That supreme power could not be limited by any Constitution or by positive law. Hobbes, in De Cive , went further than Bodin in maintaining that a sovereign was not bound by anything; others such as Pufendorf, in De Jure Naturae et Gentium took a more restrictive view, acknowledging that while sovereignty was the supreme power within a State it was not an absolute power, and could be constitutionally restricted.
But virtually all agreed that sovereignty was indivisible - either a State and its ruler was sovereign, or it was not. After the Westphalian Peace of these States and their rulers enjoyed in practice even if not in theory a large degree of independence.
Yet it was not felt appropriate to treat them as sovereign States of the same standing as the major European States such as France, Sweden and England. Instead, full sovereignty was attributed to all rulers who held supreme authority within their States and enjoyed unqualified independence in their relations with other rulers.
While Kings and Emperors were accordingly acknowledged to be of the highest rank in terms of their sovereign authority, the standing of the many lesser rulers, such as Princes of varying status, Grand Dukes, and so on, was characterised by their enjoyment of only relative, partial or imperfect sovereignty.
They also established that, contrary to earlier views and despite some continuing theoretical objections e. In the essentially religious societies in which the evolution of modern statal communities was taking place, no temporal ruler could assert his supreme authority within the State without at the same time recognising the overriding spiritual authority of whatever God or God-like Being the community acknowledged.
The constitutional structures of the different States developed different ways of accommodating this need to combine spiritual and temporal authority - thus in some the ruler himself possessed divine status, in others the ruler was regarded as divinely chosen and appointed, in others divinity was seen to be reflected in natural law by which the ruler was bound notwithstanding his temporal sovereignty.
Whatever the technique, however, it was essentially one devised by the constitutional developments within the State concerned. At the beginning of the 21st century the continued theoretical utility of the concept of sovereignty is increasingly open to question.
As a concept denoting supreme legal authority it never was appropriate for the international position of States, since no State has such authority over all other States. Such political use of notions of sovereignty is nowadays little more than a nostalgic attempt to invoke the memory of past freedoms, independence and supremacy. Within the overall context of self-determination the place of sovereignty in international law requires some explanation, since self-determination is usually although erroneously seen as a quest for sovereignty and independence.
Sovereignty as a principle of international law is to be distinguished sharply from sovereignty in its internal and constitutional aspects. It is implicit in the nature of sovereignty as supreme authority that such a notion of sovereignty is inapplicable to the role of sovereign States on the international plane and within international law. Internationally, no State has supreme legal power and authority over other States in general, nor are States generally subservient to the legal power and authority of other States although in former times such claims were occasionally made, most notably in the traditional Chinese view of international relations, maintained for well over a millenium, that the rightful relationship of all foreigners with the imperial court was one of respectful subordination - a view which led to major differences on the occasion of the visit of a British diplomatic and trade mission to the Chinese Emperor, Qianlong, in Moreover, State sovereignty on the international plane would be inconsistent with the conception of international law as a body of rules of conduct binding upon States irrespective of their internal domestic law, for this implies their subjection to international law and renders untenable any claims by a State on the international plane to absolute sovereignty and to the lawfulness of its conduct being beyond question.
Sovereignty is also not to be confused with international personality. The former is based on notions of supreme authority and independence. International personality connotes the possession of rights, duties, powers and capacities in international law: whatever person or entity possesses rights, duties, powers and capacities in international law has international personality, even if that person or entity does not possess sovereignty.
Sovereign States characteristically possess the full range of international legal rights, duties, powers and capacities, and undoubtedly possess international personality. But many States which are in one way or another subject to the authority of another State and may well therefore not be fully sovereign, may nevertheless, through the possession of at least some of the legal entitlements conferred by international law, enjoy international personality albeit on a less plenary basis that do sovereign States ; the same applies to non-statal entities such as many international organisations.
Sovereignty being supreme authority necessarily implies independence. A ruler or State which is sovereign is, strictly, independent of any other temporal legal authority so far as concerns its legal powers within its borders, and is equally independent as regards its legal authority to act beyond its borders.
