Introduction

In this paper, I will argue that modern conceptions of sovereignty derive from a taxonomy of political philosophies.  The paper begins with the premises that international relations, like politics in general, is driven by ideology and is concerned with the use of coercion.  It then undertakes a two-step critique of J. Samuel Barkin and Bruce Cronin’s argument in “The State and the Nation” that the international community has alternated between state- and nation-centered conceptions of sovereignty.  First, it generates an alternative taxonomy of political ideologies.  Second, it compares the relative descriptive and explanatory powers of these two ideological frameworks, employing several of Barkin and Cronin’s historical case studies.

Beginning Assumptions

We might preface any discussion of international relations by stating two basic premises.  First, “[h]uman action is directed by ideologies.”  Animals of other species act on their instincts; humans, whose “particular and characteristic feature” is their capacity for reason, cannot act without thinking, or without “a definite idea about causal relations.”  Ludwig von Mises puts it simply: “Action is always directed by ideas; it realizes what previous thinking has designed.”  And ideologies – ideas about “individual conduct and social relations” – animate every “existing state of social affairs,” whether they are made explicit or remain unarticulated.[1]

A second premise is that – as John Ruggie writes, seeking to “begin at the very beginning” – “politics is about rule.”[2]  More specifically, it is about the use of coercion to constrain individual action.[3]  Ruggie adds that “the distinctive feature of the modern system of rule is that it has differentiated its subject collectivity” – humans – into states, or “territorially defined, fixed, and mutually exclusive enclaves of legitimate dominion.”  And so long as the state survives – so long as there exists a “monopolization on the part of central authorities of the legitimate use of force”[4] – the fundamental question inherent in political activity is: When should the state employ coercion against the individual?[5]

A Preliminary Critique of Barkin and Cronin's Model

The above premises suggest that the prime mover of international relations, and of politics more generally, is individuals’ political philosophies – their ideas about the use of coercion – and that scholars’ explanatory models should reflect that reality.  Yet instead of deducing from these ontological premises a complete typology of political philosophies, Barkin and Cronin induce from the history of international relations two conceptions of sovereignty.  Specifically, they argue that “there has been a historical [sic] tension between state sovereignty, which stresses the link between sovereign authority and a defined territory, and national sovereignty, which emphasizes a link between sovereign authority and a defined population.”[6]  The former highlights “the integrity of borders based on historical possession, national frontiers, and viability” (e.g., strong, stable institutions); the latter advances “the claim that nations should be politically self-determining and that group sentiment…should serve as the sole criterion in defining the nation.”[7]  When the international community adopts norms drawn from the former definition, states typically will “defend the rights of [other] states against nationalist claims of domestic ethnic groups,” and vice versa.  The authors argue that “major systemic crises” often lead the international community to shift from one conception of sovereignty to the other, “because the new dominant coalition often sees the previous emphasis on one form of sovereignty as the cause of the crisis.”  Therefore sovereignty is not “a constant,” but is rather “a variable” that can take either of two values.[8]

Yet because these two values are drawn from the historical record rather than from human ontology, they fail to reflect the complete range of individuals’ possible conceptions of sovereignty.  One might deduce such a range, however, from the second premise discussed above: Any political philosophy – any ideology prescribing when the state should employ coercion against the individual – must first decide whether the state may initiate coercion against the individual.[9]  Put differently, it must choose whether to give full scope to what Ruggie terms the “private [realm],”[10] or to constrain such non-coerced activity for the sake of higher goals.  Thus it must take its place on a continuum of ideologies.  At one end is the political philosophy that prescribes classical liberal political institutions that maximize the individual’s negative rights.  At the opposite end are philosophies that subordinate those rights to other political goals, whether they include the collective aspirations of a nation or the empowerment of an individual monarch. 

One might separate the latter political objectives on a second ideological continuum; the point is that such continua – derived from this paper’s beginning assumptions – offer the best means of discovering the particular values that the “variable” of sovereignty might take, and therefore an ideal perspective from which to recognize empirical patterns in the history of international relations.  Accordingly, the remainder of this paper will analyze three of the “historical cases”[11] cited by Barkin and Cronin in support of their argument.  The paper will investigate whether a philosophical framework limited to the “state” and “national” conceptions of sovereignty is too imprecise to explain key outcomes in each case study.

The Post-Napoleonic Order

“Following the defeats of Napoleon in 1814 and 1815,” write Barkin and Cronin, “an international order was constructed by the victorious coalition” – including Britain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia – on the basis of a “a set of principles” that emphasized “the value of the state over the nation.”  Despite the “conflicting interests” which divided this Grand Alliance, both British and Austrian leaders perceived revolutionary France’s “coupling of nationalism with Jacobinism” as “the cause of the Napoleonic wars.”  Eventually all of the allies acceded to Austrian minister Klemens von Metternich’s “legitimizing principle” for a new order that would last between three and four decades: “There would be a conservative European society of states, not nations, in which all postwar borders would be defended by collective force.”[12]

Yet Barkin and Cronin oversimplify the character of the post-Napoleonic European order by attempting to fit its “legitimizing principle” into one of the “two ideal types” of “‘state’ and ‘nation’ as…differing interpretations of the source of legitimate authority.”[13]  They introduce additional political objectives that united or divided the Grand Alliance in order to narrate the historical “interaction” process[14] that culminated in a consensus around Metternich’s “legitimizing principle,” but they choose not to employ these supplementary political details to refine their “two ideal types” (or to construct a more exhaustive typology).

