Against sovereignty
Russia’s appalling war has made the moribund concept of sovereignty briefly tactically useful again to friends of freedom. But sovereignty itself is still a horrible idea with no future
It’s been a funny old year for the concept of sovereignty. An idea many, myself included, assumed was slowly dying, loudly proclaimed itself stronger than ever in the furious denunciations that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
I’m no fan of sovereignty, an idea which to me appears to unavoidably contain both division and hierarchy. Sovereignty needs a sovereign, and cleaves populations according to the sovereigns to which they are loyal. We’re better off unfettered by such ideas.
But rejecting the idea of sovereignty does not mean accepting the legitimacy of Russian invasion. Ukraine is, “a fake country only in the ways that all countries are fake, and it is real in the way that any others are real” and one needs to be aware when questioning that reality of the context: a Russian attempt to erase the idea of a separate Ukrainian identity in a manner it would not be entirely hyperbolic to call genocidal.
Nevertheless, for sovereignty sceptics, and perhaps in any instance, the egregiousness of Russia’s act is better understood not as a crime against Ukraine but as a crime against Ukrainians. The chaos of war was brought into the lives of Ukrainians unnecessarily, and with the objective of preventing Ukrainians from determining their own future. Any crime against the state of Ukraine, a depersonalised version of that last point, pales into insignificance besides these.
Understanding aggression as a crime against people, not states, is not just normatively healthier, but underlines a distinction which can on occasion result in tangible differences. Take, for example, Azerbaijan’s recent assault on Armenian soldiers. This was clearly a crime against peace: people are dead and maimed because Azerbaijan attempted to use brute force to impose its answer to a question which was in the process of being solved peaceably. However, it was not a crime against sovereignty: Armenia has been occupying what is internationally recognised as Azeri territory for the last 28 years — in law Azerbaijan had every right to reacquire it by force.
In any event, it might be a mistake to consider 2022’s denunciations of Russia’s acts as a sign of sovereignty’s rude health. Sovereignty is a concept that has only existed for what is, in historic terms, the blink of an eye, and which sits on shifting foundations: our world is no longer neatly vertically divided into separate polities that only interact in controlled ways or through dedicated channels. Sovereignty means too much to too many people to go quickly or quietly, but so did feudalism once.
Rather we need to consider the health of the idea over a longer timeframe. Starting just over twenty years ago two powerful dynamics started to pull on it in opposite directions, and yet they frequently attempted to work together.
First was a sense that in an increasingly porous and interlinked world where power operates on multiple levels, many of them nongovernmental, it is increasingly anachronistic to think of the absolute and incontestable authority that is sovereignty as residing in any one place, let alone that of the nation state. Coupled to that was a long overdue reckoning with the fact that the social contract was a two-way street, and that sovereignty was a licence populations granted governments in exchange for maintaining their security — that licence could be revoked if that bargain was not upheld. This idea was codified, albeit in exceptionally limited and caveated form, in the concept of the “Responsibility to Protect”: unanimously adopted by states at the 2005 world summit.
Second, and very probably a reaction of insecurity to the first, was the logic of the “war on terror” which represented an aggressive reassertion of sovereignty and in particular the sovereign right to commit unspeakable acts of violence against anyone who threatened the state. Terrorists commit unspeakable acts too of course, but no more so than states, and the logic of counterterrorism is not about preventing cruelty, but about using all necessary means to defend the state’s monopoly on cruelty. Terrorism is often thought of as an (appalling) tactic, but that’s not what defines it. It is defined as the use of violence by illegitimate — ie non-state — powers.
Paradoxically both dynamics were most robustly championed by two groups who were also diametrically opposed: muscular liberals and authoritarian tyrants. Both were true believers in one of these ideas, and saw the prevailing wind behind the other and, for the most part, saw more opportunity than risk in using and abusing its language.
The consequences were not only confused and contradictory, but also led to all sorts of unholy alliances between the two groups. This mess found its purest manifestation in the two greatest crimes against peace committed in this era: the US/UK invasion of Iraq and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Both were the consequence of an overly mighty security apparatus which had been established to counter terror, had outgrown its adversaries, and seeking new ones upon which to feed had targeted a sovereign state, requiring a thin justification to be manufactured out of whatever other concepts were lying around.
