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March 18, 2006
An article by Richard N. Haass on rethinking sovereignty. Sovereignty is understood as:
...the notion that states are the central actors on the world stage and that governments are essentially free to do what they want within their own territory but not within the territory of other states...
Haass says that this concept needs to be rethought. In what way? Some argue that globalization has rendered the concepts of state soverignty anachronistic. So we should drop the concept of sovereignty and buy into the idea of transnational governance in the form of a powerful imperial project on the part of the United States that seeks to develop a useful version of global (cosmopolitan) right to justify its self-interested interventions.
Haass says sovereignty needs to rethought in the sense that:
The goal should be to redefine sovereignty for the era of globalization, to find a balance between a world of fully sovereign states and an international system of either world government or anarchy. The basic idea of sovereignty, which still provides a useful constraint on violence between states, needs to be preserved. But the concept needs to be adapted to a world in which the main challenges to order come from what global forces do to states and what governments do to their citizens rather than from what states do to one another.
Good point. However, Haass makes no mention of the effects of empire. An empire that is not organised around the hegemony of a particular nation state, but which is more a decentred and deterritorializing apparatus of rule.
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