State Sovereignty in International Relations PDF

State Sovereignty in International Relations: Bridging the Gap between Theory and Empirical Research Author(s): Janice E. Thomson Source: International Studies Quarterly , Jun., 1995, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Jun., 1995), pp. 213- 233 Published by: Wiley on behalf of The International Studies Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2600847 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The International Studies Association and Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to International Studies Quarterly This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms International Studies Quarterly (1995) 39, 213-233 State Sovereignty in International Relations: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Empirical Research JANICE E. THOMSON University of Washington This article explores many of the key theoretical and analytical issues attending empirical research on state sovereignty. It reviews recent re- search on sovereignty, the state, and state-building in an attempt to summarize what we now know or think we know about state sovereignty. Bringing the fruits of that research to bear on the concepts that define state sovereignty, I offer some criteria from which analysts might derive empirically testable propositions about sovereignty's historical status and future prospects. In conclusion, I argue that research on these issues should be (re-)directed to the bedrock of sovereignty: rule making and enforcement authority, or what I call policing. For ten years now International Relations theorists have been researching, writing, and arguing about sovereignty.1 Debate among realist, liberal interdependence, and critical theorists has rescued the concept of sovereignty from its abstract, arcane, and sterile treatment in the fields of international law and political phi- losophy and infused it with new meaning, theoretical significance, and practical relevance (Walker, 1988). Sovereignty is now prominent in the International Rela- tions research agenda. The question this article poses is: in light of this decade of research on sovereignty, what do we now know or think we know about the theoretical and practical role of sovereignty in world politics? For liberal interde- pendence theorists sovereignty is defined in terms of the state's ability to control actors and activities within and across its borders. For realists, the essence of sovereignty is the state's ability to make authoritative decisions-in the final in- stance, the decision to make war. Given the two schools' focus on these different aspects of sovereignty, it is not surprising that International Relations theorists make conflicting and sometimes diametrically opposed claims about the status of sovereignty in the post-Cold War era. This article presupposes that an assessment of the current and future prospects of sovereignty depends upon a theoretically coherent conception of sovereignty which is both consistent with history and amenable to empirical analysis. Before Author's note: An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1991 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., August 29 - September 1, 1991. For helpful comments and suggestions, I wish to thank Thomas Risse-Kappen, Kaz Poznanski, Gregory Gause, Daniel Deudney, Rob Walker, Michael Webb, Michael Barnett, Cynthia Weber, and especially Alexander Wendt, and the reviewers and editors of International Studies Quarterly. I In this article, International Relations, with initial upper-case letters, refers to the discipline; international relations refers to the discipline's subject matter. ? 1995 International Studies Association. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 214 State Sovereignty in International Relations we can determine whether sovereignty is being eroded, consolidated, or something else, we must be clear about what sovereignty is and be able to operationalize it into measurable, if not quantifiable, indicators. This article reviews recent research on sovereignty, the state, and state-building in an attempt to summarize what we now know or think we know about sovereignty. The aim here is to mine these literatures for indicators of sovereignty which alone, or in some combination, will produce a conception of sovereignty on which can be grounded the kind of empirical analysis upon which informed speculation about its future necessarily depends. My major points are three. First, I contend that both realist and liberal interde- pendence treatments of sovereignty are hampered by a unitary view of the national state. A more useful approach is contained in Giddens's "non-realist [proto-] theory of sovereignty" (Rosenberg, 1990) which emphasizes the "international" dimension of sovereignty. Interstate relations (or state practices) play as significant a role in constituting the sovereign state as do the relations between individual states and their societies. Recognition of sovereignty's external or international dimension accounts, in part, for the demise of sovereignty in political philosophy which treated sovereignty as a matter of state-society relations occurring in an international vacuum.2Jacques Maritain (1950:343) argued forty years ago that "political philosophy must elimi- nate Sovereignty both as a word and as a concept..." While the devolution of sovereignty to "the people" (at least in theory) undoubtedly contributed to the failure of that approach to sovereignty,3 it was also doomed by ignoring the integral role of external forces in constituting, defining, and shaping sovereignty, the state, and state-society relations. As I will argue below, the domestic-international dichot- omy and the interplay between the two are crucial to the institution of sovereignty.4 Second, sovereignty is best conceptualized in terms, not of state control, but of state authority. State control has waxed and waned enormously over time, regions, and issue-areas while the state's claim to ultimate political authority has persisted for more than three centuries. The conceptualization of sovereignty I offer here is as an institution which imparts to the state what I call meta-political authority. That is, with the institution of sovereignty states are empowered or authorized to decide what is political in the first place. With sovereignty, states do not simply have ultimate authority over things political; they have the authority to relegate activities, issues, and practices to the economic, social, cultural, and scientific realms of authority or to the states' own realm-the political. This is not to say that activities defined as apolitical are not intensely political but only that states will not treat them as political. Finally, I suggest some criteria from which we might derive empirically testable propositions about the status of sovereignty in history and in future. I argue that a shift from sovereignty to some other form of global political organization would entail one or more of the following: the loss of states' exclusive authority to recognize sovereignty; transfer of meta-political authority to nonstate actors or institutions; end of the state's monopoly on legitimate coercion; and deterritoriali- zation of states' authority claims. To illustrate both the utility of and problems with 2 For good reviews of this literature see Maritain (1950), Merriam (1968), and Walker (1988). 3 For example, Bodin's (and Hobbes's) "theories" of sovereignty were largely "aspirational" as both sought to bring order out of (what they viewed as) political turmoil by expanding the powers of the central state (Ferguson and Mansbach, 1991:378). 4 Sovereignty is sometimes treated as an organizing principle or as a process. For analytical purposes, I prefer to characterize it as an institution, defined as "the [formal (e.g., laws) and informal (e.g., norms)] rules of the game in a society" (North, 1990:3). For a review of some of the prominent definitions of an institution see Krasner (1989:74- 77). This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms JANICE E. THOMSON 215 this strategy for operationalizing sovereignty, I draw on largely anecdotal evidence to speculate about the extent and degree to which sovereignty is under challenge. Bringing Sovereignty Back into International Relations5 State-centric theories, which have dominated International Relations, are built on the assumption that states are, by definition, sovereign. The point of theorizing is to understand, explain, and predict international outcomes resulting from interac- tions among already existing sovereign entities-states. In the 1970s and early 1980s liberal interdependence theorists (Cooper, 1972; Keohane and Nye, 1972 and 1977; Morse, 1976; Rosecrance, 1986) challenged this approach to world politics. Their attacks on the state-centric paradigm implied that state sovereignty was being eroded by economic interdependence, global-scale technologies, and democratic politics. They argued that states can no longer control their borders. Modern technology empowers nonstate or substate actors to evade state efforts