Independence was referred to in classic terms by Judge Anzilotti in [1] as involving. Independence as thus understood is really no more than the normal condition of States according to international law; it may also be described as sovereignty supreme potestas , or external sovereignty, by which is meant that the State has over it no other authority than that of international law As long as these restrictions [i. In the perspective of international law sovereignty has always predominantly been, and is now invariably, seen as a legal construct of the domestic constitutional law of States, of which international law takes cognisance as a fact but which is not itself based on international law.
Instead of supreme authority over all other States, sovereignty, in international law, brings into play considerations of comparative ranking similar to those which influenced the development of conceptions of sovereignty within the framework of domestic political theory. If ruler A is, in his domestic legal order, a sovereign ruler, then he is, in terms of legal standing, in the same position as ruler B who, in his domestic legal order, is also a sovereign ruler.
As between two rulers and thus their States who are both internally sovereign, the appropriate legal relationship is one of equality. The sovereignty of their States is not sovereignty as a matter of international law, but rather a sovereignty in their separate domestic laws of which international law takes due note. In international law sovereignty is more descriptive of the authority of a State and its ruler within and as a matter of domestic law than constitutive of their authority as a matter of international law: it is more an attribute of Statehood in international law, than a condition for its existence.
All States enjoy sovereign equality. They have equal rights and duties and are equal members of the international community, notwithstanding differences of an economic, social, political or other nature. A State may, without thereby losing its quality as a sovereign State, limit the exercise of its sovereign rights by concluding a treaty to that effect with one or more other States. Treaties of that kind are a commonplace of international relations. Fundamental to the sovereignty of a State is not only its internally supreme authority, and thus its independence from and equality with other similarly sovereign States, but also the spatial extent within which its supreme authority is exercised: its sovereignty is recognised within and delimited by its territory.
By virtue of its sovereignty over its internal affairs, it is inherent in the domestic law concept of sovereignty that in principle a State has exclusive authority and jurisdiction within its own territory and that other States are under a duty of non-intervention in areas subject to its exclusive jurisdiction ; in particular all States are acknowledged to have sovereignty over their natural resources.
Both of these notions - independence and territory - are part of the essential sovereignty of the State, and are cornerstones of international society and modern international law. The essentials of what is meant by territorial sovereignty in contemporary international law were identified by Judge Huber in his classic statement in his arbitral award in the Island of Palmas Case , where he said:.
Sovereignty in the relations between States signifies independence. His way out of the resulting paradox is both simple and original, and also provides an escape from the predicament described by Derrida in Force de Loi : the coming into being of a political community is propelled by a dialectic between constituting and constituted power, where the former act of sovereignty is simply a matter of seizing the initiative.
This is another remarkable way of bringing the mythological lawgiver from Du Contrat Social down to earth, yet without ending up in the arms of old Nick in doing so. Richard Bellamy shares these concerns with democratic legitimacy and rights within the European Union, but delivers a different solution. He is critical both of the view that state sovereignty has been transferred to other bodies and the view that it has evaporated in favour of an international rights regime.
To him, political sovereignty still persists, but changing legal norms have altered its basis. Bellamy goes on to specify the principles of mixed sovereignty that would satisfy these requirements, thereby returning to and reviving the ideals of civic republicanism. The aim is to produce a balance between the interests and values of individuals and groups within the polity, obliging them to interact with each other in fair and reciprocal ways. Bellamy envisages a polity in which all arbitrary power is kept in check and in which unity is based on constant dialogue and negotiation, but he has little to say about the boundaries of such a polity.
How are they to be drawn, and in whose name? Here Bellamy, like many other political philosophers, remains silent. Another approach to the question of democratic legitimacy is taken up by Michael Keating. Noting how the notoriously ambiguous concept of sovereignty nevertheless has been constitutive of the disciplines of political science and international relations, he proceeds to describe the challenges faced by the modern sovereign nation-state, and the reasons why these disciplines have had a hard time making sense of these challenges.