It’s easy enough to say that there is little pattern to be determined in the ensuing shambles. Thus realists can say: “what did you expect? These concepts are all just post rationalisations placed over self-interest”. Do what I have done and listen to the UN Human Rights Council hold back-to-back debates about abuses in Israel and some other country and that point becomes even more compelling. Some states will stand up in one meeting and denounce investigations of atrocities as a disgraceful violation of a nation’s sovereignty, and then immediately laud those same investigators in the other meeting for uncovering vital information of global importance. Other states will do it the precise opposite way around. And nobody will draw attention to anybody else’s glaring hypocrisy save, perhaps, for a few miserable civil society voices tacked on at the end.
But the duplicity of the powerful does not mean that power does not have a logic, and Russia misunderstood that to its detriment when invading Ukraine. Too many states have a vested interest in insisting sovereignty is inalienable. States, mostly based in the global south, might grant Russia some leeway at times due to a fear of US hegemonic power and a desire for (any) alternatives to it, amplified by a disgust at western arrogance, racism, and refusal to accept that they are just as hypocritical as anyone else; but they’re not going to go so far as to therefore abandon the sanctity of the thing that maintains their own power: sovereignty. Only four countries backed Russia in the UN General Assembly, and all four are run by psychopaths — two are effectively Russian proxy states.
Might there be a short-to-medium-term strategic benefit left in riding this wave of support of sovereignty in support of left-wing (broadly conceived) ideals? Again I am sceptical.
The most compelling defence of sovereignty is that it is a necessary administrative mechanism for democracy, and thus a vital tool in the forever war between elites and publics over the exercise of power. I agree that this is a war in which elites have used the splintering of power into new axes and layers to open up new angles of attack, but I am not convinced it is necessary, desirable, or even possible to reforge the places power is contested into one single centralised location in order to win the battle there. I think we have neither the luxury nor the highly dubious advantage of only fighting it in that spot. Better surely to outflank the attempt to outflank, and contest power in as many places, axes and layers as possible. The strength of the elites is depth and the strength of the public is breadth, the more dispersed the battlefield the better.
I’ve also too often seen, again primarily at the UN Human Rights Council, the way sovereignty can lead the left into a reductive campism. What starts as a well-meaning attempt to practice solidarity within and between the global south is distorted into a solidarity for elites in the global south (and their northern patrons and beneficiaries both state and non-state) even as they oppress their own people.
There are those who defend such an approach, for all its shortcomings, on the basis that it is vital to defend self-determination, even if it is self-determination by elites, as part of the struggle against imperialism. They would do well to remember the warning of one of self-determination’s great intellectuals — Frantz Fanon — that self-determination without genuine societal transformation (a transformation few would argue has occurred) would lead to the replication of colonial power dynamics with the replacement, only, of the names of the oppressors.
Half a century earlier James Connolly put it more pithily when he said of the decolonisation of Ireland:
“If you remove the English army to-morrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle… England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs. England would still rule you to your ruin, even while your lips offered hypocritical homage at the shrine of that Freedom whose cause you had betrayed.”
Opposing imperialism means opposing oppressive dynamics of power, not just preferring certain forms of oppression to others. Those dynamics are innate to the concept of sovereignty, a concept whose time has surely passed and whose departure should now be hastened.
Granted, one should not be too purist about that. For example, while it is a shame (if not a surprise) that attempts at the United Nations to delegitimise Russia’s recent annexations have been framed in terms of those actions as a crime against the sovereignty of Ukraine and not against the agency of Ukrainians, that does not mean that the international community should have foregone the opportunity to denounce Russia’s imperialism.
The messy and nuanced world of international diplomacy does not allow one to make absolute choices between pragmatism and principle. Stick exclusively to principles and one will find oneself stationary; abandon principles entirely and one will find oneself on a fast train headed in the wrong direction. Rather, the art of diplomatic advocacy is in carefully weighing up the long-term consequences that arise because the arguments you are making will ultimately coalesce into the next generation’s norms and dominant ideologies against the short term need to achieve the tangible diplomatic outcomes that will create the framework of historical facts through which the narrative of those arguments will weave.
That’s tricky, but one way to make it less so is to carefully consider one’s own agency. It is popular, and becoming moreso, to always think and write from the perspective of the decisionmaker. But actually decisionmakers are highly constrained in ways that we are not, and that is a freedom we shouldn’t spurn.
A diplomat cloistered with another diplomat may find it tactically useful to emphasise sovereignty in attempting to win a vote condemning Russia’s annexations. I do not have such a responsibility, and so rather than imagining what it might be like if I did, all the more reason why I should use my liberty to advance the argument that sovereignty is a dying, superfluous, and obnoxious concept that will hopefully some day soon be shuffled out to pasture.