For example, while “Czar Alexander was [relatively] sympathetic to the ideas of constitutionalism and self-determination,” both Russia and Austria accepted that “the war against Napoleon had three specific aims: to restore a balance of power, to stop the spread of French radical ideas, and to prevent liberal revolutions in Europe.”[15]  The first of these three goals implies little concerning “the content and understanding of sovereignty,”[16] and Barkin and Cronin therefore are correct to ignore it in constructing their “ideal types.”[17]  However, the second and third goals entail a distinct political philosophy that is its own ideal type and can be categorized using the two ideological continua introduced above.  Specifically, the Grand Alliance’s goals (a) arrogate unlimited coercive power to the state (first continuum), and (b) award each state to an individual monarch (second continuum).  Barkin and Cronin cite the views of the emperor of Austria – himself an absolute monarch, like those of Prussia and Russia – “on how a new legitimate nation-state could be created”: “‘A Prince can, if he wishes, cede a part of his country and all of his people’ to create such a state.  ‘If he abdicates then his rights are passed on to his legitimate heirs.’”[18] 

Accordingly, this philosophy more closely resembles a collectivist strain of nationalism – which (a) grants the state complete coercive power, but (b) awards the state to a nation – than it does a liberal form of nationalism which (a) defends individual citizens’ rights against the state monopoly on coercion, and therefore reduces the significance of (b) control over a weakened state.[19]  Yet the treaties signed by a coalition of liberal nationalist states (like those reached by the Grand Alliance) also would “clearly [reflect] the value of the state over the nation,” though for wholly different reasons; i.e., a classical liberal state would exercise its limited prerogatives over the individuals whom it happened to rule, to the neglect of any nationalist aspirations.[20]  Both political philosophies would disapprove of the Jacobins, for whom “‘the people’ has become ‘the nation,’ a mystical entity, an absolute sovereign.”  This underlying similarity might explain why the Grand Alliance consisted of what Barkin and Cronin term “a rather diverse group of states” – i.e., why liberal Britain allied with three absolutist monarchies.[21]  Moreover, the Alliance’s monarchist ideology appears to underlie “the right to intervene” in the affairs of a foreign state:

According to Metternich, when domestic social unrest makes it impossible for a government to meet its treaty obligations that bind it to other countries, ‘the right to intervene belongs as clearly and indisputably to every government which finds itself being drawn into the revolutionary maelstrom, as it does to any individual who must put out a fire in his neighbor’s house if it is not to spread to its own.’[22]

The post-Napoleonic order, in short, was “a compact among rulers” – among individual monarchs who were analogous to homeowners – “not among nations or peoples”[23] whose governments were restricted to defending their individual rights within a limited territory.

Most importantly, however, the notion of “state sovereignty” simply fails to explain or to predict any more detailed dynamics of the Grand Alliance than a shared antagonism to nationalism.  Barkin and Cronin’s following case studies suffer from similar problems.

Consequences of the First and Second World Wars

The authors label their next historical case as “World War I and the triumph of the nation,” indicating their belief that the international norm of “national sovereignty” replaced that of “state sovereignty” after the First World War.  They write that “the analysis and program of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson predominated [among the Allies] by the end of the war,” and they describe Wilson’s view that “a legitimate nation-state was one that represented a defined national population and whose government was accountable to its people.”  Yet while this “principle of nationalism” certainly differed from the ideologies legitimizing the Central Powers’ regimes – which might be described loosely as a variant of the Grand Alliance’s monarchist statism – Wilsonian nationalism centered around “the principle of self-determination.”[24]  And this principle is wholly consistent with a classical liberal political philosophy:

The self-determination of peoples implies that everyone as an individual has a right to his or her own government and to participate in that government.  The term ‘peoples’ does not, however, imply any specific basis for delineating national boundaries.[25]

Therefore the Wilsonian “principle of nationalism” might be categorized best as a vaguely classical liberal tenet; it is vague only because it does not specify any “basis for delineating national boundaries.”  Accordingly, it can be combined with a collectivist nationalist philosophy, as it was before the Second World War: Barkin and Cronin write that “[n]ationalism…does imply a specific basis for delineating state boundaries.  The state should match the nation,” and should “expand to wherever [its] nationals live.  In areas where members of more than one nationality live, interstate conflict becomes both likely and virulent.”  Nazi belligerency was a clear manifestation of this phenomenon.[26]

Thus Barkin and Cronin write of their next case study that “World War II was viewed” by its winners, in part, “as a fight against…a particularly virulent strain of nationalism.”  In fact, the very concept of nationalism came to be associated “with the desire of some people to dominate or dislocate others,” though the international community earlier had identified it with “the desire of people to be free.”  Accordingly, the Cold War witnessed “the reification of state borders in Europe and the Third World,” as international norms once again incorporated the notion of “state sovereignty.”  Yet “the legitimate basis for the state” remained “the self-determination of peoples”[27] – a mere clarification of the Wilsonian “principle of nationalism” as a liberal philosophical norm rather than as a collectivist nationalist tenet.  The post-World War II international consensus around what Barkin and Cronin would label the norm of “state sovereignty,” in short, was not significantly different from the post-World War I consensus around the norm of “national sovereignty.”  Neither did it entail the same set of secondary norms that the post-Napoleonic order – supposedly also centered on the concept of “state sovereignty” – had legitimized.  In particular contrast to “the right to intervene” accepted by members of the Grand Alliance, the postwar “Charter of the United Nations…affirms…the principle of noninterference in the domestic affairs of other states,” and it does so on decidedly liberal grounds: states represent “their people as individuals, not the ‘nation’ as a separate entity” on whose behalf it can interfere abroad.[28]

In sum, the notions of “state sovereignty” and “national sovereignty” employed by Barkin and Cronin are conceptually too broad either to categorize the legitimating ideologies of differing states and international orders, or to explain important aspects of their behavior.  Table One (below) groups the governments and alliances discussed in these case studies according to the philosophical taxonomy introduced in this paper.

Table One: Categorization of Relevant Governments and International Orders by Ideology