So Long, Sovereignty
Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty is a good book — not great, it’s repetitive and sometimes hard to follow — but genuinely provocative and original. A gifted reader of theory, in Sovereignty Brown turns her eye to Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Jean Bodin (1530–1596), and Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) — the philosophers who defined sovereignty. The simplest way to explain sovereignty is that it is the power to decide and act. For Hobbes, the political sovereign had power over everything else. Most governments have, in practice, softened this. But the idea of sovereignty has long been considered a sacred part of governance; all governments are assumed to have it and all international law defers to it, at least nominally.
Brown’s thesis is not a new argument about the contents of sovereignty (which has been hashed over by, e.g., Krasner). It is, instead, an argument that state sovereignty as a concept is historical and near the end of its time. She argues that the idea of political sovereignty emerged as a way to subordinate economics and religion to government. Politics, for Aristotle, was natural but also had no power over certain facts of life (economics, for example, was considered personal, not political); by contrast, politics for Hobbes was created by human arrangements and elevated above all other concerns (for example, people could be compelled to observe a religion they did not believe). Hobbes and Locke firmly believed that governance necessarily took priority over religion, which makes sense given that they grew up in a country basically destroyed by religious war. Where, for centuries, wars and political schisms had been fought over theology, the liberals in France and England argued that in fact, governance was necessarily greater than questions of belief.
Brown smartly notes that modern states are not premised on actually interfering with the machinations of the economy or citizens’ religious practices but are premised on the idea that they have the power to. If a government couldn’t tyrannize religion, there would be no need for a right to the freedom of religion. We believe government shouldn’t plan the economy, but we know if it were determined to, it could have that authority.
In other words, sovereignty as we currently understand it assumes that national governments have power — even if it’s not exercised — over the economic and religious life of its citizens. But in the rise of international terrorism and globalization, Brown sees these aspects of sovereignty slipping from states’ capabilities — against tax evasion, company relocation, and individual radicalization, national governments seem helpless. Some combination of late capitalism and who knows what else has made religion and political economy impossible for governments to subordinate anymore, and whatever direction history takes will be affected by that change. What happens now, she asks, that many “sovereigns” are not able to exercise control over what profit-seeking companies do to their land and citizens, or keep people from fighting over religion?
This is the problem Brown establishes. It’s valid, but the assumption that states used to have sovereignty/a lot of power over economic forces in their territory is untrue in substantial portions of the developing world. If Brown asks what formerly-sovereign states will end up like, she begs the question of what never-sovereign states will end up like. If her analysis says sovereignty can no longer be usefully aspired to, fine, yes, powerful countries are on a new path in which companies can’t effectively be subordinated to states. But what about countries that never really attained internal sovereignty, never really managed their economy or citizens? Most successful modern states followed one of two paths: they were colonized and won independence as an effective sovereign (United States), or they were slowly unified by force (France, Germany, probably China? I don’t know Asian history). For the many former colonies that stumbled on this path, what direction do they go now? If we can’t assume that the DRC will ever be sovereign over the industries and peoples in its territory, what do we think will happen there?
