Sovereignty

For centuries sovereignty remained the bedrock of the world order and this principle was earnestly and broadly respected and followed. Sovereignty had become the closest there is to a universal principle promoting order in the world and held preference over all other concepts related to governance.

The application of this principle was exclusively applicable to states that can legitimately claim sovereignty. Sovereignty is closely tied to the supremacy of governmental authority within a country’s given borders.

This applies to all who live or happen to be present there regardless of the form of government. Individuals and other entities such as corporations have rights but on most issues they must respect the ultimate authority of the national government of a country and those who act in its name unless the constitution or law of the country provides otherwise. This condition is specific and is required to be adhered to unconditionally.

The specifics are for the government and in some cases people of particular countries to decide. Sovereignty also has an international dimension though unlike the domestic definition, sovereignty in the international context connotes equality. All countries, no matter what their size or population or power or wealth, are equal in their rights and significantly in the notion that their borders are to be respected by other states. Non interference in the internal affairs of another country is a hallmark of sovereignty and has been a long-standing practice. A political entity qualifies as a sovereign country if it possesses supreme political authority and an exclusive right to legitimately use of force within its borders. In other words, it can enforce its laws and punish those who break them and its citizens recognise the government’s authority to do so.

This exclusive provision to monopolise the use of coercive force has been frequently debated in human rights forums and considerable objections are raised about the indiscriminate use of this power.

The government of a state is supposed to be able to control its borders and regulate all that enters and leaves its territory from goods to people. In return, a country has the ability to adopt the domestic policies of its choosing. Moreover, a country is one recognized by its peers meaning other sovereign countries. Normally, this recognition manifests itself in the establishment of embassies, the exchange of ambassadors and diplomatic interactions such as concluding treaties. The UN General Assembly is composed only of entities, that is to say countries that meet or at their time of entry were thought to meet these criterias.

Sovereignty is widely considered near but not quite absolute. An ongoing debate is tied to the question of whether there ought to be legitimate grounds for intervening, including with military force in the internal affairs of other countries such as preventing genocide defined as the purposeful destruction of a group of people based on their race, religion, ethnicity or national identity. Central to this debate is whether order ought to reflect more than relations between countries and take into account what goes on within them. In recent years, there has been an effort to rebalance the rights of the state and the rights of the individual away from the former and toward the latter. Under this line of thinking, sovereignty is something of a contract between a government and both its citizens and other governments and when a government is unable or unwilling to live up to its responsibilities, it forfeits some of the rights that normally come with being sovereign. One of these rights is the presumption of non interference and a free hand for it to do what it wants at home.

A decade after genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the world embraced the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (commonly referred to as R2P), which in principle provides a basis for interventions by other countries or regional or global organisations, be it with words, sanctions, or even military force in situations in which a government carries out or fails to prevent mass atrocities against people living in its territory. In practice, the R2P doctrine has not fared well. The United States and its NATO allies invoked R2P to justify their intervention in Libya in 2011, but several governments, above all China and Russia came to view the doctrine with suspicion when what began as a humanitarian effort to deter attacks against civilians morphed into an effort to oust the ruling regime. It also turns out that R2P can be extraordinarily difficult and costly to carry out. There is also the reality that many governments, including China, Russia, and India, tend to resist any exception to the notion of absolute sovereignty out of concern that a precedent could be established that might be used to constrain what it is they do or would like to do within their own borders.

In addition, when a government allows a terrorist group to operate freely in its territory, it cannot expect its borders to be respected by actual or would-be victims of that terrorism. This was the case with the Taliban-led Afghan government which saw its sovereign rights violated after it allowed al-Qaeda to use Afghanistan as a base from which to carry out the 11 September, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States. Similarly, when one country violates the sovereignty of another country directly, be it with military force or cyber-attacks, it legitimises retaliation against it either in kind or with other means chosen by the victim.

Though the belief in sovereignty is near absolute yet instances of outside interference in the matters of a state have become a common occurrence usually on the pretext of protecting human rights of people. This interference categorically reveals that respect for even the most basic of international rules is far from universal and it is questioned in many cases with adversarial results. It should be added that sovereignty can also be voluntarily constrained or even ceded or delegated. This, for example, is what countries do inside the European Union, where they pool their sovereignty, allowing the EU’svarious organs to make decisions that affect them. Other countries do something similar in the World Trade Organization. In all such cases, governments do so out ofthe belief that on balance their interests are better served by engaging in collective decision making even ifoccasionally decisions are made that they disagree with.What is critical in all these cases is that the transfer of sovereignty is partial and voluntary and can be rescinded at any time.

Sovereign states and their governments are not the only pieces on the chessboard in the international system. There are also corporations, nongovernmental organisations such as Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders and Greenpeace, foundations, members of the media, religious authorities, governors and mayors, and regional and global organizations—not to mention terrorists, drug cartels, andpirates. The reality is that while countries usually wield more power and influence than other actors, they are not alone in their ability to do so and they are not always in aposition to prevent others from asserting themselves. The result is a world defined more by the principle that state sovereignty is dominant than by the reality and this notion is open to alteration in many respects.