Freshpolitique

A Memorandum from the Office of the State Philosopher

Dear Readers, my core belief is that the progress of universal human rights is contingent on achieving a stable balance between the principles of sovereignty (ultimate political authority), legitimacy (consent of the governed, plus external recognition by others), and subsidiarity (decentralization of political and economic governance, combined with ecologically sustainable social size). That’s a mouthful, and a mindful, for sure. The main goal of my para-diplomatic dispatches is to imagine, and then articulate, how such progress has been made by the year 2045, a generation from now, in particular regions of international conflict. These missives to the UN official in charge of monitoring and advancing human rights conditions worldwide are mostly “lookbacks”—attempts to assess how mostly good things have come to pass, against the odds, based on what we are witnessing at the present time.

Once in a while, I depart from my self-determined norm, to dig a bit deeper into the aforementioned principles and attempt to explain how they are interconnected and carry meaning in both private and public lives. This is one of those times; I’ll be delving into sovereignty in the format of a Memorandum from the Office of the State Philosopher. (Can you imagine such an institutional edifice, and who might people it? Scary fun--scarier still when one contemplates the prospective operational role of generative AI.) So, this is a dispatch from the home office, as it were, with nothing foreign or exotic on offer, just some highly caffeinated ruminations on a substantive subject.

MEMO TO: UN HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

FROM: OFFICE OF THE STATE PHILOSOPHER

DATELINE: JULY 4, 2045

On the Matter of Sovereignty. When will the world get beyond organizing itself into sovereign nation states? History has proven that the competition between countries pursuing perceived and narrowly construed national interests heightens the probability of war. Contemporary global crises clearly transcend national borders and require concerted collective action. Tyrants shelter their brutalities behind the legal façade of national sovereignty, a doctrine which in most cases prevents humanitarian interventions to prevent genocidal violence within state boundaries.

The legitimacy of the nation-state is in decline, owing to several factors: the corrosive effects of endemic corruption, the draining away of fealty to constitutional order as people coalesce around religious fanaticisms, the erosion of faith and trust in systems of governance that are prone to insolvency, technological innovations and patterns of commerce that transcend political boundaries, the poverty of ideas and the lack of leaders who can inspire loyalty and solidarity. The coercive power of the state continues to be undermined by the complexity of transactions taking place in cyberspace. The loss of legitimacy is most acute in mega states—huge, populous, multi-ethnic countries like China, Russia, the United States.

All that said, the concept of national sovereignty has a tenacious grip on the hearts and minds of most world citizens. As Patrick Stewart cogently reminded us way back in 2010, writing in the quarterly journal Foreign Affairs,

There may have been a certain erosion of the powers of the nation-state in recent decades, but the nation-state remains the primary locus of identity of most people, regardless of who their employer is [a reference to the economic majesty of transnational corporations], and what they do for a living. Individuals pay taxes to the State, are subject to its laws, serve (if need be) in its armed forces, and can travel only by having its passport.

Predictions of the demise of this international order are legion, but nothing definitive has emerged to replace the model. The United Nations remains what it has always been, an assembly of independent countries, large, small, gigantic, tiny, working together to solve problems, their efforts based on the legal construct of “sovereign equality”. This vital and activating myth is roughly analogous to the legal and political norm of equality of all citizens, no matter how weak or strong, under the law in democratic republics like the United States. The grossly inconsistent adherence to equality doesn’t diminish the majesty of the idea.

Sovereignty is a principle, a concept, an issue. It has become, over many centuries, a pervasive and binding fiction that is laden with enduring controversies. Sovereignty is where domestic and international politics intersect, where national and international laws both converge and diverge, where many citizens’ ideas and understandings of their place in the world go off in all directions.

Sovereignty gets frequent mention in the news media. There are diverse and diffuse uses of the term across many genres of discourse: consumer sovereignty in Econ 101, cultural sovereignty in anthropology and sociology, economic sovereignty in diplomatic confabs like the BRICS assembly of big developing countries and the G7 cluster of industrial democracies. For the past 20 years at least, commentators have asserted that “sovereign debt” might be solved by a Sovereign Wealth Fund.