to control the flow of goods, people, money, and information across territorial boundaries. Capital, especially, can flow to another state or an- other currency to escape state fiscal and monetary policies (Cooper, 1972). Efforts to defend cultural values or bar subversive ideas are stymied by computer and telecommunications technologies in the hands of other states and substate and nonstate actors. At the same time, technological advances have produced weapons of mass destruction which preclude the state from protecting its own people or territory (Rosecrance, 1986). As a result states cannot ensure economic or military security. Critics of the liberal interdependence school have challenged this view on a number of empirical and theoretical grounds. These responses to liberal interde- pendence arguments generally come in one of two forms. Some deny that inter- dependence has increased and therefore that state sovereignty has eroded. Current ratios of transborder to within-border flows of people, information, and capital are not dramatically different from those of the late nineteenth century. If these ratios are reasonable measures of interdependence, then interdependence is not on the rise and does not reflect an erosion of sovereignty (Waltz, 1970; Thomson and Krasner, 1989). The alternative response is to argue that, if interdependence is growing, it is a reflection of state power and interests. Any international economic system is predi- cated on the exercise of state power. Transborder flows can occur only if states agree to provide the institutional framework in which markets can flourish (Carr, 1939; Gilpin, 1975, 1987). The lack of interdependence between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War attests to that (Waltz, 1979:141). As to the argument that technological developments are eroding sovereignty from below, Gilpin (1987:406) reminds us of what happened to the great technological achieve- ments of the Roman empire. Politics triumphed over technology then, and may do so again. Still, there is the question of whether states could reassert control, especially in the economic realm, if their interests changed. Liberals argue that it would be prohibitively costly but, as World War I indicates, theorists and state rulers need not agree on what constitutes a prohibitive cost (Angell, 1911). It is important to recognize that the liberal interdependence school did not claim that the state-centric paradigm's assumption of sovereignty is wrong per se. 5 This phrase echoes that of Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol's Bringing the State Back In, which in turn was inspired by George C. Homans's 1964 Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association, "Bringing Men Back In" (Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, 1985:31). This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 216 State Sovereignty in International Relations Rather, it granted that the assumption was appropriate in theorizing about world politics in the past but is of decreasing utility in the twentieth century (Keohane and Nye, 1972:371, 375). The liberal interdependence literature provides a useful point of departure for a discussion of sovereignty in the International Relations literature because it represents an early attempt to-at least inductively-treat sovereignty as a variable. As such, its perspective on sovereignty warrants close scrutiny. This literature is now massive and I cannot hope to do it justice here. But I want to point to three basic problems with its treatment of sovereignty. The most important problem with liberal interdependence theory's treatment of sovereignty is that it "measures" or operationalizes sovereignty in terms of state control-over economic policy, transborder flows, and so on. But, in point of fact, there never was a time when state control over anything, including violence, was assured or secure. State control over important external flows has not eroded relative to state control over internal flows over the past 100 years (Thomson and Krasner, 1989). In short, it makes no sense to posit that interdependence and/or democracy has reduced state control from a level that was never actually attained. Sovereignty is not about state control but about state authority. The question is whether or not the state's ability to make authoritative political decisions has eroded; that is, whether ultimate political authority has shifted from the state to nonstate actors or institutions. Second, there is a strong element of functionalism evident in the liberal inter- dependence literature. This perspective suggests that the state and sovereignty are institutions that developed to serve societal needs like economic growth and protection from military attack. The problem with this view is that there is little evidence in the state-building literature to support it. Work by Strayer (1970), Tilly (1975, 1990), Giddens (1985), and others (Skocpol, 1979; Weisser, 1979; Evans et al., 1985) suggests that the state's "function" was to make war and to build power vis-a-vis other states and society. "Society" was largely an adversary in this process as it resisted state rulers' efforts to extract resources and monopolize political and judicial authority. True, state rulers were compelled to make bargains with various societal actors. In exchange for a reliable supply of money and military manpower, states granted or agreed to respect civil, political, and property rights. But the point is that it is ahistorical to suggest that states are losing control, that sovereignty is eroding, because states cannot now fulfill functions they never had, or have as- sumed only recently. The third set of problems is logical. First, liberal interdependence writers are not clear about the relationship between sovereignty and interdependence. Is increasing interdependence the cause of declining sovereignty or vice versa? That is, are interdependence linkages reducing the state's ability to control its borders, or is the state's declining ability to control its borders-presumably due to techno- logical developments-facilitating the proliferation of ties of interdependence? This issue is further confused by those who treat interdependence as a prescription, viewing it as a means of ameliorating some of the more unattractive consequences of sovereignty, most especially interstate conflict and war. Much of this literature evidences a normative stance in which interstate cooperation (or multilateralism) is, by definition, desirable; interdependence, to the extent that it compels such cooperation, is preferable to unilateral state actions associated with sovereignty. In short, the normative and the empirical have become so entangled that the basic theoretical argument is now obscured. Clarification of the logic behind the inter- dependence-sovereignty relationship must precede any assessment of whether or not sovereignty is really eroding. The second logical problem is probably more important. If interdependence is This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms JANICE E. THOMSON 217 eroding state sovereignty, why did states initiate, support, or at least adapt to it in the first place? More tellingly, why do they continue to support it? How do we explain the state's interest in undermining the very basis of its rule-namely, sovereignty? One answer is that the economic benefits of interdependence out- weigh the costs associated with reduced sovereignty. The problem with this notion is that, apart from the fact that it is impossible to put a price tag on sovereignty, the argument cannot explain why most states have apparently failed to make the proper calculus, preferring sovereignty to the benefits of interdependence (Kras- ner, 1985). Alternatively, liberal interdependence theorists might argue that this can be explained in terms of the development and spread of political democracy-that is, popular sovereignty. Presumably capitalists, at least, vote for freedom of transbor- der movement. But this simply leads to another question, which is: if interdepend- ence is eroding sovereignty and the people are sovereign, does not the decline of sovereignty mean an erosion of democratic control? Kaiser (1972), Rosecrance (1986), and Gilpin (1987) have all noted this possibility,6 but almost no one has systematically explored the relationship between political democracy, economic interdependence, and sovereignty.7 Liberal interdependence theory is confused about whether sovereignty is erod- ing or simply being shifted from the central state to the people. One reason for this is, as Halliday (1987:217) suggests, that International Relations theorists-re- alist and liberal interdependence theorists alike-take a holistic view of the state. They equate the state with the country, failing to distinguish between the state, government, society, and so on.8 The state may represent society in the sense that it purports to speak for society in international relations, but -this is quite different from claiming that the state represents societal wishes or needs.9 In failing to disaggregate the society, state, and