Intersecting Geographies of Institutions and Sovereignty
Alexander B. Murphy Department of Geography, University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403 USA
Word Count: 9923
Introduction The doctrine of sovereignty is the product of an institutional arrangement traceable to Early Modern Europe. As a principle that has long been inscribed in modern international law, sovereignty has a widely recognized institutional dimension. But what is meant by “intersecting geographies of institutions and sovereignty?” As used here, the phrase connotes a concern with the ways in which a particular institutionalized doctrine about the legitimate exercise of authority (sovereignty) has reflected and shaped the spatial structure/organization of power on the surface of the earth—both actual and perceived. To put it another way, the phrase references the ways in which political geography and institutionalized sovereignty have been mutually constituted. Until the last few decades, the relationship between sovereignty and geography was not the object of much critical scrutiny. Sovereignty was treated as a relatively straightforward territorial doctrine given birth by the Peace of Westphalia, but with older roots that reflected the increasingly autonomous practices of the free cities and emergent absolutist states of late medieval Europe, as well as the principle of cuius regio, eius religio in the Holy Roman Empire. It was conceptualized as a foundational principle of the modern state system—codifying the right of the rulers within the constituent units making up the system to exercise authority within their own territories, while being free from interference from other territorial units. Its geographic relevance was seen to lie largely in its role in defining how the modern political-geographic order was to function: as a set of discrete territorial states possessing sovereign rights (Knight 1994). Much has changed over the past two decades. The break-up of the Cold War order in Europe and the growing reach and jurisdictional competence of the European Union have challenged long-held assumptions about the stability of the world political map and opened up questions about the nature and role of the modern state. At the same time, the accelerating globalization of economic activity has blurred the significance of the state as the dominant locus of power, even as technological innovations have fueled the growth of networked, as opposed to territorially defined, organizations, institutions, and communities—many bypassing or transcending the state. The rise of increasingly visible extra-state insurgencies (most notably al-Qaeda) has signaled a shift away from a world in which the state is seen as the only significant arbiter and determiner of power, even as the doctrine of preemptive war advanced by the United States in defense of its 2003 invasion of Iraq has raised questions about the continuing viability of sovereignty as an organizing force in the contemporary world. Along with these tangible developments, changing theoretical orientations have served to encourage a reexamination of the geography-sovereignty-institution nexus. In recent decades, constructivist, post-structuralist, and post-modernist ideas have gained ground in the social sciences—fostering an interest in the ontological and social roots of core concepts and opening up questions about the way those concepts are embedded in dominant understandings. In some circles the focus on the role of context that accompanied this theoretical reorientation opened up new interest in geography—challenging the notion that geography is simply about place-name memorization and raising questions about how the places and spaces we use to make sense of the world are embedded in the political, social, economic, and cultural categories that frame our understandings. Geography came to be seen no longer as a static backdrop to human affairs, but as a product and a producer of social relations. The foregoing developments have fostered an outpouring of scholarly interest in the concepts at the heart of this article. Political scientists and international relations theorists have been at the forefront of the effort to rethink the historical and contemporary character of sovereignty as a political-legal institution (e.g., Krasner 1999), but geographers have taken the lead in exploring how the interplay between institutions and sovereignty reflects and shapes the political organization of space. Hence, much of this article focuses on contributions from the geographical literature, although the work of scholars in allied disciplines is taken up when it speaks specifically to the geographical dimensions of sovereignty as an institutionalized concept and practice. The literature on the geography-sovereignty-institution nexus is rather disparate, with many overlapping concerns but no overall dominant strand. There are, however, several identifiable themes: (1) the territorial foundations of sovereignty, (2) the extra-territorial challenges to sovereignty unfolding in the contemporary world, (3) the continuing functional and normative impacts of sovereignty, and (4) the advantages and disadvantages of sovereignty for individual groups and entities. These are certainly not discrete thematic categories, but they provide a useful means of organizing and synthesizing much of the relevant literature. After discussing the debates and ideas that pertain to each, this article ends with an assessment of the somewhat different ideas that have been proposed about how we might conceptualize the geography-sovereignty-institution nexus in the twenty-first century.
