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September 20, 2004
In his article, 'The Perverse Perseverance of Sovereignty', Anthony Burke asks:
"What is "modern sovereignty"? In developing this concept, Hardt and Negri echo a powerful critique of sovereignty that refutes its basic essentialising claim: that sovereignty forms an unproblematic and legitimate site of authority and legal violence based on its status as a representative signifier for the nation, 'the people'. This is a form of ontological magic first visible in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, where he posits humanity moving on a journey from a mythical 'state of nature' to the 'body-politick', 'a multitude united in One Person'. (1985: 227) Based on this suffocating image of 'many wills' reduced to one, Westphalian sovereignty was made (via Machiavelli) into the basic structural and normative principle for International Relations: the rule of law and morality within the state; the rule of anarchy and amorality outside it, driven by states' eternal competition and struggle for power. (Hobbes 1985; George 1994: 71)"
He says that this essentialist image of sovereignty effaces the violence and illegitimacy of its own founding. Force and violence create the sovereign.That violence was certainly the history of the colonial founding of the Australian nation state: there was a juridical and strategic violence against Australia's indigenous peoples.
The history of Australia has been one of the concealment of this violence that involves a politics of forgetting.
Burke says that this politics involves a trading of freedom for security coupled to a powerful image of sovereign identity as perpetually under threat, and as intolerant and repressive of difference.
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