This solution of course begs the question of why the nation should still be conceived of as the exemplary form of community, and to what extent it should be regarded as the predominant source of political will in a world in which the very idea of distinct and bounded national identities is under challenge. The relationship between transnationalism and sovereignty receives a refreshing treatment in the hands of Jef Huysmans, who raises the question whether the existence of transnational practices really defies the logic of sovereignty in international politics, or if it merely constitutes one of its many reproductive circuits.
Rather than merely reiterating any of the standard views about the corrosive effects of transnational practices upon state sovereignty, Huysmans reformulates this problem in terms of how these practices might affect the matrix of sovereignty, understood as the way in which the question of the political conventionally has been formulated in terms of a territorialized distinction between the domestic inside and the international outside.
The existence of transnational practices thus opens up the possibility of envisaging politics in terms of pluralization instead of unification, making it possible to rework the matrix of sovereignty and thus align it closer to a democratic ethos.
Yet if the spectre of sovereignty seems difficult to escape, I suspect that this is at least partly due to the fact that the author takes its presence as the starting point for his analysis. The fact that most of the contributors to this volume are inclined to take some aspects of sovereignty for granted, while struggling hard to question others, finds a tentative explanation in an essay by Govert Buijs, which explores the theological background of this concept.
He attempts to assess the claim, once made by Carl Schmitt, that sovereignty originally and basically is a theological concept which has been gradually secularized. While Buijs does not provide us with anything like a comprehensive conceptual history, he succeeds in unearthing several layers of theological meaning that have been long lost to political and legal philosophy.
He then describes how these meanings have continued to condition our understanding of sovereignty despite or possibly because of our best efforts to secularize our political and legal theories. Being the blind spot of these attempts, the concept of sovereignty necessarily brings a whiff of incense from another world. These theoretical expositions are followed by a series of ambitious attempts to analyse the meaning and function of the concept of sovereignty within different national constitutional traditions, as well as from the point of view of European institutions.
Jacques Ziller describes how and why the idea that it might be possible to divide and share sovereignty has been so hard to reconcile with the French constitutional tradition, torn between conceptions of national and popular sovereignty both of which are premised on its indivisibility. This has posed an obstacle to the French understanding of European integration. But for better or worse, Le mal de Bodin or the fetishism of indivisibility has been highly contagious throughout the centuries and in different countries.
As indicated by Miriam Aziz and Marta Cartabia respectively, the problem of sovereignty is very much alive even in those countries — Italy and Germany — where it appears to have been a relative latecomer. Kenneth Armstrong describes how the British constitutional tradition and its location of sovereignty in Parliament increasingly is challenged, and tries to reconcile the claims of common law constitutionalists and pluralists in order to accommodate internal devolution as well as emergence of new sites of political authority outside the British state.
Bruno de Witte offers valuable insights from the Dutch and Belgian contexts, where the fetishism of indivisibility has long since been replaced by the kind of constitutional pluralism and pragmatism that seems so desirable, yet has proven so hard to attain in other contexts. When seen from a European perspective, the constitutional plurality represented by the existence of distinct and relatively continuous national traditions represents both the motivating force behind legal integration as well as its primary obstacle.
There seems to be a vanishing point beyond which efforts to reconcile these different traditions is likely to become caught in a pragmatic paradox. As Jo Shaw argues in the case of electoral rights and the question of boundaries in the European Union, this again boils down to what has been a recurrent theme throughout this volume, namely the problem of how to construct a European demos on the basis of an idea of the EU as a legitimate political order, and conversely.
Almost encyclopaedic in its scope and impressive in its intellectual ambitions, this volume is a landmark achievement. It is likely to become a standard reference for all those interested in the recent debate on the problem of sovereignty. The focus on the concept of sovereignty endows the volume with coherence because of an underlying agreement to disagree about its proper meaning and the limits of its contestability.
Consequently, most of the contributions to this volume cannot but confirm the salience of this concept within our political and legal vocabularies. Yet this leads to another set of difficulties. On the one hand, some of the contributors to this volume understand sovereignty as a condition of possible agency, ultimately being constitutive of both political entities and the larger society of which they form part.
From the point of view of conceptual realism, the concept of sovereignty appears indispensable. On the other hand, other authors are more inclined to regard sovereignty as an attribute of individual entities, ultimately being constituted by virtue of their being embedded within a larger legal framework.