government, International Relations theorists leave themselves open to Halliday's charge that they accept the latter view, an ideological (liberal) perspective on state-society relations. Liberal interdependence theory does raise the interesting question of how much control the state could lose and still make authoritative decisions. At what point does an erosion of control translate into an irreversible decline in the capacity to make authoritative decisions? I will return to this important question later in this article. To summarize, liberal interdependence theory rightly makes problematic some- thing state-centrists assume to be true-namely, state sovereignty. But interdepend- ence theorists' conception of sovereignty is ahistorical and wrongly focuses on control rather than authority. Moreover, their arguments about the relationship 6 Rosecrance (1986:39), citing Kaiser, acknowledges that "the operations of the multinational corporation and movements of funds from country to country are thus in one sense a derogation from democracy, for democratic electorates no longer have the means of controlling their own fates." Gilpin's work also implies that international economic relations increasingly undermine democratic control. With traditional barriers to trade diminishing in importance, remaining barriers are really domestic legal, cultural, and social institutions. This is particularly true in the case of U.S.-Japan economic relationship. As Gilpin (1987:389-394) puts it, 'The question of whether statist societies should become more liberal, liberal societies should become more statist, or, as most economists aver, domestic structures do not really matter has become central to an evaluation of the problem posed by the inherent conflict between domestic autonomy and international norms." And, we might note, the states to which Gilpin refers are all "democracies." 7 Two exceptions are scholars who focus on the effects of transnationalism or internationalism on democracy (see Picciotto, 1988; and Held, 1991). 8 This charge is not true of Krasner (1984) who has developed a realist theory of state-society relations (statism) which sees the state as confronted with an "us vs. them" situation in which us is the state and them is both other states and domestic society. 9 For a prime example of this, see Frohlich and Oppenheimer (1970:104), who argue, in the first paragraph of their paper, that "a state is first of all an organization that provides public goods for its members, the citizens..." This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 218 State Sovereignty in International Relations between interdependence and sovereignty are confused. Still, theorists of world politics are indebted to this school of thought for challenging sovereignty as the taken-for-granted basis of the state-centric paradigm. In contrast with this inductive approach to sovereignty, recent work by both realists and critical theorists has taken to task the state-centric paradigm's treatment of sovereignty in theoretical terms. John Ruggie's (1983a) "Continuity and Trans- formation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis" and Richard Ashley's (1984) 'The Poverty of Neorealism" highlight the historicity and variability of sovereignty as well as its intersubjective quality. Ruggie and Ashley argue that sovereignty is not a timeless attribute of the state but a way of ordering global politics unique to the modern state system.10 World (or at least European) politics in the medieval period were based not on sover- eignty but on heteronomy. Ruggie (1983a:274-275) describes the medieval heter- onomous system as follows: This system of rule was inlherently "international." To begin with, the distinction between "internal" and "external" political realms, separated by clearly demarcated "boundaries," made little sense until late in the day.... And the feudal ruling class was mobile in a manner not dreamed of since-able to travel and assume govern- ance from one end of the continent to the other without hesitation or difficulty because "public territories formed a continuum with private estates." By contrast, sovereignty "differentiates units in terms of juridically mutually exclu- sive and morally self-entailed domains" based on single-titled or exclusive, fixed territoriality (Ruggie, 1983a:280). As Ruggie (1983a:273) argues, neorealist international relations theory cannot explain the transition from heteronomy to sovereignty, a transition he terms "the most important contextual change in international politics in this millennium.. In taking sovereignty as an assumption, neorealism becomes, not a universal theory of global politics, but a theory of relations among modern states. Ashley argues, however, that Ruggie fails to acknowledge the inherently rela- tional and practical nature of sovereignty. Sovereignty "involves not only the pos- session of self and the exclusion of others but also the limitation of self in the respect of others, for its authority presupposes the recognition of others who, per force of their recognition, agree to be so excluded" (Ashley, 1984:272-273, n. 101). 11 It is simply a matter of logic that the claim to exclude others presupposes the existence of others against whom the claim must be made.12 Sovereignty, Ashley suggests, is not about who has the physical power to make such claims but about who "is to be a power" in global politics. Put differently, "sovereignty is what makes a territorial entity eligible to participate in international relations" (James, 1986b:92). In addition, Ashley (1984:272-273, n. 101) argues that the criteria for sovereign recognition are variable: "In effect, sovereignty is a practical category whose empirical contents are not fixed but evolve in a way reflecting the active practical consensus among coreflective statesmen...." So, ultimately, sovereignty is a product of an intersubjective consensus among state leaders. Sovereignty is what some collectivity of state leaders says it is. Ruggie and Ashley thus suggest that a more encompassing theory of world politics would have to dispense with the assumption of state sovereignty. Ruggie's 10 Neorealism is also a theory not of international relations but of interstate relations (see Klink, 1990:38-39). 11 This statement was in response to Ruggie's argument that sovereignty and private property are parallel institu- tions. 12 Thus the history of diplomacy can be interpreted as the practical attempt to mediate the alienation attendant to sovereignty (Der Derian, 1987). This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms JANICE E. THOMSON 219 work indicates that we should treat it as one of at least two possible ordering principles. Ashley's arguments suggest that sovereignty, while distinct from hetero- nomy, is itself variable and a product of state practices. Ruggie and Ashley spurred many International Relations scholars to rethink sovereignty both theoretically and empirically. How should we conceptualize sovereignty? How should we measure it empirically so we can determine its status-past, current, and future? How much and what kind of change in world politics is consistent with sovereignty? Toward an Empirically Useful Conception of Sovereignty Theoretical and empirical work on sovereignty and the state over the past ten years or so has come to grips with many of the issues raised by theorists, such as Ruggie and Ashley, as well as by the earlier liberal interdependence critique of the state- centric paradigm. In this section I draw upon an eclectic literature on sovereignty, the state, and state-building to propose a synthetic conceptualization of sovereignty amenable to empirical research. A working definition of sovereignty with which most theorists would not take (strenuous) issue is: Sovereignty is the recognition by internal and external actors that the state has the exclusive authority to inter- vene coercively in activities within its territory.13 This follows on the classical international law definition, with the addition of the recognition criterion. The key elements in this definition are recognition, the state, authority, coercion, and territory. In what follows, each of these is closely examined, with the aim of translating these definitional components into empirical indicators. The Dimensions of Sovereignty Recognition. Sovereignty is not an attribute of the state but is attributed to the state by other states or state rulers (Ashley, 1984:239, 259, 269, 272; Miller, 1984, 1986). Recent work, most notably by Robert Jackson (1990), is quite persuasive in demonstrating the state's dependence on other states for its authority. In the "real world," Latvia and Croatia would surely not disagree with this view. The modern state system is unique in that its members recognize one another as equal authority claimants. "Most state systems have been comprised of a domi- nant empire ringed by client states"; that is, they rested "on the concept of asym- metric relations of dominance and subordination" (Strang, 1991a:148). In the modern, sovereign system, states are recognized as being juridically equal, despite vast