, but if one tries to read the movements of agencies and governmentalities that are at work in the contemporary world, it is not difficult to get a sense of sovereignties as temporary and specific in their claims. They are much more difficult to map than the sovereignties of states, and by the official codes of sovereign states they are not sovereignties at all. But then, it would not take much to argue that there are also no sovereign states at all either, no matter how much state agents might insist that there are.

5. With #5 we are on territory that seems the furthest removed from matters of state sovereignty as conventionally conceived by analysts of international relations and law, but of course closest to the heart of political theorists like myself. For it is one of the effects of the discourse mobilized by claims to state sovereignty that there is a huge gap between the concerns of international relations and the concerns of the political theorist. This gap has long seemed to me to be nonsense, but also difficult to negotiate.

In this context, one might talk at length here about some key themes. I will only mention some of them:

i. the claims of modern state sovereignty have long been in tension with claims about popular sovereignty. This is what generates the problem of democracy. I would note only that in the context of all the noise about globalization especially, the problem of democratization is a bit of a problem.

ii. the claims of modern state sovereignty have been the condition under which it has been possible to construct the category of citizenship as our primary form of political identity. Again, I would say only that in a world of movement, multiple identities, and all the rest, one should probably look at the ways in which the concept of citizenship is being rearticulated.

iii. The modern account of state sovereignty was worked out intellectually on the basis of a modern concept of a free and equal subject: the individual in the paradigmatic case of Hobbes, the nation as the major alternative variation on the same theme. And again, I would only say that while there may be a lot of individualism and nationalism about, the regulative ideal of the single self-identical autonomous individual or nation is increasingly difficult to sustain.

So, it=s a complicated picture; and I would say one that needs to be made even more complicated. What is not on the agenda is the simple minded notion that state sovereignty is here forever or gone tomorrow.

What then does one look for?

First, I think it is important to pay some attention to the way the basic paradox of sovereignty was resolved in the early modern period, and I am referring here both to the extraordinary conceptualization worked out by Hobbes and to the more concrete expressions of something very close to Hobbes= position that we generally choose to associate with the Treaty of Westphalia.

It is worth noting that the tension between secularisms and religions was crucial in both cases.

It was also crucially a resolution that depended on two key and related moves. One was to identify a fixed point in space and time and one was to draw straight lines between points. Modern sovereignty can be understood quite simply as the capacity of a monopolistic centre to be able to draw the line, and to draw this line both physically and metaphorically.

Moreover, modern sovereignty expresses not simply a point, or a line of authority, but a point/line at which claims about universality and plurality are resolved, a specific account of how universality and diversity must be related. Modern accounts of state sovereignty cannot be understood as a claim about either fragmented authority, as the claims about international anarchy would have it, or a claim about monopolies of authority in a particular territory would have it, but a very specific account of the proper relationship between unity and diversity, order and anarchy.

This is what gives us our historically specific way of responding to the problem of sovereignty with a specifically modern account of sovereignty as that which is able to draw clear lines between the normal and the exceptional, here and there, legitimate and illegitimate, citizen and non-citizen and all the rest. This is also what makes it seem so desirable but also impossible to deal with the problem of sovereignty by imagining a move from anarchy to universality.

Thus contrary to the ways in which claims to universality and claims to particularity are conceived as opposites B nationalism/globalism, realism/idealism, domestic jurisdiction/humanitarian intervention B they are part of the same package and are subject to all kinds of rhetorical switches and reversals, as we have seen in debates about the bombing of Kosovo among other cases.

Second, it seems to me, then, that what is at stake is not the eternal presence or imminant absence of sovereignty, but:

1. the proliferation; that is, functional disaggregation, multiplication and spatial differentiation of centres of sovereign authority

2. the decreasing capacity of central authorities to draw lines at the same place; thus the disaggregation of borders. Moreover, lines of inclusion/exclusion are being challenged by lines of connection. This is why so many of the major intellectual moves of our time involve metaphor of networks and relationalities rather than of things and their containers.

3. the increasing mobility but also only temporary effectiveness of functionally disaggregate authorities.

4. the increasingly contestable status of all such authorities that are no longer able to draw all lines once and for all in the same place.

5. the consequent struggle between two quite different forms of democratic practice, one concerned to work within the spaces of political representation carved out by modern sovereign states, and one concerned to challenge the assumption of sovereignty by proliferating and functionally/spatially disagregated authorities.

All of this comes with three obvious warnings:

i. one should not underestimate the continuing power of state institutions, even though state institutions are not coextensive with nations, territories, communities, identities or authorities.

ii. one should not underestimate the continuing appeal of forms of politics that seek to draw lines of inclusion and exclusion, though these lines are no longer drawn on simple territorial space

iii. one should not underestimate the highly variable application of these considerations in different settings. Whether one speaks in the language of uneven development or of cultural/regional difference, we are dealing here with many potential variations on a very complex theme.

Nevertheless, as a basic point of departure for thinking about the all these things, one should not assume that one can use the categories of modern sovereignty B the categories of modern space, time and identity B to figure out what else is going on anywhere, including what is going on with what seems to me to be a fairly profound re-articulation of political space, time and authority, the basic categories that are expressed by modern sovereignty.

In the proverbial nutshell, the problem of sovereignty is going to become ever more difficult, intense, and contested, while the modern framing of state sovereignty as a spatial enclosure in which all contingencies can be contained and all decisions rendered as legal/illegal here/there is going to seem increasingly nostalgic. Which is why any serious analysis simply has to engage with all those arcane paradoxes that are written into the heart of our supposedly common sense.