The Territorial Foundations of Sovereignty As noted above, sovereignty was originally envisaged as a territorial doctrine. It undergirded a political-territorial system that was clearly distinct from its feudal or imperial predecessors. Sovereignty was premised on the idea that political governance should take place within a system of territorially discrete units, each with the same legal standing and each agreeing to respect the territorial integrity of the others. Its original reach was limited to a part of Europe that was party to an agreement that is sometimes viewed as the cornerstone of modern international law: the Peace of Westphalia (1648). But its reach eventually became globe-girdling, as sovereignty norms accompanied the spatial expansion of the modern state system. Geographical work on the territorial dimensions of sovereignty grew out of a scholarly tradition that treated spatial divisions on the surface of the earth not simply as objective facts, but as imbued with ideas and meaning. In the political geography arena, Jean Gottmann’s seminal 1973 book, The Significance of Territory, is widely regarded as foundational in this regard. By asking how and why particular territorial configurations come to be seen as significant, Gottmann challenged geographers and other social scientists to treat political patterns not simply as functional spaces, but as reflections of political ideas and interests. While Gottmann’s book set the stage, it was work on “human territoriality” that moved things forward. If political units are the product of ideas and interests, then how and why did communities choose territorial strategies to move them forward? Such concerns attracted the attention of Edward Soja in the early 1970s (Soja 1971), but Robert Sack’s effort to expand on, and formalize, work on territoriality more than a decade later (Sack 1986), along with David Knight’s (1982) entreaty to view territory as a process rather than a container, served to shift the political geographic agenda away from assessments of the attributes of different territorial units and toward the analysis of how particular political geographic arrangements came into being, and how those arrangements structure practices and ideas. This stream of scholarship was reaching its apex in the early 1990s just as questions of sovereignty were coming to the fore in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and then Yugoslavia. As geographers with interests in territory and territoriality turned their attention to sovereignty, they initially focused on two key issues: the impacts of territorially based sovereignty norms on contemporary conceptualizations of social and political processes, and the ways in which territorial structures and ideas shape the understanding and practice of sovereignty over time. John Agnew (1994) and Peter Taylor (1994) took the lead on the first of these challenges, arguing that social scientists and the general public were locked into an unexamined geographical framing of the world—a spatial imaginary—grounded in the map of states. Agnew (1994) contended that we are caught in a “territorial trap,” wherein our foundational understandings of society are rooted in the map of states, but with no real recognition of the ways in which that framing shapes our concepts and ideas. On manifestation of the trap, he argued, is the tendency of International Relations theorists to take the territorial integrity of states for granted and to view them as the only actors of significance in the international arena. He went on to note that most social scientists at least implicitly embrace a nationalization or modernization thesis that treats identities grounded in local, tribal, or ethnic communities as primitive forms of social organization that will give way to national (i.e., state-based) identities as societies modernized. The dominant geographical imagination of the social sciences, as outlined by Agnew, is directly traceable to sovereignty’s territorial dimension. Sovereignty embodied a way of organizing the world that reduced all power to a set of discrete territorial entities. As Agnew (1994, p. 60) put it, “the total sovereignty of the state over its territorial space in a world fragmented into territorial states gives the state its most powerful justification. Without this a state would be just another organization”—and without it alternative political-territorial constructions could be more easily imagined. Reinforcing these ideas, Alexander Murphy (1996) argued that it is difficult to exaggerate the conceptual impact of the sovereign territorial ideals on which the modern state system is based. Those ideals: have made the territorial state the privileged unit for analyzing most phenomena while discouraging consideration of the nature of the territorial state itself. In the political sphere they have directed overwhelming attention to state government and governmental leaders at the expense of extrastate or substate actors and arrangements. In the economic sphere they have prompted us to frame our most basic theories of development in state terms. In the cultural sphere they have encouraged us to collapse our understandings of diversity into state-based categories; for every reference to the Quechua, Aymara, and Guaraní peoples there are thousands to Bolivians. In the environmental sphere they have prompted us to conceptualize issues that do not correspond to state boundaries as "transnational" (read trans-state) or "transboundary" issues, not Upper Rhine or Southeast Asian lowland issues (Murphy 1996, p. 102-03).
