Tantamount happens with the individuals that face anonymous relations, the debilitation of the state tends to an occlusion of its sovereignty. Both psychological and sociological aspects debouch in the analysis of bureaucracies and international relations, canvassing a distributed system of governance, marking the displacement of executive functions and, in the particular case of the EU, also legislative ones, to supra-statal institutions. On the specific challenge set by the European Union on sovereignty,(1) Sorensen has highlighted the possibility of a post-modern, empirical, statehood that really imposes a horizon of transformation to the classical concept of sovereignty.(2)
Especially contended in the basic definition of sovereign state, knitting together the elements of people, authority, and territory, is the latter aspect. Rather than denying sovereignty the question has been directed towards its localization, its emplacement. In an apparent opposition but in a consistent manner appears the debate on globalization as an erosion, a dissolution or a transformation.(3) Transformation or whithering away, has to be assessed according to sovereignty’s interaction with those other contents that provided with our canonical understanding, conforming its conditions of existence, configuring a plain of consistency.(4)
The relation between the questioning of sovereignty and post-modernity is widespread in the literature.(5) In this sense, it is often referred to the will, to the capacity of action of the state rather than the assertion of power.(6) Sovereignty thus becomes a relevant discourse in the processes of construction and deconstruction of social representations.(7) Sovereignty is thus assessed as a discursive praxis privileging certain understandings, values and interests.
(1) Cf. N. MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty. Law, State and Nation in the European Commonwealth, Oxford, 2001. M. Wind, Sovereignty and European Integration. Towards a post-Hobbesian order, Houndmills, 2001. J. Habermas, “The European Nation-State -Its Achievements and its Limits”, Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the nation, New York, 1996. J. Habermas, “The European Nation-State and the Pressures of Globalization”, New Left Review 235, 1999, pp. 46-59. N. Walker, Sovereignty in Transition, Oxford, 2003.
(2) G. Sorensen, “Sovereignty: Change and continuity in a fundamental institution”, Cf. R. Jackson (ed.), Sovereignty at the Millenium, Massachusetts, 1999. Sorensen distinguishes between a constitutive aspect of sovereignty, based on the central tenets of territory, people and government, that has not suffered any alteration, and a regulative aspect, with an ample content, among which he refers to non-intervention and reciprocity, that has been modified, and an empirical statehood that is experiencing profound shifts in economic relations, the polity’s structure and the redefinition of nationhood.
(3) J.A. Camilleri and J. Falk, The End of Sovereignty? The politics of a shrinking and fragmenting world, Aldershot, 1992. For a grasp at possible future alternatives cf. D.J. Elkins, Beyond Sovereignty. Territorial and Political Economy in the Twenty-First Century, Toronto, 1995. “What I see is the beginning of the unbundling of sovereignty as we have known it for many centuries -but not always. Scholars examining changes in mentalities or social epistemologies have remarked that significant, epochal change frequently could not be grasped by contemporaries: the vocabularies, categories, master images available to them were unable to capture fundamental change. Suffering from the same limitations, all we see is the collapse of sovereignty as we know it. But it seems to me rather than sovereignty eroding as a consequence of globalization and supranational organizations, it is being transformed.” S. Saasen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an age of globalization, New York, 1996, pp. 29-30.
(4) “…associated with the concept of state sovereignty, although only fully articulated by Hobbes, is the idea of the undifferentiated individual as the basic social entity facing the power and majesty of the state as embodied in the monarch.” R.E. Dowse and J.A. Hughes, Political Sociology, Chichester, 1986, p. 98. R. Lapidoth, “Sovereignty in Transition”, Journal of International Affairs 45(2), 1992, pp. 326-346. G.H. Von Wright, “The crisis of social science and the whithering away of the nation state”, Associations 1, 1997, pp. 49-52. W.G. Werner and J.H De Wilde, “The Endurance of Sovereignty”, European Journal of International Relations 7(3), 2001, pp. 283-313. D. Philpott, “Usurping the Sovereignty of Sovereignty?” World Politics 53(2), 2001, pp. 297-324. D. Philpott, “Sovereignty: An Introduction and Brief History”, Journal of International Affairs 48, 1995, pp. 353-68.
(5) Cf. R. Jackson (ed.), op. cit. J.A. Camilleri and J. Falk, op. cit.
(6) “Though the state will continue to perform important administrative and other functions, the theory of sovereignty will seem strangely out of place in a world characterized by shifting allegiances, new forms of identity and overlapping tiers of jurisdiction.”J.A. Camilleri and J. Falk, op. cit., p. 256.
(7) T.J. Biersteker and C. Weber “The social construction of state sovereignty”, T.J. Biersteker and C. Weber (eds.), State Sovereignty as a Social Construct, Cambridge, 1996. J. Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, Cambridge, 1995.
