What use for sovereignty today?

Abstract

To suggest that there might be good use for state sovereignty sounds counter-intuitive. After all, at least since the time of the League of Nations, we international lawyers have been critical of sovereignty. We have thought it a narrow, ethnocentric way to think about the relations of human beings. We have rehearsed a moral case against it. Sovereignty, we say, upholds egoistic interests of limited communities against the world at large, providing unlimited opportunities for oppression at home. It is, we sometimes say, "organized hypocrisy". If a country claims that a matter is under its "domestic jurisdiction", and refers to Article 2(7) of the UN Charter, we are inclined to think of this as an effort by its leaders to hide from well-founded international criticism. From a sociological perspective, we have attacked it because it fails to articulate the economic, environmental, technological, and ideological interdependencies that link humans all across the globe, giving a mistaken description of the reality of human relationships across the world. And from a functional perspective, we have observed its failure to deal with global threats such as climate change, criminality, or terrorism, while obstructing such beneficial projects as furthering free trade and protecting human rights. Therefore, we have wanted to replace it with international or global approaches, working across "artificial" national boundaries in pursuit of objectives that have nothing territorially limited about them. Copyright © Asian Journal of International Law 2010.