The modern conflation of the terms nation and state provides another example of the conceptual hegemony of territorialized sovereignty. The term nation still continues to be used in the original sense of the term (e.g., when reference is made to Kurds or Palestinians as nations). More commonly, however, the term is used as a synonym for a formally independent state—a linguistic development that implicitly rendered invisible the multiple ethnic nations that are hidden by the map of states (see Mikesell 1983). In an effort to understand how and why sovereignty had such a great impact on the modern geographical imagination, commentators such as Peter Taylor (1994; 1995) and Murphy (1994; 1996) focused attention on the evolution of the relationship between sovereignty and political territoriality. They argued that the development of the modern state system could be traced to a complex interplay between sovereignty and territoriality over the past several hundred years that saw one reinforcing the other. In brief, they took the position that the sovereignty principle embedded in the Peace of Westphalia was an outgrowth of both a set of Roman legal principles that were being rediscovered in Renaissance Europe and an emerging European political order made up of increasingly discrete, autonomous, and powerful authoritarian regimes that provided a model for a regime defined by what Taylor (1995, p. 3) called “interstateness.” This regime produced stability for a time, but it was eventually “thrown into crisis when social, technological, and economic developments challenged the theoretical and functional bases of particular territorial arrangements” (Murphy 1996, p. 82-83). Those crises challenged the sovereignty principle, but no enduring alternative became firmly established. Instead, the shift in the widely accepted locus of legitimate power from hereditary sovereigns to “the people” strengthened the doctrine’s hold on the political geographic imagination as nationalism took root and spread. This shift also served to internationalize sovereignty (Taylor 1995, p. 5)—turning it from a principle governing relations among a particular set of states to a principle that could be applied to independent nations wherever they might be found. As the break-up of longstanding empires and decolonization movements added new units to the world political map, the territorial “nation state”—the term itself demonstrating the conflation of nation and state—became the taken-for-granted basis for the legitimate exercise of power on the earth’s surface. And each major breach of that order, as occurred in the two major world wars of the twentieth century, was followed by a reaffirmation of territorial sovereignty as a foundational global principle governing the relations among people. These historical-geographical studies were part of a larger literature beginning to challenge the notion that sovereignty was an inevitable and immutable dimension of the modern human condition. They showed that sovereignty came out of a particular set of territorial ideas and practices and that it helped to establish a political-territorial system that reinforced the doctrine itself. In the process, studies along this line helped to usher in a new way of thinking about political spaces—particularly states. Instead of casting them solely as frames of action possessing certain attributes based on their geographic situation, resource endowments, and population characteristics, they were framed as spatial structures that reflected and shaped societies, economies, politics, and culture. To put it another way, the emergence of a political unit with a particular set of boundaries came to be understood as having specific implications for how people, places, and things were spatially organized and conceptualized. By the same token, the limitations of territorial power were also opened up for scrutiny—paving the way for investigation of a second key theme related to the geography-sovereignty-institution nexus.