differences in size, power capabilities, and empirical statehood (Jackson and Rosberg, 1982). Each is recognized as having the final and exclusive authority to use coercion within its territorial borders. This recognition dimension of sovereignty entails two principal empirical ques- tions: whose recognition is required?, and what are the criteria for recognition? The first question concerns identification of those who have the power to designate the state as the repository of ultimate political authority within a given territory. Ashley (1984) posits a community of competent statesmen; Meyer (1980), a world polity of transnational elites; while others suggest it is the European or Great Powers who constitute the regime of sovereignty (Bull and Watson, 1982; Strang, 1991a; Thomson, 1994). So while theoretical and empirical work persua- sively demonstrates the crucial role external recognition plays in constituting state sovereignty, it remains unclear just who must do the recognizing-a majority of 13 I am indebted to one of the reviewers for helping me to clarify this definition. This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 220 State Sovereignty in International Relations states, the Great Powers, all states, a core of elites, a hegemonic power, or some- thing else. What an entity must do to be recognized as a sovereign state is the second empirical question. Waltz's (1979:96) claim that the essence of sovereignty is that the state "decides for itself how it will cope with its internal and external problems" suggests that capabilities are central. States are recognized as sovereign when they present a fact of sovereignty; that is, states recognize another's sovereignty when the latter has achieved the capability to defend its authority against domestic and international challengers. European history largely supports this argument but the post-World War II period of decolonization does not. By no stretch of the imagi- nation is it possible to explain the existence of the vast majority of today's sovereign states in terms of their empirical power capabilities. Most cannot defend against either external or internal challengers (Jackson and Rosberg, 1982;Jackson, 1990). But if recognition without power capabilities characterizes most contemporary states, cases of power capabilities without recognition exist as well. For example, most of the Great Powers did not recognize the Soviet state's sovereignty in the Baltic region. This lack of recognition meant nothing as the Soviet state simply went ahead and exerted sovereignty there for a half-century. It had the physical capacity to make good on its claims to sovereignty despite other states' refusal to recognize it. Recognition (or the lack of it) did not matter. Arguably, Taiwan fits in this category, too, as it has developed a rich and powerful national state without enjoying recognition as a sovereign state. This suggests that power capabilities are equally as or more important than outside recognition. It may be, and this will be discussed below, that sovereignty is limited to those who possess the material resources to defend it while the less powerful are nominally sovereign but in fact are subject to heteronomy. Evidently, the relationship between sovereignty, recognition, and power is exceedingly com- plex. Nevertheless, empirical research on sovereignty requires a better under- standing of the relative importance of power capabilities and external recognition in empowering and legitimizing the sovereign state. The State. In international relations theory, sovereignty resides with the state.14 One problem with this assumption is that it is not clear what international relations theorists mean by "the state." Halliday (1987:217) claims that they take a holistic view, treating a "country as a whole and all that is within it: territory, government, people, society" as a state. Although neorealism does display this tendency, liberal- interdependence theorists, who use the terms state and government interchangeably (Keohane and Nye, 1972:ix), are arguably more sensitive to the distinctions be- tween country and state. The state-building literature provides historically grounded bases for distinguishing between the state and society and for theorizing about the state's role and functions. First, the state is a bureaucratic apparatus separate from and potentially in conflict with society. Society or the nation was created by the state out of the "arbitrary assemblages of people" (Halliday, 1987:220) caught within a set of territorial boundaries. As Hinsley (1966:10) writes, the "first emergence of the state reflects not the desire of a society for its kind of rule but an urge in men to possess 14 It is important to note that this reflects a bias toward the continental European system. In some cases-Britain, Holland, and the United States, among others-"the people" are sovereign. Treating sovereign states as identical entities (or individuals as rational utility-maximizers, as in economic theory) does obscure such differences. But international relations theory is based upon the claim either that the explanatory or predictive payoff from empha- sizing similarity is greater or that differences are reduced to theoretical insignificance through processes of socialization witlhin the state system (see Waltz, 1979). This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms JANICE E. THOMSON 221 its kind of power." In Europe the modern national state emerged only after long and bloody struggles in which "society" strenuously and often violently resisted state-builders' efforts to monopolize authority and violence (Tilly, 1975). It is only when the state monopolizes coercion both internally and externally that the na- tional state, in which the state is equivalent to the polity, emerges (Tilly, 1975:638; Giddens, 1985:121). Empirically, what seems to have occurred in Europe is a series of bargains between state-builders and wealth-producers. As the costs of war-making escalated, state-builders were compelled to grant political and economic rights to individuals in exchange for revenue (Tilly, 1990:84-91). Plunder gave way to taxation. Later states made bargains with ordinary people (political rights and social programs) in exchange for their service as soldiers (Tilly, 1990:122). "The core of what we now call 'citizenship,' indeed, consists of multiple bargains hammered out by rulers and ruled in the course of their struggles over the means of state action, especially the making of war" (Tilly, 1990:102). Clearly state sovereignty is consistent with a wide range of relationships with the "private sector" and a capitalist economy. State control over the economy has varied with each permutation of the state: the early state and mercantilism, the modern state and laissez-faire, and the national state and embedded liberalism.15 But the salient point is that historically, state control of the economy was not meant to be functional to society but to the state's war-making capabilities. For most of its history, the state has spurred economic growth in the interest of augmenting its war-fighting capabilities and securing domestic order. In a later section I will argue that, if any function can be legitimately attributed to the state, it is policing. Finally, from the beginning the state-building process and state-society relations were permeated with outside influences. "Far from the international constitution of states and societies being immune, at least until recently, to international phe- nomena it can be asserted that the international dimension provided the context and formative influence for these states..." including European states (Halliday, 1987:220). Modern states are, in part, constituted by the international system. In Tilly's memorable words, "War made states and states made war." Tilly's view, which implies that competition and war were the extent of the international system's contribution to the state-building process, ignores or understates the contribution of cooperative and peacetime interstate relations. The state is a product of both internal and external competition, of conflict and cooperation. Once we acknowledge that the state and society are not equivalent, that the relationship between them is potentially (if not inherently) conflictual, and that state-society relations are influenced by interstate relations, interstate cooperation takes on an added dimension. Put bluntly, states can cooperate against societies. That is, states may have a common interest in placing similar controls on individu- als or may be compelled by more powerful states to adopt such controls. In neither case does the impetus for these controls come from society and, in some instances, may be directly opposed to societal beliefs or wishes.16 In summary, then, the state is the central bureaucratic apparatus claiming a monopoly on organized coercive forces. To the extent that it has assumed the role of defending societal rights, ensuring economic development, or providing collec- tive goods, it is a consequence of state-society bargains made in the context of the state's quest for money