VII | R ECLAIMING S OVEREIGNTY
2. Challenges to Westphalian governance
The institution of sovereignty - that is the assumption that legitimacy in international affairs is denoted by an assemblage of territorially defined authority-structures, supreme internally and autonomous internationally - is regarded as one of the Grundnormen of international affairs, and as an institution upon which the society of states ultimately rests.473 Formally, sovereignty is accepted as a nearly universal ordering principle. A glance at a political world map suffices and one will understand immediately that the global political landscape is depicted in the shape of a universal Westphalian polity. Statist agents exalt a virtually hegemonic influence which is also mirrored by the grand political projects of the past 150 years: 19th century efforts of European nation building, mid-20th century waves of decolonization, and late 20th century examples of state building in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Sub-Sahara Africa.474 Yet, upon taking a closer look at this supposedly smooth Westphalian surface, cracks and irregularities appear.
State sovereignty as a mechanism to regulate the circulation of violence475 in domestic and international realms works particularly well in certain political contexts, but leads to diametral effects in others. Regulating force through statist practices succeeds in Western and European societies - which negotiated the terms of sovereignty from the 16th century onwards and forged a specifically political notion of the concept that was inextricably tied to the rise of the
473 Stephen D. Krasner, Power, the State, and Sovereignty (Oxon: Routledge, 2009): 180; and Paul Taylor,
“The United Nations in the 1990s: Proactive Cosmopolitanism and the Issue of Sovereignty”, Political Studies XLVII (1999): 142 ff.
474 Christopher Clapham, “Sovereignty and the Third World State”, Political Studies XLVII (1999): 522 ff.
475 Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 102 ff.
modern territorial state.476 A number of non-European societies, former empires - such as Japan, Turkey, China - and colonial dependencies - for example Brazil and India - adopted well and swiftly to the Westphalian ways of arranging inter-polity relations. Yet, a third category of political communities, quasi-states according to Jackson,477 exposes great difficulties in coping with the requirements of Westphalian statism. An ever growing body of literature on fragile or failing states bolsters this notion.478
The promise of Westphalia - the effective regulation of violence through a division of the political plane into domestic and international political spaces - has failed to materialize. Instead of effectively managing force on a global scale, the Westphalian standard pacifies only certain societies, while insufficiently containing conflict in others. Adding insult to injury, these societies are routinely marked with the label ‘failed states’. Such discourses on state failure expose the conceptual inability of recognizing the existence of mechanisms for the regulation of violence that operate outside of the statist logic. Not societies who failed to adopt to the Westphalian model ought to be problematized, but rather an intrusive account of sovereignty that conceptualizes political authority-structures through an exclusively statist lens. Certain societies might have ‘failed’
as states, but not as polities per se. Historically they have often developed alternative socio-political coping mechanisms and regulate political intercourse by non-statist means. Nomadic peoples, tribal- and village-structures, diasporas, urban communities, etc. are incompatible with the statist model, mainly due to their non-reliance on territorial accounts of rule and their ability to tolerate overlapping and intertwining authority-structures. Yet, they could still be mobilized effectively for the regulation of violence and the the management of political affairs by non-statist means. What is required for such a mobilization is a
476 Robert Jackson, Sovereignty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 49 f.; and Wouter Werner & Jaap De Wilde, “The Endurance of Sovereignty”, European Journal of International Relations 7, 3 (2001): 286 f.
477 Robert Jackson, Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge:
University Press, 1990).
478 Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown Publishing, 2012).
new authority consensus capable of doing justice to the agentic heterogeneity inherent to world politics. The political reality of the 21st century is neither that of a homogenous Westphalian republic, nor is it accurately described by Friedman’s flat-world analogy which portraits the globe as a structurally unified realm.479 The global’s ontology must instead be comprehended as comprising of socio-political topographies and polities of varying scales - a landscape scattered with cliffs and archipelagos, planes, caves, and no-mans lands in which
“international politics works as an increasingly complex institutional and behavioural superstructure crisscrossing with both domestic politics, domestic and transnational society, and sub-units of states”.480
This chapter suggests that such a new authority-consensus must emerge from within prevalent debates about sovereignty. It problematizes Westphalian interpretations of sovereignty in global politics and works towards its analytical re-conceptualization alongside the lines of anarchist accounts of agency.
Sovereign practices can indeed serve as an important platform for global political action by means of providing accounts of democratic accountability and oversight. Yet, it must be conceptually couched in a normative context that moves beyond Westphalian forms of rule. By means of deploying anarchist accounts of constituent power, the chapter proposes to conceive of a sovereign political momentum beyond the conceptually hegemonic horizon of the Westphalian agent. Amalgamating anarchism with sovereignty on a global level disentangles the state-sovereignty-nexus and draws attention to the constituent qualities of non-foundational sovereign practices. The political space that emerges at this intersection of constituent anarchist power and post-Westphalian sovereignty facilitates the emergence of democratic agentic forces in international affairs. The aim of the Westphalian project of state sovereignty was to denote the conditions for legitimate political action in international affairs. The aim of a post-Westphalian project of anarchist sovereignty is to denote the conditions for legitimate political action in global affairs. Such a project must recognize and work with the partially
479 Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat (New York: Farrar, Straus und Giroux, 2005).
480 Cerny, “Reframing the International”, 15.
statist reality of international politics, while acknowledging the political capacity of polities that exist above and below a statist threshold. A post-Westphalian take on sovereignty displaces and rephrases the authority-condition. In a Westphalian reading, a polity has political authority if it displays statist properties (a government, control over territory and citizens). In a post-Westphalian reading, a polity has political authority if it displays anarchic qualities (being organized in accordance to the principle of non-domination). A non-statist authority consensus is agonistic towards form and focuses instead on principles. This allows for an institutional pluralism and admits polities and political associations into the global political sphere that are disregarded under a statist regime.