Extra-territorial Challenges to Sovereignty It has long been recognized that the sovereignty ideal has never been fully realized. The signing of the Peace of Westphalia ushered in a period of almost 90 years of stability in west-central Europe characterized by general recognition of the territorial rights of the political entities that were party to the treaty. Yet even during this period more powerful states within the German Empire were sometimes involved in the affairs of their neighbors. Moreover, the Prussian invasion of Silesia in 1740 initiated a series of territorial conflicts that was to bring an end to the post-Westphalian political-territorial order. In the process the systemic understanding of sovereignty—the idea that all states should respect the territorial integrity of other states—gave way to a reading that viewed sovereignty as granting sovereigns the right to do whatever was needed to guarantee the territorial viability of their domains, including attack a neighboring state. Further complicating the picture, the expansionist turn taken by revolutionary France at the end of the eighteenth century made the sovereignty principle look increasingly anachronistic. When the dust settled on the Napoleonic era at the Congress of Vienna, however, a new European political-territorial order was brought into being premised on the sovereignty principle (Fox 1991, p. 107-112). Once again, a gap soon developed between the sovereignty ideal and the practice of international relations—with the “Great Powers” of the time intervening frequently in the affairs of less powerful states The period between 1870 and 1945 also saw a succession of territorial wars that strained the sovereignty principle to the breaking point—although theses conflicts were typically cast either as efforts to recover territory that was historically within a state’s sovereign domain or efforts to prevent violations of a state’s sovereignty (Murphy 1996, p. 98-102). Yet each ended with a reaffirmation of the territorial inviolability of states. Moreover, as the scale of violence and destruction escalated in the two world wars of the twentieth century, the act of challenging the political-territorial status quo came to be seen as increasingly illegitimate. Hence, the units that appeared on the post-World War II political map, whether independent states or colonies in the process of gaining independence, were not questioned for the most part. This, in turn, reinforced the tendency to see view the map of states as the sole spatial template of importance. Even though the political-territorial units themselves were taken for granted, the enormous power differentials among states put some in a position to interfere actively in the affairs of others. Most obviously, the United States and the Soviet Union meddled in the affairs of many states as part of their post-World War II geopolitical contest for dominance. As the twentieth century moved toward its close, it also became increasingly clear that there were other sources of power in the global system beyond territorial states: multi-national corporations, suprastate organizations, globalized financial institutions, extra-state and substate ethnic and political communities, and the like. Taken together, these circumstances highlighted the gap between the ideal and the practice of sovereignty. The checkered history of sovereignty has prompted a number of commentators to suggest that it is useful to distinguish between de jure and de facto sovereignty within the modern state system (see, e.g., Murphy 1996; Austin & Kumar 1998). As traditionally deployed, de jure sovereignty refers to a legal principle giving state governments final authority within their territorial domains, but requiring them to respect the territorial integrity of other domains. De facto sovereignty refers to the actual ability of state governments to exercise final authority within their territorial domains, and the existence of a system in which states do, in fact, respect the territorial integrity of other states. Viewed in these terms, it is clear that there has always been a gap between de jure and de facto sovereignty—and that de jure and de facto sovereignty themselves have fluctuated over time, although not necessarily in lock step with one another. Both were fairly strong in Central Europe in the decades following the signing of the Peace of Westphalia, and both were eroding rapidly by the middle of the eighteenth century. During the subsequent two-hundred years, the spatial reach of de jure sovereignty widened with the expansion of the modern state system—eventually making sovereignty a bedrock principle of international law. De facto sovereignty, by contrast, ebbed and flowed with the times—often strengthening for a time after major international agreements affirmed sovereignty’s de jure significance, but then eroding in the face of real-world power differentials and changing political, economic, and technological circumstances. Until relatively recently the dissonance between de jure and de facto sovereignty could be rationalized as a product of the inevitable gap between institutionalized norms and concrete practices. (The fact that many people cheat on their taxes does not render tax law a fiction or make taxation an insignificant element in the exercise of power.) Thus even when the Cold War was in full swing and the United States and the Soviet Union were involved in the internal affairs of many states around the globe, sovereignty as a de jure principle was not seriously questioned. And as already noted, this view was reinforced by a conceptually dominant modernization thesis, which treated the state as the final step in the evolution of the modern political order. Yet the tendency to take sovereignty for granted began to change as increasingly well recognized foci of power outside the framework of the territorial state emerged, for these represented a different type