From this nominalist point of view, the concept of sovereignty appears profoundly problematic. But how and why have we gotten into this intellectual predicament, in which the concept of sovereignty is both indispensable and problematic? Rather than attempting to define the term sovereignty in order to be able to discuss its proper theoretical meaning, Beaulac instead focuses on the constitutive functions of this concept within early-modern legal and political discourse.
Starting from the assumption that attempts at definition are futile since language cannot transcend itself, the author goes on to elaborate the philosophical foundations of an inquiry into the function of legal concepts and myths within legal discourse. Drawing on classical hermeneutics and deconstruction, Beaulac then devises an interpretative scheme that purports to make sense of the salience of the concept of sovereignty and the myth of Westphalia in the shaping of the normative structure of the modern society of states.
Hence, words and myths have the power not only to describe and represent reality, but also to actively create and transform it. To Beaulac, the alleged universalistic and timeless connotations of the concept of sovereignty are dynamically constituted through the changing employment of the very term sovereignty. In these texts, the idea of a territorially-based system of independent states is nowhere to be found. These documents dealt with questions of religious toleration, territorial settlements, and the power to make treaties, but never with the kind of wholesale reconfiguration of the political order which we have been led to believe by so much modern scholarship.
In fact, these documents went a long way towards preserving the power and prerogatives of empire in Europe. In the fourth part, Beaulac sets out to explain how this myth has been fabricated by analysing the meaning and function of the concept of sovereignty in the writings of Bodin and Vattel. With this diagnosis, Beaulac has provided some important clues as to why the concept of sovereignty today seems both indispensable and profoundly problematic. It is indispensable by virtue of being a constitutive element of the modern political order, yet whenever we try to decipher that very order by means of this concept, our attempts to gain understanding are short-circuited due to the very same circularity of language that made the linguistic constitution of that order possible in the first place.
Nonetheless, while some of his points about Westphalia and Bodin have been noted elsewhere, this book fruitfully explores the connections between different concepts of sovereignty and the myth of Westphalia. So what world do we live in, and what kind of entities make up this world?
The books under review here convey above all the impression of a world in constant flux. The volumes edited by Ilgen and Walker both describe the transition from a world of sovereign states to a world in which sovereignty has been relocated to different levels above as well as below that of the state.
But while the contributors to the former volume use the concept of sovereignty in order to describe some aspects of this transition, the contributors to the latter focus on the implications of this transition for the concept of sovereignty and its applicability when justifying the possible outcomes of this change. To Beaulac, all of this is possible only thanks to the prior constitution of sovereignty as the basic organizing principle in an international society of states.
The concept of sovereignty thus contains the seeds of its own essential contestability. This common focus on questions of becoming makes questions of being intrinsically hard to formulate. But while Beaulac and Ilgen are content to describe the coming into being and passing away of the Westphalian world, the Walker volume can be read as a juridico-political bestiarium, covering a wide range of constitutional alternatives to those prevailing in that world.
This volume could also be read symptomatically to indicate what seems to be the main source of confusion today. Not only do we live in a world in which the territorial differentiation into distinct nation-states is being challenged by a functional differentiation into distinct issue areas, but we also live in a world in which the sovereign equality of states no longer constitutes the baseline for further stratification according to relative wealth and power.
In this world, there are several normative frameworks competing for both legality and legitimacy when it comes to justifying political practices, such as intervention.
The traditional statist framework of international law has been challenged, first by ideas of universal human rights and corollary pleas for cosmopolitan democracy, and then by emergent claims to imperial sovereignty made by the United States and its allies. I take the articulation of such a meta-vocabulary to be the chief task of political and legal theory in the years to come, so that the alternatives to the world of states can be gradually evaluated on their own merits.
Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty For different versions of this argument, see, e. Krasner, Sovereignty. The tension between these views has been explored by I. Hacking, Historical Ontology See, e. Held, Democracy and the Global Order. Archibugi, D. Held and M. Brock and H. Brighouse eds , The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner , at 1— Burns and M.
Fasolt, The Limits of History Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.
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