Popular sovereignty, the belief that people are the sole source of legitimate power, has spawned many versions of populism as a political ideology. Sadly, populist regimes are generally headed by wannabe authoritarians. This is one of the reasons why author David Elkins refers to the most obvious forms of sovereignty as “organized hypocrisy.” There are lots of different takes on sovereignty, but they are not disparate enough to render the term a useless vagary.

There is a basic understanding of sovereignty that is widely distributed across the world. “Political independence and territorial integrity” define the sovereign state in international legal parlance. Everybody gets it, even if aggressors routinely seek to violate the law of nations. Absent any wildly divergent DIY definitions, sovereignty is what it is: the central organizing principle of world order. Sovereignty connotes ultimate governing authority; sovereign governments are believed to have exclusive monopoly on the legitimate use of force within their respective territories.

This conventional understanding masks big arguments are about where ultimate authority is actually housed—in the self, in the nation (or “nation state”), in the Lord God Almighty of the Universe. I will address this trifurcation in due course.

Historically, sovereign authority was believed (by many, not all) to be housed in the corpus of a divinely appointed monarch. Remember Louis XIV’s famously proclaimed L’etat, C’est Moi. (I AM THE STATE!) To this day, remarkable as it seems, people in nominally democratic and secular countries still believe that their head of state—even a personage known to be corrupt, morally depraved, and mentally unstable—enjoys the blessed protection of God. This was true during the Trump era, and also in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Putin grasped for support of the Russian Orthodox Church to justify his regime’s murderous groping of Ukraine. Even more perplexing is how the officially atheist regime of the Chinese Communist Party garners public support by professing that their governance accords with “The Mandate of Heaven”. Aspiring and actual leaders of nation states of all stripes invoke the divine in times of crisis.

Heads of state—those imbued with genuine executive authority--have a seemingly inexorable tendency to covet sovereign power. This is not true with modern monarchs, those nominal heads of state whose primary role is to symbolize national unity. The irony is richly unrewarding for modern republics: strong-minded executives, especially in presidential (not parliamentary) systems, seek a restoration of what amounts to absolute monarchy in the verbal guise of “unitary executive” authority, while the authentic hereditary royals settle for good works and regal pageantries that soothe the souls of ordinary citizens.

The Semi-Sovereign Self. Let’s return for a moment to the principle of popular sovereignty. As I write this, on July 4, it occurs to me that “We the People” in the U.S. Constitutions pretty much says it all, especially when juxtaposed to the phraseology of “unalienable rights endowed by their Creator” in the Declaration of Independence. Ever since the American Revolution, across much of the world, individuals constitute the body politic that legitimizes government. That’s all well and good. But the sovereign individual is, in large part, a mythical creature. The concept does not take account of the We in Me.

In the sovereign state of me, myself and I, who or what is in charge of my thinking, my behavior, my sense of self? In carrying out the dictates of my catechistic Catholic upbringing at Christ the King church, and carrying out a routine bed-time examination of conscience, what part of my inner self is looking at the other parts? In such an examination, what faculty of mind (or soul, if there’s a difference) is being brought to bear on remembered actions and inactions? What part of me is analyzing the rest of me? What (semi) detached element of my personal identity is analyzing the whole slate of conscious choices made in myriad social situations?

In my imagined sovereign self, things are in flux, owing to the well-researched left brain/right brain dichotomy, and to more subjective phenomena like gut feelings and mood swings. Consider also both the intended and side effects of prescription drugs, the behavioral influences of stuff like mushrooms and ketamine as well as illicit narcotics like meth and fentanyl. Is someone afflicted with schizophrenia sovereign in their own mind? Dare I mention dementia in all its forms? Then there is the sobering and humbling reality of the temporary yet sometimes lethal sovereignty of germs, viruses, and other pathogens. We are always subordinate to “selfish” genes, and also vulnerable to the mind-altering bites of ticks, mosquitoes, and other bugs.