of challenge to the sovereignty principle. They called into question not just the gap between de facto and de jure sovereignty, but whether the legitimate exercise of power could any longer be seen in terms of the Westphalian, territorialized conception of sovereignty. Scholars grappling with this latter matter adopted two different, although not necessarily clashing, approaches to sovereignty’s changing character. One approach sought to document the ways in which territorial sovereignty was being eroded by extra-state sources of power without necessarily arguing that the Westphalian sovereign system was completely dead. The goal instead was to point to the functional changes occurring in the system. The other took the position that it is no longer useful to see sovereignty in Westphalian territorial terms because the legitimate exercise of power is no longer fundamentally rooted in a set of discrete territorial units. Turning to the first of these approaches, growing evidence of economic and cultural globalization provided the spark for a set of commentaries dating back to the 1970s, if not before, that began to call into question the power of the state to control fundamental aspects of the global political economy. Much of the attention focused on multi-national corporations and financial practices and institutions that were beyond the effective reach of individual states. Contemporaneously, the growing visibility of substate nationalist groups challenging state authority began to attract the attention of scholars—leading to work that sought to expose the illegitimacy of internal state territorial practices and to highlight another type of challenge to the territorial authority of states (e.g., Hechter 1975; Nairn 1977). Few of these early forays into the changing territorial power of the state made any significant reference to sovereignty, but they set the stage for a set of studies in the 1990s focused explicitly on territorial sovereignty’s weakening significance (see generally Flint 2002). These studies directed attention to such matters as the impacts of new transportation and communications technologies on the geographical organization of power, the ways in which expanding flows of goods and people were undercutting traditional state prerogatives, the impacts of sub- and trans-state identity communities on the role of the state as the arbiter of citizenship, and the deterritorialization of traditional government practices. Examples of studies on each of these topics provide insight into the ways in which the shifting human geography of the planet brought the Westphalian sovereignty construct into question. In the transportation and communications arena, Stanley Brunn (1998) looked at how the Internet was weakening sovereignty arrangements both by facilitating extrastate forms of political and economic practice and by making it more difficult for the state to control communication. He contended that the Internet, along with a variety of other innovations in communications and transportation, shape how states “view themselves in the world, how they address their own and others’ problems and issues, and the form and frequencies of information exchanges” (ibid., p. 107). He accordingly argued that there is a need for a “Treaty of Silicon” to move into the void that exists between the Treaty of Westphalia’s state-based notions of authority and the spatiality of power in a networked world. John Agnew (1999) focused attention on the ways in which population migration and monetary flows are undermining the traditional role of the state. He documented a series of developments that, he argued, are fundamentally altering the geography of power. In his words, “political power now circulates in ways that are not best captured by the theoretical equation of fixed state territoriality, pre-given political identities, and limited movement of goods, investment, and people” (ibid., p. 521). As such, he contended that conventional theories in International Relations. Turning to matters of identity, edited compilations assembled by Knippenburg and Markusse (1999) and Herb and Kaplan (1999) highlighted the growing significance of identity communities emerging above and below the scale of the state (e.g., substate nationalist groups, cross-border communities, and supranational groupings). A fundamental (sometimes implicit) premise of many studies in these volumes is that states no longer play as dominant a role in identity formation as they once did—thus undermining the strength of the nation-state link that historically helped to deepen sovereignty’s reach. This theme has been taken up by anthropologists as well as geographers, with Ong (2006), for example, contending that neoliberalism is reconfiguring the geography of citizenship in ways that “fragment and extend the space of the state” (ibid., p. 7). Studies of the shifting nature of borders also drew attention to the strengthening of extra-state identity communities. Indeed, Newman and Paasi (1998) and Paasi (1999) argued that borders were among the places where sovereignty and collective identity were being most dramatically renegotiated. Timothy Luke’s (1991) influential study of the Kuwait government during the 1991 Gulf War highlighted the potential decoupling of traditional government practices from state territoriality, as traditionally understood. Luke argued that, before the Gulf War, the practice of statehood in Kuwait was already significantly deterritorialized because governance fundamentally relied on foreign bank accounts, extra-state real estate and stock holdings, and a set of globalized economic flows. This meant that, after the Iraqi invasion, the Kuwaiti government could continue to function as a state even though it lacked a territorial base and was forced to coordinate its operations from Washington, DC, and Taif, Saudi Arabia. Luke’s assessment cast Westphalian territorial sovereignty almost as an