Sovereignty: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Men

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As presented before, sovereignty is alternatively or cumulatively referred to as ultimate power and supreme authority. Externally, it implies a degree of independence or freedom. As a legal regime or status, international sovereignty, and more particularly international external sovereignty entails the rights that can guarantee sovereign independence, but also the duties that correspond to those rights in a community of equal sovereigns where all rights are reciprocal.

Sovereignty | Princeton University Press

Stephen Bronner has been an important critical voice on the American political scene for the past few decades. Here, in his book The Sovereign, Bronner provides an original and provocative set of views on this urgent topic—especially topical owing to its clear focus on such pressing issues as immigration, refugees, populism, transnational power, and the fate of democracy not only in the United States but around the world. As usual, Bronner presents his work in a style accessible to both an academic and general readership. The book is highly recommended for anyone interested in the special challenges facing contemporary American politics." — Carl Boggs, Professor of Social Sciences, National University, author of Fascism Old and New and Origins of the Warfare State With time, however, increased integration in IOs has given rise to new channels of political decision-making that do not fit the intergovernmental framework of the 19 th century and first half of the 20 th century and hence also to new fora of human rights protection beyond the State. The EU is the paradigm example of such a supranational organization. One may find a confirmation in the gradual democratization of its decision-making processes and the recent transformation of its human rights framework into a municipal human rights body. First of all, and although this may be contested from a democratic legitimacy perspective, different institutions exercise sovereignty in both cases: the executive acts as a sovereign in external affairs, while it is usually the legislative which is regarded as sovereign in internal affairs. Hence the difficulty there can be in distinguishing between parliamentary sovereignty on the inside and State sovereignty on the outside. Secondly, their functions differ; whereas internal sovereignty pertains to all political and legal matters, external sovereignty usually only relates to questions of coexistence and/or cooperation among distinct sovereign entities. Finally, external sovereignty can less easily be described as final or ultimate as it is necessarily equal; it can only be equally ultimate since a sovereign can only coexist as an equal to other sovereigns. In internal affairs, however, sovereignty is usually final.True, non-democratic States are sovereign and benefit from all rights and duties of a sovereign State. As they benefit from the principle of sovereign equality, requiring them to be democratic seems to be an invasion of their sovereignty. This corresponds, however, to the classical view of sovereignty in international law where the political regime was a matter of internal sovereignty and hence left to domestic law. During the second half of the 20 th centu The analogy between authority for States or other institutional subjects of international sovereignty, on the one hand, and individuals, on the other, presupposes therefore that the value of autonomy extends to the choices and actions of States. At first sight, it seems plausible that it does, given the value of shared membership in a national political community and, as a result, of the collective self-determination of such communities. The problem is that the value of State autonomy can only be explained in terms of the autonomy of the people constituting it. States are quite unlike individuals when it comes to the value of their autonomy. Their autonomy cannot simply be equated with that of any of their domestic legal subjects, but is the product of those subjects’ autonomy as a political entity. By analogy with an individual but also because of the imperfect analogy with an individual in the service of which sovereignty actually lies, sovereign autonomy is even more clearly dependent on the purposes of being a good polity. With contributors from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, North and South America and Europe, this book offers a rich account of the potential for Indigenous data sovereignty to support human flourishing and to protect against the ever-growing threats of data-related risks and harms. Chapter 3: The Intersection of Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Closing the Gap policy in Australia, Raymond Lovett, Roxanne Jones and Bobby Maher

Parliamentary Sovereignty - Cambridge University Press Parliamentary Sovereignty - Cambridge University Press