and security. The analytical distinction between state and 15 On the former, see Viner, 1987; on the latter two, see Ruggie, 1983b. 16 This form of interstate cooperation against individuals is nicely illustrated by the decline of mercenarism (Thomson, 1990) and of nonstate violence in general (Thomson, 1994). This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 222 State Sovereignty in International Relations society17 opens up the possibility for a distinctive form of interstate cooperation, one based on states' common interest in controlling nonstate actors. Authority. I want to suggest that, with sovereignty, states claim and are recognized as having the authority to define the political, the political being that which is subject to state coercion (Wolfe, 1989:1-23). This is not to say that states cannot delegate authority to other actors or institutions. It is to say, rather, that once that authority is delegated, it is no longer treated as political; it is private, social, economic, religious, cultural, and so on. In the contemporary world, we make easy distinctions between economics and politics. We assume that the production and, above all, the acquisition of [the means of consumption and production] normally takes place without threat or use of physical or military violence. Nothing is less self-evident. For all warrior societies with a barter econ- omy-and not only for them-the sword is a frequent and indispensable instru- ment for acquiring means of production, and the threat of violence an indispensable means of production. (Elias, 1982:149) An economic realm of choice distinct from a political realm of coercion is not, as liberalism presupposes, natural and timeless but is a product of history and prac- tice. In the Middle Ages, "military action, and political and economic striving, are largely identical, and the urge to increase wealth in the form of land comes to the same thing as extending territorial sovereignty and increasing military power" (Elias, 1982:43). The contemporary differentiation between the state's realm-poli- tics-and the economy is itself a product of the modern interstate system and the meta-political authority imparted to it by the institution of sovereignty. Meta-political authority, of course, is not unique to the modern sovereign state. Empires, for example, claim the right to decide what social relations are subject to coercion and which are not. What is distinctive with sovereignty is that, globally, this meta-political authority is pluralistic and mutually recognized as such. That is, states mutually recognize each other's meta-political authority, which means that the boundaries between spheres (political, economic, religious, cultural, etc.) are not only the subject of domestic politics but of interstate relations as well. There is no central decision-making locus at the global level to finally decide where the boundaries separating them are to be drawn. To illustrate my notion of meta-political authority, consider the U.S. state's definition of drug issues. The U.S. central state does not deploy its political authority over the production, sale, and consumption of cigarettes. Instead, these activities are left to the private, individual, and market realms of authority. State coercion is not deployed except in regulating smoking in public places.18 In contrast, almost the entire apparatus of the state is geared toward abolishing the production, distribution, and use of cocaine. The state has defined smoking ciga- rettes as a (domestic) health issue; cocaine as a (transnational) political issue.19 But the effects of U.S. state decisions are not confined to U.S. domestic politics or territory. Defining the production and use of cocaine and tobacco in this way has enormous consequences for international relations: tobacco is subject to a free trade regime while cocaine is subject to an international prohibition regime (Nadelmann, 1990). Because the exercise of meta-political authority by one state allows or prohibits various transborder flows, many if not all other states feel the 17 For a discussion of the problems associated with making this analytical distinction see Mitchell, 1991. 18 Some U.S. states, of course, regulate the sale of tobacco products to minors. 19 For an explanation of this outcome see Thomson, 1992. This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms JANICE E. THOMSON 223 impact. Liberal interdependence analysts are right to claim that economic policy making is increasingly "interdependent." They are wrong to assume that what is defined as economic is somehow clear, static, and uncontested. The politics of international economic relations includes or is preceded by the politics of deciding what-for example, cocaine and tobacco-falls into the realm of economics or politics in the first place. Since I contend that in examining sovereignty our focus should be on the state's meta-political authority claims rather than on control, it is important to be clear about what I mean by the terms authority and control. The distinction I want to make is between the claim to exclusive right to make rules (authority) and the capability of enforcing that claim (control).20 In short, authority concerns rule-making and control, rule-enforcement. I should emphasize at this point that my conception of authority is rather different from the traditional Weberian one in at least two respects (Weber, 1964). First, my concept concerns interstate rather than state-society relations.21 Whereas Weber was concerned almost exclusively with dominant (ruler)-subordinate (ruled) relationships, the authority I am talking about here applies to a pluralistic group of equals none of which claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion at the global level. Second, whereas there is an element of legitimacy to interna- tionally recognized authority, those doing the recognizing are not "societies" (the ruled) but other states (rulers). As such, my conception of authority is closer to that of Stinchcombe, who says that "the person over whom power is exercised is not usually as important as other power-holders" (quoted in Tilly, 1985:171). This means that, to paraphrase Tilly, "legitimacy is the probability that other states will act to confirm the decisions of a given state" (Tilly, 1985:171). Authority and control are analytically separable but their empirical relationship is of crucial importance in understanding and measuring sovereignty. Authority, as the working definition offered earlier suggests, is contingent on recognition; con- trol depends on concrete capabilities to monitor and enforce compliance with the rules that are made under that authority. For example, the new African states which are not empirically sovereign are still sovereign by virtue of the interstate system's recognition of their claims to sovereignty (Jackson and Rosberg, 1982). Indeed, capabilities may be supplied by other states or international institutions, as in the contemporary case of Somalia or the earlier case of the Congo, where international intervention is aimed at building the state's power capabilities, especially the security and police forces. It may well be that the central problem in defining and measuring sovereignty is to understand the relationship between authority and control. One way to think about this relationship is in terms of a cross-sectional and/or longitudinal, quantitative research design. As a first cut, we might posit the rela- tionship as positive and monotonic. As control (measured in terms of capabilities) increases, authority (or sovereignty) expands, or vice versa. This aptly captures the state-building process from the end of the medieval period, when states made minimal authority claims and had few capabilities with which to enforce them, to 20 These concepts are clearly related but the analytic distinction is crucial for empirical work. As Ruggie (1983b:198) argues, "the prevailing interpretation of international authority focuses on powver only; it ignores the dimension of social purpose." If my interpretation of Rtuggie's argument is correct, he is uirging a distinction between power as capabilities and the ends to which that power is deployed. My concepts of auithority and control are meant to address Rtuggie's concern somewhat differently. Control meastured in terms of capabilities is probably not different from what Rtuggie terms "power." On the other hand, my concept of authority concerns those who have the right to make the rtules, while Ruggie's "social purpose" seems to refer to the content of those rules. 