Having acknowledged the complicated relationship between personal sovereignty and consciousness in individuals’ lives, we now have to concern ourselves with the less well-known phenomena of subconscious motivations in affairs of state--how the collective unconsciousness (Jung et.al.) figures into international relations. The false consciousness and class consciousness in Marxist-Leninist dogma has not been fully discredited, and the social impacts of 24/7 propaganda are still being measured, assessed, and debated. Normal people continue to act crazily when confronted with myriad concoctions of conspiracy threats to the national interest.

The threads of memory, devotion, and expectation connecting individual citizens to their nation are strong and enduring. Much of the psychological roots of this sentimental attraction are nurtured within families. Think of sons and daughters whose forebears carry a military pedigree. In times of war, the state can issue a draft that can apply to all able-bodied citizens young enough to climb ropes and drive drones. This exemplifies the coercive nature of the state. But we know that many citizens are compelled by other factors to join in the fight. It’s not the force of law that motivates their action, rather it’s the moral compulsion to do one’s duty, to not reject or abandon one’s sense of fealty to the nation. This tension between duties coerced and duties devoted has existed for centuries. It may change in one direction or the other, depending om young people’s susceptibility to the ceaseless propaganda of social media, some of which aims to ignite fervent nationalism, some of which effectively dampens it down by emphasizing the absurdities of militarized patriotism. John Lennon’s Imagine still has purchase in the mindsets of youth around the world.

In the now, it's an observable reality all over the world: sovereign selves willingly surrender much of their individual freedom (for a time, anyway) to risk their lives in defense of their nation. They do so, for the most part, believing the cause of collective self-defense is just, ordained in fact by a sovereign god. (The old adage that there are few if any atheists on the battlefield comes to mind here. It may not be true, but the evidence that individual warriors and warring armies alike fight under the proverbial banner of heaven is overwhelming.)

Such devotions are heartfelt, and generally un-philosophized. Citizens feel duty bound to act in ways that are categorically not in their best interest, if physical survival is the sine qua non of one’s existence.

Nations and States. Let’s move on and re-focus on the world order dimension of sovereignty. The conflation of “nation” and “state” into the term “nation-state” is a commonplace occurrence, especially among pundits and holders of high public office. Only public intellectuals (some of whom could justly be labeled scholarly nitpickers) are quick to decouple the terminology and provide correctives to what they regard as the misguided nomenclature of international affairs. Such critics of language have a valid point: nations and states are only very rarely the same thing.

Nations are communities that share a language and culture. Nations inspire loyalty, devotion, belongingness—a love of country. Nations evoke emotional expressions of patriotism and reverence for the oftentimes hard lessons of shared experience.

States are institutional instrumentalities that command obedience, enforce laws, issue passports and edicts regarding compulsory military service and the payment of taxes. States are forceful; they are the governing formations that actually carry the weight and burden of sovereignty on behalf of people who believe themselves to constitute a nation.

This type of corrective categorization—distinguishing states from nations in public discourse—is useful in analyzing the causes and consequences of international conflict. It’s not possible to understand the seemingly perpetual civil war in Sudan, the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Putin’s relentless aggression against Ukraine for the past two decades, Catalonia’s enduring rationale for independence from Spain, etc. without a deeply respectful appreciation for ethnocultural differentiation within countries. In almost all cases, the boundaries of cultural nations do not conform to the borderlines etched by violent history on the map of the world. This is well known.

Most people, if they care to consider such things, will acknowledge that countries are commonly multicultural, that there is no such thing as a “pure” nation state. Japan comes close, with its historic limitations on immigration, but the Ainu people on Hokkaido are a sizeable and deeply rooted indigenous minority group. Israel is giving it a go: the Knesset passed a law in 2018 defining Israel as “the nation state of the Jewish people”, disregarding at its peril the fact that there are over two million Muslim and Christian citizens of Arab descent within the borders of the state, and underestimating the influence of millions of diaspora Jews living as citizens of other countries. The U.S. is a contender for nation-state status, with its melting pot approach to successive waves of immigrants. Yet the haunting vestiges of the Confederate cause suggest an underlying division that separates the nation into ideological camps with divergent core values.

