What is sovereignty? Discuss the difference between internal and external sovereignty.

  Sovereignty is an important element of the state which distinguishes the state from other political associations within a society and similar entities in the international society. The origin and history of the idea of sovereignty is intimately connected with the origin and development of the territorial states in modern times. It is for this reason that the meaning of sovereignty has undergone change across history. Despite the many meanings of the concept, sovereignty has a core meaning. Hinsley, an eminent Political Scientists, captures the core meaning of sovereignty when he says that it is “the idea that there is a final and absolute political authority in the political community…and that no final and absolute authority exists elsewhere”.

Sovereignty, then, is an assumption about authority. We might say that sovereignty is the basic assumption about authority of modern political life, domestically and internationally. Authority is the right or title to rule. Sovereignty is the assumption that the government of a state is both supreme and independent. It is supreme over everybody who lives in its territorial jurisdiction and it is independent from other governing authority.

The concept of sovereignty has been controversial in academic discourse. To a large measure this is because of the contrasting ways in which it is used to refer to independence and to autonomy. The former is a notion of authority and right, but the second is a notion of power and capability. While historians, international lawyers and political theorists tend to operate with the first concept, political economists, and political sociologists tend to employ the later concept. These two categorically different approaches to sovereignty exist and must be borne in mind as we proceed to analyse the key concept in political thought.

Internal Sovereignty

The preceding discussion on the concept of sovereignty has been largely in terms of internal sovereignty. As we saw, much of modern political theory has been an attempt to decide precisely where sovereignty should be located. Early political thinkers such as Machiavelli, Bodin and Hobbes were inclined to the belief that sovereignty should be vested in the hands of a single person, a monarch. The overriding merit of vesting sovereignty in a single individual was that sovereignty would then be indivisible; it would be expressed in a single voice that could claim final authority. Locke, Rousseau and the subsequent thinkers departed from this absolutist notion of sovereignty.

They rejected monarchical rule in favour of the notion of popular sovereignty, the belief that ultimate authority is vested in the people themselves. This doctrine of popular sovereignty is generally regarded as the basis of modern democratic theory. While these thinkers disagreed about who or what the ultimate authority should be, they were united in their belief that sovereignty could be and should be located in a determinant body. This is the traditional doctrine of sovereignty which is also called as the monistic theory of sovereignty. Even Rousseau, who espoused popular sovereignty, acknowledged that the ‘general will’ was indivisible whole which could only be articulated by a single individual, who he called ‘the legislator’. This traditional doctrine of sovereignty has come under growing criticism in an age of pluralistic and democratic government.

John Friggs, Harold J Laski and other pluralists have argued that the monistic theory is intrinsically linked to its absolutist past and so is frankly undesirable. They emphasise that political power in any given society does not rest only in the state apparatus, but is shared by a number of groups and institutions other than the state in that society. Moreover, they point out that it is no longer applicable to modern systems of government, which operate according to a network of checks and balances. For a pluralist, liberal-democratic principles are the very antithesis of sovereignty.

External Sovereignty

Sovereignty, as seen from inside a state, is supreme authority and as seen from outside, is self-governing authority. In other words, external sovereignty refers to the state’s place in the international order and therefore to its sovereign independence in relation to other states.

In international relations, sovereignty has become synonymous with state power. It is useful to conceive of external sovereignty as constitutional independence. The state possesses a constitution, written or unwritten, democratic or otherwise, which makes it independent from other states. State sovereignty, in the sense of constitutional independence, consists of being apart from other similar entities. The moment a state establishes a constitutional link with another state, it loses its sovereignty, for it is contained within a wider scheme. External sovereignty, in other words, implies that there is no higher political authority over the state. The sovereign state has the exclusive jurisdiction over its territory, its occupants, resources and events that take place there.

External sovereignty also establishes the basic condition of international relations- anarchy, meaning the absence of a higher authority over the states. There is no rule-making and rule-enforcing institution in international relations. Anarchy or the absence of higher political authority above the states does not necessarily imply chaos or absence of order. In fact, although there is no international government, there exists a rule governed social order in international relations. States, initially free of obligation to one another, have accepted a whole body of formal and informal rules (for instance, international law, rules governing diplomacy and recognition of spheres of influence, etc.

Many of the formal and rules accepted by the states restrict their freedom of action in certain activities and spheres. Moreover, because of the uneven distribution of power capabilities of states, the powerful states have greater freedom of action than the weaker states. Some scholars, therefore, talk of the erosion of state sovereignty or it being present only in great powers. But it should be noted sovereignty is not autonomy or freedom of action but constitutional independence. The distinction between autonomy and independence is the distinction between political and legal sovereignty. The states may be losing the ability to do what they want, but not their right to do so. If sovereignty is understood in political terms, one can argue that from the inception of the state system states had not much freedom of action. But if sovereignty is understood to mean the basic organising principles of international relations, that is, an order structured around sovereign states, then nothing much has changed. International commitments that place restrictions on states domestic polices are those that have been voluntarily accepted by states as sovereign entities. In contemporary international relations, the most basic norms, principles and practices continue to rest on state sovereignty.

While the principle of external sovereignty is widely recognised and enshrined as a basic principle of international law, it is not without its critics. There are those who draw our attention to the sinister implications of granting each state exclusive jurisdiction over its own territory, people and resources. Human rights advocacy groups, for instance, provide abundant evidence of state capacity to abuse, terrorise and even exterminate their own population and argue for intervention in states. They insist that states should conform to a higher set of moral principles, usually expressed in the doctrine of human rights. Attempts have been made to embody such principles in international law, notably in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948). (Eloberate?) Then there are those critics who suggest that the classical argument for sovereignty should go beyond national sovereignty. Thinkers such as Bodin and Hobbes emphasised that sovereignty was the only alternative to disorder, chaos and anarchy. Yet this is precisely what a rigorous application of the principle of national sovereignty would turn international politics into. Just as the absence of an internal sovereign leads to brutality and injustice in interpersonal and intra-societal relations, so does the absence of a supreme international authority leads to illegal interventions by powerful states and disputes and armed conflicts (wars) between states. In this way, the classical doctrine of sovereignty can be turned into an argument for world government.

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