21 For a trenchant critique of Weber's concept of auithority see Blau, 1963. This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 224 State Sovereignty in International Relations the contemporary period, when some states possess the capabilities to enforce totalitarian claims to authority. Alternatively, the relationship between authority and control may be a step-func- tion. Once a particular threshold of capabilities is crossed, sovereignty is achieved. This would seem to characterize the post-mandate case in which tutelary powers prepared (or were supposed to prepare) colonial regions for the exercise of sovereignty by building the minimal police, military, and political institutions necessary for self-government. Conversely, at an identifiable point, loss of control would mean loss of sovereignty. This is arguably the case in the realm of interna- tional finance where, for whatever reasons, states allowed the development of the Eurodollar markets which eventuated in the states' loss of control over capital markets (Strange, quoted in Webb, 1991:328). In this instance, states no longer exercise sovereignty; authority claims are largely empty or meaningless (but see Kapstein, 1991/92). Working at this level of aggregation may be reasonable and even necessary in performing these types of quantitative analyses, but, in my view, the authority-con- trol relationship is much more complex. First, this relationship may, in some instances, be inverse. That is, the scope of authority claims may narrow despite no change or even an increase in enforcement capabilities. Much of international law since about 1800 has entailed states "negotiating" the appropriate authority claims vis-A-vis nonstate actors. Not surprisingly, one of the first things states agreed on was that they had a responsibility to curtail private military expeditions launched from their territories against other states (Thomson, 1994). Later they agreed that the state's nationali- zation (with compensation) of private property was a legitimate exercise of state authority (Krasner, 1985:190). In these and other cases, authority and control positively covaried, although assertion of authority preceded (caused? legiti- mated?) development of capabilities. But in a whole range of other issue-areas the trend, especially since World War II, seems to be the reverse. International human rights and humanitarian law proscribe genocide, torture, slavery, and so on, despite the fact that states generally possess the capabilities to perpetrate them. However, my interpretation of what is occurring here is not a challenge to the state's claim to exclusive authority within its territory, but a redefinition of what means the state can legitimately use in exercising that authority. In this regard, it is perhaps useful to think of authority along two dimensions: the constitutive and the functional. Sovereignty constitutes the state system as the meta-political authority in world politics. The functional dimension delineates the precise range of activities over which states can legitimately exercise their authority (extensiveness). Within this range, variable across issue-areas and actors, the depth of state authority-or, put differently, the degree to which state authority pene- trates society (intensiveness)-may vary. These need not covary. Indeed, it appears that the breadth of contemporary sovereignty is diminishing in some areas, par- ticularly the "economic" sphere where decision-making authority is being relegated to the market. At the same time, the state's intrusion into formerly "private" aspects of people's lives is reaching astonishingly high levels perhaps especially in the United States (Meyer et al., 1984; Marx, 1986). A question that bears further investigation is the degree to which the decline of state authority and control in the economic realm may be contingent on an enhancement of its authority and control in other realms. It is also important to recognize that control is a function of capabilities defined much more broadly than simply in terms of coercion. Monitoring, surveillance, prevention, and other proactive, sophisticated means of controlling behavior are This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms JANICE E. THOMSON 225 at the state's disposal. In a "pacified" society, rules may, in fact, be self-enforcing, or enforced by nonstate actors. I will return to this issue later in the article. To summarize my argument here, sovereignty imbues states with the meta- political authority to decide which issues, activities, and practices fall within their authority realm-the political-and which lie in the province of nonstate authority. The question is whether rules governing various activities are to be made and enforced by states or left to private or nonstate actors. It is this deeper level of authority, joined with territoriality, that constitutes the basis of state power under sovereignty. My claim is that the end of sovereignty would entail the end of the states' monopoly on meta-political authority. What some observers take as signs of eroding sovereignty are merely changes in the norms or rules delineating the legitimate forms of functional authority and means of enforcing those rules. Sovereign states must effectively patrol territory, but the meaning of effectiveness, as well as the means of achieving it, changes as the global environment changes. Rising interde- pendence may threaten states' ability to assert and make good on their authority claims-, but it may also provide an inducement to move beyond unilateralism toward the homogenization of authority claims and interstate cooperative policing.22 Coercion. In the Weberian tradition, a monopoly on the major, organized forces of violence is the hallmark of the state (Weber, 1964:154). Even non-Weberians suggest that "effectively-patrolled territory" is a prerequisite for recognition as a sovereign state (Ashley, 1984:272). Yet, for the first 200 years of the modern state system, states did not monopolize coercion, although they claimed and were gen- erally perceived to be sovereign (Thomson and Krasner, 1989; Thomson, 1994). History is littered with countless cases of states racked by civil war and yet accorded recognition as sovereign entities. Rebels, terrorists, criminal organizations, and private corporations have persistently challenged the state's monopoly on coercion, yet the state's sovereignty was not questioned. Moreover, empirical analysis demon- strates that states did not achieve a monopoly on externally directed coercion until the late nineteenth century (Thomson, 1990). Nevertheless, it would be absurd to claim that the state did not exist or did not claim sovereignty until 1900. So while it seems reasonable to define sovereignty in terms of the state's monop- oly on the use of violence domestically, there is plenty of empirical evidence, both historical and contemporary, to the contrary. To what degree-actually, on the ground-is the U.S. state sovereign in south-central Los Angeles or the British state in Northern Ireland? In terms of a monopoly on violence, are the Russian and Georgian states sovereign and, if so, where? Beyond this is the extent to which the state can exclude other states from intervening coercively in its territory. Great Powers have persistently intervened militarily in Third World states without the latter losing their sovereignty. Undoubtedly, coercion is key to sovereignty because, ultimately, the exercise of authority depends on it (Blau, 1963:313). Still, it is not clear the extent to which state control over coercion can be eroded or challenged by internal or external actors and still be consistent with sovereignty. The state's prime "function" has always been policing territory and people. Conflict and war with competing rulers were largely responsible for the develop- ment of the modern state and state system (Tilly, 1975). The state's policing activities depend on its monopolization of the major organized means of violence within its territory. This entails both the exclusion of other states and the extraction 22 In this regard, Nadelmann's (1993) research on international law enforcement is exemplary and merits emula- tion. This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 226 State Sovereignty in International Relations of coercive capabilities from domestic competitors. This monopoly, which was achieved by the late nineteenth century, was facilitated by an international institu- tional structure reflecting states' common interests in building power and exerting control vis-a-vis nonstate actors. The international system lends domestic autonomy to the state through institutions such as international law and diplomacy, which empower the state to overcome societal resistance to its policing practices. The state's policing role, in the narrower sense of law enforcement, is complex and ambiguous. An extensive literature on social control indicates that policing and surveillance are everywhere being rapidly privatized and socialized. 