⁂ Concepts · Society · No. 142
Sovereignty

Antarctica: the claims suspended rather than resolved, for sixty-five years.

Sovereignty

Supreme authority within a territory, answerable to no higher power - and the question of whether anything actually has it.

Theme
Society, politics and power
Tradition
Modern
Term fixed
1651

In plain terms

Sovereignty is the claim that within some territory there is a final authority - somewhere the buck stops, with nothing above it to appeal to.

It is a strange idea when you look at it. Nothing in nature marks a border, and no fact about a stretch of land determines who decides there. Sovereignty is something states assert about each other and accept reciprocally, which makes it a mutual arrangement that everyone treats as a fact.

And the arrangement is under pressure from several directions. Treaties bind. International courts rule. Capital moves without asking. Climate ignores borders entirely. Whether sovereignty survives as anything more than a legal formality is a live question, and the states that insist on it most loudly are usually the ones finding it hardest to exercise.

As a philosopher would put it

Bodin defines sovereignty as absolute and perpetual power, and Hobbes makes it indivisible - a sovereign that can be resisted or limited is not one, since the point is to have a final decision-maker who ends disputes rather than joining them.

The distinction between internal and external sovereignty matters: supremacy over everything within the territory, and independence from any outside authority. Constitutional government complicates the first by dividing powers, and international law complicates the second by binding states to rules they cannot unilaterally repeal.

Schmitt's definition - the sovereign is he who decides on the exception - locates it in the power to suspend the normal legal order, which makes sovereignty prior to law rather than constituted by it, and has been enormously influential and enormously contested. Postcolonial scholarship adds that sovereignty was extended selectively: the same European states that treated it as absolute for themselves denied it to most of the world, and the resulting order is not symmetric.

Where you meet it

Seven states have made territorial claims in Antarctica, and several of them overlap. The Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959 by twelve states and now with fifty-eight parties, deals with this by neither recognising nor rejecting any of them.

Article IV is the operative provision. Nothing in the treaty is to be interpreted as a renunciation of any claim, as prejudicing any state's position, or as a basis for asserting or denying one - and no new claim may be made while it is in force. The claims are not resolved. They are suspended.

What runs the continent instead is a consultative meeting of the treaty parties, with inspections, a ban on military activity and a comprehensive environmental protocol. It is a functioning legal order for a landmass larger than Europe in which the question of who is sovereign has been deliberately left open for sixty-five years - which suggests that sovereignty is less indispensable to governing a territory than the theory claims.

What is actually disputed

Whether sovereignty is indivisible.

Hobbes and Schmitt both insist it is: a divided sovereign is a recipe for civil war, and in a genuine emergency someone must be able to decide without appeal. Federal and constitutional systems demonstrate that divided authority works in practice, which either refutes the theory or shows that they retain an undivided sovereign somewhere less visible.

The external question is sharper. If a state is bound by treaties it cannot unilaterally escape, subject to courts whose rulings it accepts, and constrained by markets it does not control, then external sovereignty is a legal fiction maintained for diplomatic purposes. Defenders reply that the state retains the capacity to withdraw and that this is what sovereignty consists in - which makes it a reserve power that is never used and would be catastrophic if it were.

Commonly confused with

  • Autonomy 1785 Autonomy in the individual sense concerns self-legislation by a person. The political sense is older and concerns communities.

Defined against

  • Common good An authority answerable to nothing and an authority justified by what it serves are different accounts of what political power is for

Philosophers

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Legitimacy 1651 · The state 1532 · Power 1532 · Rights 1689 · Country

Bodin gives the first systematic definition in 1576; Hobbes makes it absolute and indivisible, and the Westphalian origin story that textbooks repeat is a nineteenth-century construction historians now largely reject.