Notwithstanding the obfuscations of reality and the ubiquity of underlying incongruities in the “nation-state” verbal construct, it is much easier to cave into the default position of thinking of and talking about states as nations. Taking the easy way is not the best way, especially when wrestling with the question of sovereignty, but from here on I will follow the facile path and discuss nation states without qualifying quotation marks to advance an alternative model of organization.

Much Lamented Limitations. There is no such thing as absolute sovereignty and never has been. National sovereignty (aka State sovereignty with capital S)* is a fairly recent phenomenon, borne of the horribly destructive Thirty Years War that raged across much of Europe in the 1600s and ended with the Peace of Westphalia, where the exhausted lords and leaders of Protestant and Catholic principalities decided that each could determine which faith community would be dominant in their respective territories—without outside interference. The Westphalian state system spread across the globe, resulting in the international legal principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state.

Although hardly anyone in public office seems to notice, national sovereignty is subject to a panoply of limitations, most of which are voluntary and contingent. None can be fairly characterized as usurpations by some supposed higher authority, like the United Nations—the favorite bugaboo of sovereigntist zealots. In the United States in particular, any perceived shedding of sovereignty has been interpreted as a diminution of security, until it dawned on the Pentagon that unfavorable climate change is a paramount national security challenge.

National sovereignty is routinely circumscribed either by writ of law or political circumstances. Nation-states cede some of their sovereignty whenever they enter into a treaty, convention, or other formal relationship with one or more other countries. The giving up of some sovereign authority is not permanent; treaties and agreements always have terms and conditions for abrogation and withdrawal. The European Union’s complex network of governing bodies is based on the concept of “pooling” certain aspects of sovereignty, e.g. in establishing a customs union with common tariff structures, recognizing the legitimate authority of European Courts, using a common currency—all in the cause of mutual gain.

Let’s Make what’s Real, Legal

While the centrality of the nation-state remains a hard fact of international life, the most beneficial concentration of authority in central governments is broadly contested. This is most obvious in federal states, where sovereignty is subdivided, and where constitutions set forth the parameters of legitimate authority in the various areas of governance. But even relatively stable federations suffer the misalignment of internal nations and the external state. Thus, the Office of the State Philosopher advocates for the formalization of limited sovereignty in international law.

The codification of limited sovereignty would legitimize most separatist movements. This process, done rightly, would have almost immediate positive applications to conflict-ridden places like Kurdistan, Catalonia, the Basque Country, Northern Cyprus, Quebec, Scotland, Palestine, South Tyrol, Taiwan, Tibet, East Turkestan (Xinjiang province), Somaliland, Baluchistan, Greenland. The list of prospective regions that would welcome such changes in international law is long. What would be the aim? There are several predictable outcomes: the prevention of mass violence via terrorism and other forms of armed conflict; the preservation and sustainment of cultural nations within a state; less economic inequality and related fiscal stress within and among large, plurinational states.

The codification of limited sovereignty is a journey not yet taken. The time is ripe to make changes in the law of nations that conform with political and cultural reality. The status quo, which has remained more or less intact since the Peace of Westphalia, holds that nobody has a legitimate reason to interfere with the internal affairs of a sovereign state. This is the People’s Republic of China’s defense of their cultural genocide policies in Tibet and Xinjiang. China is not alone. In the 2020s, Israel decried South Africa’s claims at the Hague that the gutting of Gaza constituted genocide. The U.S. government continues to bristle when other countries point to the ongoing American sin of racial discrimination.

All of this is to say that sovereignty is complex, with many dimensions and subdivisions that render a seemingly simple principle connoting ultimate authority a reality riddled with paradox.

Summing Up. Where is the legitimate locus of supreme authority in a civilized society? There isn’t one; rather, there are many. Sovereignty may be outside the realm of science, but it’s useful to regard it nonetheless as a quantum phenomenon. It is everywhere, all at once.