3 Main- taining order through traditional law enforcement, a function states assumed in the nineteenth century, is increasingly confined to the criminal element and the lower classes. Behavioral control of the broader society is increasingly aimed at prevention, requiring more subtle and more pervasive surveillance-by corporate security bureaucracies over workers in the workplace, over workers and customers in privately owned public places such as shopping malls and amusement parks, and over the middle class in the marketplace for credit. It appears, then, that the state's policing functions, at least in North America, have been both expanded and differentiated so that now the poor and minorities may be subject to much more personally and physically intrusive policing by regular public police and welfare workers, whereas the middle classes (in fact, most wage earners) may be subject to much greater, but less visible, policing by the I.R.S. and credit agencies. (Nalla and Newman, 1991:544) The complexity of this relationship between state and private policing does not lend itself to any easy conclusions about its consequences for sovereignty. Some argue that "North America is experiencing a 'new feudalism'; huge tracts of prop- erty and associated public spaces are controlled-and policed-by private corpo- rations," which raises the "possibility of sovereignty shifting from the state directly to private [national and transnational] corporations" (Shearing and Stenning, 1983:503-504). However, it is also clear that this privatization of surveillance, at least in the United States, was a result of state authorization. The federal Trademark and Counterfeiting Act of 1984 gave businesses expanded powers to protect their property and profits, including the right to conduct inde- pendent investigations, obtain search warrants, seize evidence, arrest suspects and pursue private criminal justice prosecutions. (Trojanowicz and Bucqueroux, 1990:131) Perhaps the most warranted conclusion is that Foucault's (1977) disciplinary society has arrived, marking the state's shift from despotic to infrastructural (Mann, 1986:477-483) or administrative (Giddens, 1985:172-197) power. If we define sovereignty more narrowly as the state's ultimate authority to decide the social order (Shearing and Stenning, 1987:12-13), state sovereignty has not declined; it has simply changed in form. Empirical analyses of the state-building process reveal that state authority and control vary over time and across both states and issue-areas. The state-centric paradigm's state has never existed anywhere but in theory. While not determinant, the level of state control over the exercise of violence is a principal explanation for this variance. To summarize, the state's function is policing. States have a common interest in monopolizing coercion within their territories. States can and do cooperate against 23 On the United States, see Cunningham and Taylor, 1985; on the United Kingdom, see Elliott, 1991; on Israel, see Geva, 1989; on Canada, see Shearing and Stenning, 1983; on Peru, see Brooke, 1991; on Germany and Switzerland, see Urban Innovation Abroad, 1980. This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms JANICE E. THOMSON 227 societal actors who challenge this monopoly. The disarming or pacification of nonstate actors is a product of three centuries of state-building and interstate interaction. Territoriality. Most analysts agree that sovereignty describes the unique basis upon which modern world politics is ordered. With sovereignty, political authority is linked with territory. Put differently, political authority is vested in "a set of administrative, policing, and military organizations headed, and more or less well coordinated by, an executive authority" (Skocpol, 1979:29)-the state. Its scope is limited to the people and resources found within a set of geographical boundaries (Klink, 1990:2). Sovereignty delineates authority according not to functions but to geography. This is the key difference between sovereignty and heteronomy. Despite broad agreemnent on the territorial basis of sovereignty, even this is subject to challenge as inherently Euro-centric. Most scholars argue that sover- eignty has been extended to non-European areas so that global politics are now organized around sovereignty (Bull and Watson, 1982:2, 123; Miller, 1984:285; Strang, 1991a, 1991b). Even political authorities lacking the empirical hallmarks of European state sovereignty are given juridical sovereignty (Jackson and Rosberg, 1982; Jackson, 1990). In this, the dominant view, sovereignty is now universal. An alternative view is that sovereignty applies only in the northern tier of states; politics between the north and south is characterized by heteronomy. Wendt and Barnett suggest that the juridical authority structure of the contemporary states system, "which is 'anarchic' in terms of Weber's bureaucratic-legal definition of authority, is overlaid by informal authority structures that correspond to something more like 'feudal' authority (and which in those terms are not 'anarchic')" (Wendt and Barnett, 1993:335; see also Onuf and Klink, 1989:164-170). This claim bears further investigation. The point I wish to make is that, although sovereignty's globalization has become something of a truism, there are very real questions about the sovereignty of non-European states in the contemporary system. While there may be degrees of sovereignty, we must be careful to distinguish between a situation of tenuous sovereignty and one of heteronomy. More research is needed here, but it is clear that even in the south political authority is based on territori- ality. At one level, territory is simply a geographic space whose limits are defined by physical borders-lines on a map. With sovereignty, however, states mutually rec- ognize one another's exclusive authority over what is contained in that space.24 The essence of the state-building process has been the state's drive to penetrate, exploit, and mobilize those resources for interstate competition and war. One of those resources, of course, is the people who live within the state's borders, and part of the state-building process-still incomplete in most of the world-entails creating a "society" or nation out of these people; that is, forging their loyalty to and identification with the state. So the territorial dimension of sovereignty entails not just the defense of geo- graphic boundaries but tight linkages between the state and people. As states struggle to attain a secure supply of money and manpower with which to compete with other states, they are compelled to make bargains with the owners of that wealth and labor, granting rights and privileges to societal groups in exchange for the obligation to provide needed resources to the state. Although space precludes an in-depth discussion here, it may well be that these bargains, unique to each national state, shape personal identities. After all, these highly institutionalized bargains are the stuff of citizenship. The point is that human beings are separated 24 On territoriality, see Sack, 1981. On territory as property, see Onuf and Klink, 1989, and Kratochwil, 1992. This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 228 State Sovereignty in International Relations not just by geographic boundaries, but by a set of unique relationships with their respective states. The preceding discussion surely highlights the great challenges entailed in moving from the received definition to an empirical analysis of sovereignty. What constitutes recognition and who has to grant it? What are the relative weights of recognition and power capabilities in constituting sovereignty? To what degree is the territoriality of Third World states real? How much devolution or erosion in state control over violence is consistent with sovereignty? All of this suggests that sovereignty is largely in the eye of the beholders. That is, most states are sovereign because other states recognize them as such. The question then becomes, How do statesmen, the hegemon, or the world polity know sovereignty when they see it? This brings us back to the question of recognition criteria. The Changing Norms of Sovereignty Ruggie (1983a:280-281) suggests that, presumably in different historical eras, there exists what he terms the "hegemonic form of state-society relations." Similarly, Ashley (1987:45) proposes a "hegemonic exemplar of a normalized sovereignty." The implication is that in a given historical era (however drawn), there is a standard or norm of sovereignty. Neither Ruggie nor Ashley is particularly clear about whether the form around which consensus is forged is hegemonic because it reflects the hegemon's own institutional structures25 or because dominant states agree on the form that works best or most clearly serves their interests. Neverthe- less, external recognition as a sovereign state is contingent on some set of criteria, and the question is how those who do the recognizing define the criteria. Clearly, these norms change; for example, traditional things like respecting borders have been joined by democracy, free markets, and human rights. "Effectively patrolled territory" (Ashley, 1984:272) is ambiguous in that it is not clear whether the state must be able to defend its territory from external incursions or to control the people within its borders, or both. With regard to the latter, Meyer (1980:119) argues that once a population is incorporated into complete citizenship, a nation-state is given almost complete authority to subordinate the population. It can expropriate, kill, and starve with relatively little fear of external intervention. Clearly this is overstated; states have from the beginning intervened in one an- other's "internal" affairs to prevent the persecution of particular groups. Still, Meyer's contention is true in the sense that states have failed to intervene in numerous cases of mass repression, slaughter, and even genocide which presum- ably occurred in the course of the state's effectively patrolling its territory. In the 1990s, despite arguments that respect for human rights has become an important prerequisite for sovereign recognition, Saddam Hussein's treatment of the Kurds has not (yet) resulted in a loss of Iraqi sovereignty in the Kurdish region.26 Nobody did much of anything to prevent the genocide in Rwanda. By way of contrast, both the European Community and the United States stated that recognition of new states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union 25 Nadelmann's (1993:11-12) work supports the latter view. He claims that "the internationalization of U.S. law enforcement during the twentieth century has shaped the evolution of criminal justice systems in dozens of other countries. No other government has pursued its international law enforcement agenda in as aggressive and penetrative a manner or devoted so much effort to promoting its own criminal justice norms to others." 