Kant's Reasons Against a Global State: Popular Sovereignty as a Principle of International Law

2015 ◽  
pp. 150-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingeborg Maus
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Global State

Perfecting Sovereignty?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
International Law ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Public Accountability

This chapter examines the idea that our priority ought to be to reform the international trade in resources so as to deliver on popular resource sovereignty, and to deliver upon an ideal of ‘public accountability’ in resource sales. It suggests that ‘accountability’ reforms have some promise, but cannot be considered a replacement for more ambitious egalitarian reforms. Indeed, it shows that we have reason to be cautious about those reforms, in light of their likely effects. It also shows that public accountability and popular sovereignty are not unambiguously enshrined in international law. This reduces the supposed pragmatic advantage of accountability reforms, and their purported superiority over more ambitious egalitarian reforms.

Sovereignty

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hermann Heller
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Political System ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
National Sovereignty ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The People ◽  
Pluralistic World

This 1927 work addresses the paradox of sovereignty, that is, how the sovereign can be both the highest authority and subject to law. Unlike Kelsen and Schmitt who seek to dissolve the paradox, this text sees the tensions that the paradox highlights as an essential part of a society ruled by law. Sovereignty, in the sense of national sovereignty, is often perceived in liberal democracies today as being under threat, or at least “in transition,” as power devolves from nation states to international bodies. This threat to national sovereignty is at the same time considered a threat to a different idea of sovereignty, popular sovereignty—the sovereignty of “the people”—as important decisions seem increasingly to be made by institutions outside of a country’s political system or by elite-dominated institutions within. This text was written in 1927 amidst the very similar tensions of the Weimar Republic. In an exploration of history, constitutional and political theory, and international law, it shows that democrats must defend a legal idea of sovereignty suitable for a pluralistic world.

Europe after the Cold War: interstate order or post-sovereign regional system?

1999 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 201-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
WILLIAM WALLACE
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
World Politics ◽  
State System ◽  
Global State ◽  
European State ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
Regional System ◽  
The Cold War

The changing structure of European order poses, for any student of international relations, some fundamental questions about the evolution of world politics. Concepts of European order and of the European state system are, after all, central to accepted ideas of international relations. Out of the series of conflicts and negotiations—religious wars, coalitions to resist first the Hapsburg and then the Bourbon attempt at European hegemony—developed ideas and practices which still structure the contemporary global state system: the equality of states; international law as regulating relations among sovereign and equal states; domestic sovereignty as exclusive, without external oversight of the rules of domestic order. The ‘modern’ state system, modern scholars now agree, did not spring fully-clothed from the Treaty of Westphalia at the close of the Thirty Years' War; it evolved through a succession of treaties and conferences, from 1555 to 1714. It remains acceptable, nevertheless, to describe the European state order as built around the Westphalian system.

The Nomos and the Gaze

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoran Oklopcic
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
National Sovereignty ◽  
Territorial Integrity ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Main Factors ◽  
The Right

Chapter 5 confronted the imagination of the right to self-determination in international law. It focused on the ways in which interpretations of that right hinge on jurists’ implicit cartographies, their scopic regimes, affective predilections, disciplinary self-images, concealed calculi of suffering, visions of alternative universes, false binaries, and their idiosyncratic levels of (im)patience and anxiety, which—together with their quasi-nationalistic professional commitments and dreams of disciplinary sovereignty—remain some of the main factors that determine how international lawyers interpret the national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political autonomy of everyone else. After having proposed a number of new ways of looking at the claims of the right to self-determination, Chapter 6 ends on a sobering note: as long as jurists remain preoccupied with their own disciplinary self-determination and ‘linguistic’ purity, they will continue reproducing the flat, monochromatic, and vacuous imaginary of popular sovereignty.

The subjects of spatial statism: Reclaiming politics and law in international entanglement: Afterword to the Foreword by Ran Hirschl and Ayelet Shachar

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-44
Author(s):  
Paul Linden-Retek
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Public International Law ◽  
International Courts ◽  
State Coordination ◽  
Politics And Law ◽  
Normative Foundations ◽  
Do So ◽  
Common World

Abstract In their Foreword, Hirschl and Shachar challenge the supposed contemporary decline of state sovereignty and describe the enduring and expansive spatial reach of state power to counter threats to sovereign territorial control. This Afterword looks into the normative foundations of this account and its consequences for public international law and for international courts, in particular. “Spatial statism” exposes, I argue, a disjunction between the concepts of state sovereignty and popular sovereignty—and thus disrupts the normative expectation that those subject to the law are also its authors. It is this expectation that international judicial review must seek to restore. The attempt to do so is burdened by analytical and practical difficulties. But the project, I argue, is essential. In confronting the new “spaces” of international entanglement, judges must redeem the idea that citizens might yet reclaim those entanglements as a “common world,” not just a space in which they are brought together, unfreely, under the mantle of state coordination and coercion.

scholarly journals Populist Governments and International Law: A Reply to Heike Krieger

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 1009-1016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Blokker
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International System ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Important Argument ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right

Abstract The article by Heike Krieger, published in this issue, is an important contribution to the debate on populism and the law, not least because of its emphasis on a distinctive populist approach to the law. Krieger’s account lacks however in providing sufficient attention to three dimensions: popular sovereignty, constituent power and a shifting imaginary of the law. The relation of populism with popular sovereignty (and populism as a reaction to unresponsive institutions) is little discussed, and, hence, the explicit democratic claim of populists is downplayed. Constituent power is equally little touched upon, meaning that the populist understanding of the law as an obstacle but equally as a means to institutionalize a different democratic order is overlooked. The most important argument in the paper, which remains however too implicit, is that of a potentially shifting imaginary of the law. Krieger’s argument points in the right direction, but it could be developed further by stressing the essentially and historically contested nature of the progressive international system and its weak spots in terms of legitimacy and accountability.

scholarly journals A European Republic of Sovereign States: Sovereignty, republicanism and the European Union

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Bellamy
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
The State ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Global State ◽  
Alternative Proposal ◽  
European Republic

This article defends state sovereignty as necessary for a form of popular sovereignty capable of realising the republican value of non-domination and argues it remains achievable and normatively warranted in an interconnected world. Many scholars, including certain republicans, contend that the external sovereignty of states can no longer be maintained or justified in such circumstances. Consequently, we must abandon the sovereignty of states and reconceive popular sovereignty on a different basis. Some argue sovereignty must be displaced upwards to a more global state, while others advocate it be vertically and horizontally dispersed to units below, across and above the state. Each group offers a related vision of the European Union to illustrate their proposals. Both these arguments are criticised as more likely to produce than reduce domination because neither can sustain a form of popular sovereignty capable of instantiating relations of non-domination. This article proposes the alternative of a republican association of sovereign states that allows sovereign states and their peoples to mutually regulate their external sovereignty in non-dominating ways. This alternative proposal provides a more plausible and defensible means for sustaining the requisite kind of popular sovereignty in contemporary conditions and a more appropriate vision of the European Union.

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