Sovereignty is among the most important phenomena for making sense of political life. But there are many mistaken assumptions associated with the concept. This book provides a new and somewhat unorthodox interpretation of it from the standpoint of a theory of practice. It rapidly became clear that public international law and sovereignty implied each other. To be fully in charge of its relations with other States in a society of equally sovereign States and to be externally sovereign, and hence in turn to be able to protect its internal sovereignty, a State needed to be submitted to public international law. However, for public international law to arise, it needed independent sovereign States to freely consent to mutual rights and obligations and to their regulation. As a result, since sovereignty implies the existence of public international law, it became self-evident that sovereignty is inherently limited. Even if, by definition, a sovereign State cannot be limited by the laws of another State, it may be limited when these laws result from the collective will of all States. Whereas some authors argue that sovereign rights and duties are correlative, others do not even conceive of sovereignty in terms of rights and duties but in terms of the components of sovereign States’ independence and the corresponding restrictions on others’. Importantly, the existence of sovereignty rights and duties need not imply that sovereignty is reducible to them and to a bundle of rights. Curiously for such a pivotal concept, but maybe precisely because it is such, its meaning has been changing across historical and political contexts and has also been heavily contested at any given time and space. Recently, upholding the concept, by reference to the State or in general, has become a ground of major contention among international lawyers and theorists; while some argue that the concept of sovereignty, or at least of State sovereignty is obsolete and should be abandoned in favour of new concepts of supranational or transnational political organization through which the current sharing, limiting, and parcelling of authority can be better explained, others see new forms of political authority and integration beyond the State, such as the European Union (‘EU’) for instance, and their inherent limitations as a confirmation or at least a development of the concept of sovereignty or even of State sovereignty (see also European Union, Historical Evolution).Chapter 6: Indigenous Self-Determination and Data Governance in the Canadian Policy Context, Robyn K. Rowe, Julie R. Bull and Jennifer D. Walker

Sovereignty - De Gruyter Sovereignty - De Gruyter

In response to this difficulty, some authors have suggested the idea of limited sovereignty. The problem then is to know when sovereignty is so limited or fragmented that there can no longer be any talk of sovereignty. The concept of sovereignty implies a certain amount of intensity or of competence over a certain range of matters. As presented before, legal sovereignty is a general competence, ie a competence to determine one’s particular competence; as such, it requires a minimal level of control over those competences. In other words, is there a threshold below which sovereignty is emptied of any content and if so, where does that threshold lie? It can be difficult to distinguish the two terms. 'Self-determination' is a more loose word for 'sovereignty'. Sometimes, it is used as an alternative, while other times it is used to describe a form of ‘limited sovereignty’ under the sovereign power of someone else. In international law, sovereignty is a more precise term than self-determination.

Aboriginal definition

Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009) The biggest contradiction of all is that, on the one hand, he argues that the future lies with the nation state and the sense of rootedness in place that makes democratic engagement possible. Fair enough – except that, on the other hand, he ends up suggesting that place doesn’t really matter anymore: “Geography comes before history. But for centuries we have been loosening the bonds of time and distance. Place has become less important.” If that is so, how can the old idea of pure sovereignty not need to be rethought? Sovereignty should be situated at the boundary between politics and law, rather than being clearly embedded in one or the other. This interpretation of the relationship between political and legal sovereignty solves a long-standing paradox in international law or at least makes the most of it.

Globalization and Sovereignty - Cambridge University Press

Sebastian Gehrig, Legal Entanglements: Law, Rights, and the Battle for Legitimacy in the Two Germanys, 1949-1990 (Berghahn, 2021) We believe we have never been conquered and we are not subject to the Australian or British law but still maintain our own sovereignty. We still have our language and practice our Madayin law and as one of the first peoples we assent to the Madayin law not Australian law. Still we want to find a way forward. So, if the Law we have always assented to is not recognised then there can never be a real rule of Law only lawlessness and true justice can never exist for our people and the communities we live in." [5] Sovereignty has been confirmed by Australian courts Chapter 1: Indigenous Data Sovereignty, Governance and the Link to Indigenous Policy, Maggie Walter and Stephanie Russo Carroll By contrast, numerous variations of the principle and so-called ‘correlated’ principles of sovereignty, as opposed to the principle of sovereignty itself, can be found in conventional international law. This is the case in particular of Art. 2 (1) UN Charter for the principle of sovereign equality, but also in the Friendly Relations Declaration (1970) for the detailed rights that follow from that principle of sovereign equality. The UN Charter also protects sovereign States’ domaine réservé and prohibits other States’ intervention on sovereign States’ territory (Arts 2 (4) and (7) UN Charter). Further correlated principles to the principle of sovereign equality may be found in general principles of international law and customary international law, and have been progressively recognized in international adjudication.

Free book: Aboriginal Sovereignty - Justice, the Law and Land

The final touch had now been made to the modern concept of sovereignty. The idea of limited sovereignty that finds its source in its own laws had appeared for the first time. True, the limited dimension of sovereignty had been propounded before, among some early modern philosophers writing in the early 17 th century. This is the case for instance in the work of Hugo Grotius, Alberico Gentili, and Francisco Suarez, who defended the possibility, albeit limited, of disciplinary interventions by other sovereign States.