26 The 1993 Amnesty International annual report on human rights says that human rights abuses around the world in 1992 reached the highest level in the organization's thirty-two-year history (Meisler, 1994). This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms JANICE E. THOMSON 229 would depend not only on their respect for borders and control of nuclear weap- ons, but also on democratization and respect for ethnic minorities (as well as assumption of international debt obligations of their former countries) (Friedman, 1991; Tagliabue, 1991). It could be argued that these criteria constitute the norms of contemporary sovereignty. Still, whether or not the capacity to effectively police territory in a prescribed way constitutes a norm of sovereignty is ambiguous. Perhaps because they are Europeans in a European-dominated state system, the East Europeans are held to a different standard than extra-European states like Iraq. Apparently, the most analysts can do is infer the criteria for sovereign recogni- tion from practices characteristic of different historical eras. Measuring Sovereignty Using the criteria developed here, a transition away from sovereignty to something else (e.g., neo-heteronomy) would require one or some combination of the follow- ing: 1. A change in the authority empowered to recognize sovereignty; 2. The diffusion of meta-political authority to alternative institutions (e.g., religious organizations, transnational corporations, international institu- tions) whose membership would be exclusively non-state actors; 3. The state's loss of its monopoly on coercion; and 4. The deterritorialization of state authority claims. An assessment of the current status of sovereignty awaits systematic empirical analyses of these aspects of sovereignty. Nevertheless, I seriously doubt that any changes have occurred to an extent sufficient to say that sovereignty is in danger. First, the states' recognition power is, if anything, more secure than ever. States emerging from the breakup of the Soviet empire and Yugoslavia are clearly de- pendent on other states for diplomatic recognition and admission to international institutions. Territorial borders seem, if anything, more secure than ever (James, 1986a). Despite the proliferation of international organizations and the increasing activism of the UN, these are institutions built on state sovereignty which is enshrined in the UN's charter. Multilateral institutions are not above or apart from the state system; states dominate them. There are no signs that individuals are switching their loyalties to some institution other than the state. True, there is some evidence that Europeans (especially young people) are increasingly identifying themselves with Europe, but the European Union is hardly a nonstate actor. Collective decision making in interstate organizations such as the League of Nations, the UN, NATO, and the European Union may well mark a decline in democratic control over policy making or a homogenization of legal structures but is not indicative of an erosion of the state's sovereignty. The end of the Cold War has brought increasing calls for collective intervention in behalf of human rights. Yet, Great Powers have always violated the nonintervention norm when it was in their interests to do so, acting collectively when possible (Holy Alliance, UN Security Council) but unilaterally when necessary. The decision to intervene coer- cively is taken by states whose aim is not to destroy a sovereign state but to prop up or depose a particular government. The monopolization of coercion is more problematic. While states clearly con- tinue to monopolize the major, organized coercive forces, there has also been a substantial growth in private coercive activities. Besides the proliferation of private This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 230 State Sovereignty in International Relations security forces, nonstate groups engaged in "illicit" activities have created private armies formidable in size, organizational sophistication, and weaponry. Nonethe- less, private armies have always existed so it is not clear that contemporary forms represent a new or unique challenge to state sovereignty. Does the contemporary delegation of policing functions to societal actors con- stitute an erosion of sovereignty, or does it merely reflect the adaptation of sover- eignty to a new division of policing labor in post-industrial capitalist economies? The state may retain a monopoly on the use of violence, but that may be irrelevant when control over people and the protection of property are proactive and based on nonviolent sanctions, especially the denial of access to private property re- sources such as "recreational and shopping facilities, housing, employment, and credit" (Shearing and Stenning, 1983:502). International Relations theorists have always concerned themselves with the possible formation of a supra-state, world policing body. More attention should be paid to the potential devolution of coer- cive authority to the "private sector." Conclusion If nothing else, this article highlights the complexity of sovereignty and suggests that the quest for empirical measures of sovereignty may well be quixotic. Never- theless, it does suggest that in assessing the current status and future prospects of sovereignty, attention should be (re-) directed to the issue of rule-making and enforcement. Ultimately, sovereignty locates and centralizes these authority and policing functions in a territorially based, bureaucratic structure-the state-but at the same time disperses them into a multiplicity of juridically equal states. If my arguments have any merit, then the bottom line is not whether or not states can pursue autonomous economic, human rights or environmental policies in an interdependent world, but if and how interdependence (or anything else) is affecting the states' recognized claim to monopolize the coercive and policing function upon which their meta-political authority rests. A transition away from sovereignty to something else (e.g., neo-heteronomy) would require the deterritorialization of legitimate violence or the dispersal of legitimate (i.e., recognized) coercive capabilities to nonstate actors. In short, the state's meta-political authority would be diffused as its (universally recognized claim to a) monopoly on coercive activity in its territory was broken up and dispersed to nonstate actors. The rather spare conclusion of this exercise in thinking through sovereignty is that empirical research on issues concerning sovereignty should focus on the organization and use of violence and how that may or may not be changing. Although the evidence is not decisive, I am skeptical that state sovereignty has eroded. In some respects, sovereignty appears to be under effective challenge or increasingly irrelevant; in others, it is clearly on the rise. But this has always been the case. Just as states crumble or disintegrate into smaller units (Soviet Union) while others coalesce into larger ones (European Union), sovereignty grows both weaker and stronger. Based on anecdotal evidence, I would argue that states increasingly exercise sovereignty in multilateral, international institutions which are distanced from societal control. State bargaining with society is bypassed and legitimated by multilateralism. It is this externally induced, state-led derogation of democratic control that is commonly mistaken for the erosion of sovereignty and which merits further systematic, empirical research. "Democratization" of the state system may not mark the demise of state sovereignty but the demise of its most effective legitimation. This content downloaded from 117.99.242.145 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:25:16 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms JANICE E. THOMSON 231 References ANGELL, N. 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