Sovereignty is in some ways the most basic idea of modern international relations. States are the
representation of sovereignty. The hundred ninety plus states are the principal actors in the world.
Sovereignty means that within the borders of a state, that government has complete authority. The people
who control a country--they are able to decide what kind of a political system they want to have. They have
control over the resources. They have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. They are meant to control what
goes in and what comes out. They are the sole legitimate representative of the country as a whole. And
states agree to recognize these rights of other states. So essentially sovereignty is a set of understandings.
You can do pretty much as you please within your borders in exchange for my being able to do pretty much as
I please within my borders.
A good deal of history has been about the urge of peoples to have countries of their own--essentially,
to become sovereign. When sovereignty came along as an idea roughly four centuries ago, it was a big innovation
because before then, you had a world not made up of states for the most part, not made up of countries,
of empires and the like, where you had constant warring, where one party was always involved in the internal
workings of another. So when sovereignty came about, a hands-off mutual understanding, that dramatically
reduced the amount of conflict. So that was an extraordinarily positive idea. We've also seen the limits to
the idea of sovereignty. It doesn't deal with the problem of when states are too weak, they can't manage what
goes on within their borders. It doesn't deal with what happens when the government itself is the threat to
the peace within its borders. It doesn't prevent war. We obviously know that. What we see constantly throughout
history is that territory is fought over. World War I, World War II, these were wars over ideology and power,
but also over territory.
In 1990, you had Saddam Hussein, then the leader of Iraq, go into his neighboring state, Kuwait, take it over,
and absorb it into his own country. Or much more recently you had Russia go into Ukraine and take
Crimea. So stronger states, those who wish to ignore borders, not accept that the sovereignty of someone else
is sacrosanct--this is part of history. Sovereignty is not a panacea, but it has set some of the basic ground
rules of international relations.
Sovereignty is being challenged in some ways as never before. From above,
if you look at Europe for example, you have supranational arrangements. The European Union
is a challenge to sovereignty, where governments voluntarily give up certain powers to Brussels.
Sovereignty is being challenged from below. Groups like ISIS, drug cartels, pirate organizations, these are entities
that don't recognize the legitimate, unique role of the state. Sovereignty is being challenged from the side.
Globalization: when particles of carbon or emails travel, they don't say, "oh, I have to stop at the border
because that's a sovereign state." When we talk of sovereignty we often talk in fairly absolute terms--
that what goes on within a country's borders is its business alone. And that idea, while still embraced by some
governments, has been challenged throughout the modern era. In the mid-nineties, after the genocide in
Rwanda, a movement grew up to basically say, sovereignty can't be absolute. We're seeing an idea take
hold, what's called the responsibility to protect, that sovereign governments not only have rights, but
responsibilities. One of the responsibilities is not to massacre their own people, or not to allow their own
people to be massacred, or victims of genocide. And when a government is unable or unwilling to protect its
own people, the international community has a certain right to step in. What this suggests is that sovereignty
has become a little bit conditional on whether a government is willing or able to fulfill its obligations.
The challenge is how to introduce this wrinkle without undoing some of the good things of sovereignty, which
have essentially kept the world from constantly being at war with itself.