National sovereignty is a phrase that before President Donald Trump brought it into question with headline-grabbing shenanigans on Venezuela, Iran and Greenland among other places was seldom heard outside political science classrooms.
Now, however, it is at the center of debates about international law, the future world order and the need for peace and stability. The concept is under attack not only from Trump but also from elements within many societies including some Western democracies.
But before we examine those threats, let us remember what sovereignty means. It means a power or an authority that has the final word on all human affairs and in the case of some religions the fate of universe as a whole. In the ancient world, that is to say in the early Mesopotamian civilizations priest-king figures represented sovereignty.
In ancient Greek city states the elite known as demos, to be distinguished from slaves, ethnic minorities and lower classes, the plebes, claimed sovereignty.
In the heyday of Persian and Roman empires the sovereign was the emperor. In medieval times that function was transferred to the Pope in Christendom and the Caliph in lands controlled by Islam.
With Reformation and the declining status of the Pope Christendom was plunged into sectarian wars that in one form or another lasted over 100 years.
Dar al-Islam, too, was also fragmented into sultanates, emirates, khanates and ungoverned badlands on the margins where sovereignty belonged to whomever had enough force and money to impose his will.
In the 17th century some in the Christendom invented the concept of nation-states and codified it in a series of accords known as the Westphalian Treaties under which sovereignty belonged to whoever controlled a distinct territory, known as a nation regardless of religion, ethnic background or language. People in such structures were subjects rather than citizens of the established order.
Hobbes depicted sovereignty as a leviathan, a monstrous all-powerful machine or animal that has the power of life and death over everyone but in exchange offer security against the law of the jungle based on the survival of the fittest.
The American and French revolutions of the 18th century invented the concept of citizenship as the building bloc of a nation-state in which sovereignty is exercised by an elected state on behalf of the nation.
Over the past two centuries that model has been adopted by almost all countries across the globe, albeit with great variations. Even where there are no elections, for example in People’s China or North Korea the assumption or pretense is that sovereignty belongs to a nation however vaguely defined. The United Nations’ Charter has made that principle or pretense the cornerstone of international law.
Thus, a nation is regarded as sovereign regardless of its location, size, population, religion, face, history and economic or military power. It is in charge of its own destiny with its demarcated and indivisible territory. This is why, for example, the UN cannot accept Somaliland as a separate entity and still regards it as part of Somali state whose writ for all intents of purposes doesn’t run beyond Mogadishu.
The same principle is used to deny Kosovo, by all measures a genuine nation, entry into the UN.
To be sure a nation can share part of its sovereignty with other nations as many do through membership of the UN, NATO, and Organization of American States, the African Union, the European Union, the GCC, the Arab League and dozens of other organizations.
In some cases, two states share sovereignty over a territory as is the case with France and Spain exercising it over Andorra.
Now we are witnessing attacks on national sovereignty in a number of other ways. In France a couple of judges managed to change the putative results of the 2017 presidential election by condemning the leading candidate of the right of breaking the law by hiring his wife as a political assistant paid by the parliament.
A similar case has now been launched against another putative right-wing candidate, Marine Le Pen. She is charged with having used funds from the European Union to pay salaries of militants in her National Rally party. Interestingly, this time the case s brought by the European Union and one of four charges leveled is “hostility to European Union”.
In other words what is clearly a political opinion is redefined as a crime and the French nation, supposedly sovereign and in charge of its own destiny shouldn’t be allowed to decide who to vote for. Worse still denying Ms. Le Pen the right to stand for any elected office for five years comes into effect immediately even before the final sentence is pronounced.
Earlier this year the dictatorship of the judges claimed another victim, former President Nicolas Sarkozy who went to jail on four charges which the court itself admitted couldn’t prove but insisted that the intent to commit them was there.
In other words, even the mere intention of committing a crime together with others could send you to jail and make you ineligible even before a final appeal is heard.
Elsewhere in many parts of the world the concept of sovereignty is under attack by the military cliques as recently witnessed in several African states and Myanmar.
In Iran, that concept is shaken by a coterie of clerics who can decide whom to allow standing even in tightly engineered elections. A man barred today from standing for election to a minor liner position today may find himself propelled into a much more important position tomorrow.
All the above shows that the very concept of national or people’s sovereignty faces the risk of becoming a hollow shell and that could endanger the very rule of law that took mankind more than a millennium to acknowledge as antidote for the law of the jungle and its modern variation of might is right.
The World Order shaped after World War II is clearly shaken both inside many countries and across the globe with the seemingly endless Ukraine war, a clear case of trying to efface a nation’s sovereignty by force a glaring example.
Redefining national sovereignty won’t be enough. We also need to be clear about the consequences of violating it either by segments within a society or by outside powers.