Sovereignty resides within individuals, in cultural groups, in governments, and in the abstract—the God(s) in Heaven. Consequently, authentic loyalties coexist in many arenas of social life. There is more than a bit of sovereignty in every human being. Some of it is willingly transferred to legitimate governing authorities and several levels—local, state (or provincial), national, and transnational. For religious-minded souls, there is overarching sovereignty in the Divine. There is an abundance of sovereignty in Nature—that is, the nature exclusive to humans’ command and control. Who can dispute that plagues exercise sovereignty when and where they occur, or that climate rules the earth?

Sovereignty is limited; that’s the oxymoronic truth of the matter. At the macro level of nation states, it’s obvious that even defended borders are porous, either by design, as in the European Union, or by default to the inimitable forces of human migration. At a more macro level of analysis, it’s always worth remembering that borders are not recognized by anything on earth except for humans. At the micro level, I can say with science-backed conviction that I’m not always the boss of me.

National (or State) sovereignty is a real phenomenon. Nationalism is still the strongest force in the geopolitical universe. Sovereignty remains the heart of the matter in international affairs; it provides a justification for righteous indignation when challenged; it is what is symbolized by flags and monuments; it is the thing worth fighting and dying for; it is the basis for international law. Still and all, the concept is dangerously outdated. What now?

The world is trending toward transitional sovereignty, with more sharing, and more subdivisions of jurisdictional authority. In the immediate years to come, shares of national sovereignty will be voluntarily transferred to supranational institutions through parliamentary and other official channels. The European Union remains the enduring model, notwithstanding past fissures like Brexit and continuing disagreements over fiscal and monetary issues. There is a flourishing authentic European identity already, and it is reasonable to expect a North American Community to take shape soon.

Recognition and the consent of the governed will continue to undergird the legitimacy of quasi-sovereign entities. We are addressing global governance, not lobbying for a world government. The Responsibility to Protect against genocide and related crimes against humanity, a still fresh doctrine taking root among many nations, will in time be the universally acknowledged replacement of the doctrine of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign states.

Humanity is continuously, and now more than ever, in a liminal state—at the edge of history. Emergence has been defined by Jeremy Goldstein as “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems.” The world order that is emerging will be built and sustained by a kind of global popular sovereignty that acknowledges the limited effectiveness of the nation-state in resolving increasingly acute crises over climate change, environmental pollution, nuclear weapons proliferation, and genocidal campaigns that are utterly destructive of human rights.

The late Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of Great Powers in 1987, observed that Even if the autonomy and functions of the State have been eroded by transnational trends, no adequate substitute has emerged to replace it as the key unit in responding to change.

Codified arenas of limited sovereignty is the emergent substitute. The bedrock principle of sovereignty must not be abandoned, for all the reasons stated above, but it must also be adapted to meet acute socioeconomic and political needs, which can be summarized as basic human rights. There is no need to enumerate them here, as the Universal Declaration is available to everyone, even if it must be secreted into and around unfree societies. Global citizens must exercise their popular sovereignty to move their respective states in two directions simultaneously.

1. Support for supranational arrangements: full ratification and implementation of the Law of the Sea Convention, modernization of and engagement with the Outer Space Treaty, renewed efforts to implement and enforce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, robust participation in the World Health Organization, reenergized and vigorous struggles to achieve a science-based Climate Change accord.

2. Institutionalization of subnational arrangements for cultural nations within established states. To organize, facilitate, nurture and safeguard cultural nations that have not achieved—and do not expressly aspire to—independent statehood, there will be a Council of Confederations administered by UNESCO, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The goal is to enable a commonwealth of semi-autonomous ethnocultural nations to build and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with one another through the energetic exercise of paradiplomacy whilst remaining attached to established sovereign states for the purposes of defense, preferential trade, a common currency, immigration policies and border maintenance.

The need for this dual track approach is increasingly urgent, to stave off ecological disasters in the world’s oceans, the weaponization of space, the spread of plagues and pandemics, global climate catastrophe, and the pandemonium of relatively small ethnocultural nations seeking to attain the status of fully sovereign states through terrorism and other violent means.

There, it is written: another (and not the last) Advisory Opinion from the Office of the State Philosopher.