MOST HUMBLY BEGGING YOUR HELP:

Sovereignty and Democracy (Marc F. Plattner, December 2003, Policy Review)

One of the scholars who appears to have been especially influential in shaping current thinking about the modern state is John Ruggie. Fittingly enough, Ruggie not only is a distinguished professor of international relations, but has recently served as assistant secretary-general of the United Nations. His writings, and especially his International Organization article “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations” (Winter 1993), are widely cited not only in the academic literature but also in more policy-oriented discussions regarding the future of the European Union. What Ruggie “problematizes” in his essay is not just modernity, but the modern state and the concept of sovereignty.

The discipline of international relations tends to take for granted the “modern system of states,” Ruggie argues. Thus, while it is adept at understanding changes in the balance of power among states, it is poorly equipped to understand the more momentous kind of transformation that may result in “fundamental institutional discontinuity in the system of states.” Yet there are signs that such a period of “epochal” change may now be upon us. This is seen both in the transformation of the global economy due to ever more extensive transnational links and in the rise of the European Union, which “may constitute nothing less than the emergence of the first postmodern international political form.”

Ruggie’s essay includes a brief account of the debate about postmodernism in the humanities, but for the purposes of international relations he distinguishes the modern from the postmodern in terms of their different “forms of configuring political space.” The modern system of rule is based upon “territorially defined, fixed and mutually exclusive enclaves of legitimate domination. As such, it appears to be unique in human history.” How else has political space been configured in the past? Ruggie refers briefly to primitive kin-based systems and to the conception of property rights held by nomadic peoples, but by far the greatest part of his analysis is devoted to the “nonexclusive territorial rule” that characterized medieval Europe, with its complex patterns of multiple allegiances and overlapping jurisdictions.

It is by analyzing the earlier transformation of the feudal order into the modern world of states claiming absolute and exclusive sovereignty over their territories that we can gain insight into the new transformation that may now be under way. The modern state has been invented or “socially constructed,” and thus its persistence cannot be taken for granted. In fact, the European Union, where “the process of unbundling of territoriality has gone further than anywhere else,” may point the way toward a postmodern future that will in important respects resemble the medieval past.

The general orientation of Ruggie’s analysis is reflected in a great deal of contemporary writing about sovereignty, the nation-state, and the European Union. (To be sure, Ruggie draws upon a body of prior academic studies, most notably the work on the formation of the modern state prominently associated with Charles Tilly.) One encounters in this literature surprisingly frequent references to the fleeting and historically contingent character of the modern nation-state. And the European Union is most often described not as the germ of some larger form of the nation-state (often disparagingly referred to as a “superstate”) but as a new kind of postmodern or “neomedieval” structure that transcends the “Westphalian” framework.

Yet while Ruggie’s argument incorporates a number of useful insights, I believe that it is misguided in several crucial respects.

I hope you won't mind if I beg your indulgence, but having just signed a contract to edit an anthology on this very topic--the threat that new transnationalist visions of sovereignty pose to democracy and self-governance--I'd greatly appreciate it if folks would send suggestions for and links to any essays that touch on the topic with which they're familiar or which they happen to spot. Many thanks.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 7, 2003 6:22 PM