anachronism in a world of networks and flows. In recent years a number of studies have built on the foregoing assessments of the functional challenges to sovereignty, providing an increasingly rich picture of the situation of the state in relation to nodes and flows existing at different scales. In terms of how the geography-sovereignty-institution nexus is conceptualized, however, the most significant recent development is arguably the contention that sovereignty and territory have become essentially “unbundled” (Raustiala 2005). In the geographical literature this idea finds early support in an article by Austin and Kumar (1998), which seeks to redefine sovereignty as reflective of “the degree to which a state, other institution, or organization can coerce or otherwise intentionally (and significantly) influence the behavior of other participants in the world political system and have such behavior recognized and accepted by a significant number of participants in that world political system” (ibid., p. 58). But it finds fullest expression in John Agnew’s (2005) piece, which argues for a focus on effective sovereignty because a de jure territorial sovereignty system has never really been created The roots of the call to unbundle territory and sovereignty lie in the functional challenges to the role of the state outlined above. Those challenges led David Elkins’ (1995), effort to outline what a world would look like that was Beyond Sovereignty (the title of the book). This is not the project of Austin and Kumar (1998) or Agnew (2005), however. They proceed from the premise that there are still norms governing the legitimate exercise of power that need to be recognized—norms that are invoked by the concept of sovereignty—but that those norms are now so divorced from the Westphalian political-territorial order that it makes no sense to continue to frame sovereignty exclusively in Westphalian territorial terms. Agnew (2005) in particular argues that we should abandon the concept of de jure sovereignty as traditionally deployed, for that concept is rooted in a Westphalian political-territorial ideal that never functioned as such—and is certainly not doing so now. Instead, he proposes that we look at how the legitimate exercise of power is actually constructed geographically and functionally. In support of his call for a focus on effective sovereignty, Agnew looks at contemporary currency regimes and suggests that four types of sovereignty arrangements govern those regimes (ibid., p. 445-56):
Each of these regimes incorporates some form of territoriality, ranging from strongly consolidated to relatively open, so they do not necessarily represent a complete decoupling of sovereignty and territory. But territoriality is not viewed primarily in Westphalian terms. Instead, the fundamental concern is with the spatial organization of power and control, which, Agnew argues, is obscured as long as sovereignty is viewed in traditional terms. Although the impetus for the call to sever sovereignty from its Westphalian territorial roots came in part from accumulated evidence of the significance of loci of power beyond the territorial state, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and that country’s creation of a space of “exceptional sovereignty” at Guantánamo Bay (Reid-Henry 2007) were of particular significance. For many commentators, the doctrine of preemptive war that was invoked by the United States to justify its invasion of Iraq exposed Westphalian sovereignty as a chimera (Elden 2005). And the legal claims that were advanced to justify the existence of the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay—and the practices that took place there—demonstrated a “complicity of law and force” that may further undermine the political-territorial foundations of modernism that find expression in the sovereign state system (Reid 2005, p. 241). In the end, Agnew (2005) argues, “we cannot meaningfully apply the orthodox conception of sovereignty to the conditional exercise of relative, limited, and partial powers that local, regional, national, international, and nonterritorial communities and actors how exert” (ibid., p. 456). Following this logic, the best way forward is to abandon a concern with whether sovereignty is eroding, as the concept has never had sufficient fixity to justify investigations of its growing demise. Instead, what is needed is an exploration of different kinds of institutionalized structures of power, for these hold the clues as to how sovereignty actually works in the contemporary world.
The Continuing Impacts of Westphalian Sovereignty Almost no one has argued that sovereignty has been unaffected by new technologies and changing economic and political arrangements, but a significant body of recent scholarship takes the position that Westphalian political-territorial practices and norms continue to have considerable influence, and therefore should not be overlooked. Studies in this vein generally focus on the tangible and normative impacts of traditional conceptions of sovereignty. In so doing, they reject, at least implicitly, the idea that de jure sovereignty is unworthy of scrutiny. Legal scholar Abdelhamid El Ouali (2006, 630) summarizes the main argument underlying this stream of literature, contending that “sovereignty has ignited the ambitions of scores of societies.” He sees this as a reflection of the institutionalization in modern international law of conceptions and practices of territoriality that have made the maintenance of “territorial integrity” a fundamental goal of societies around the world. El Ouali’s contention is supported by a variety of studies focused on territorial sovereignty’s continuing ideological significance. Those studies treat sovereignty as a powerful norm and discourse that frames and structures myriad political and social initiatives. The degree of flexibility to that discourse is a matter of some debate (see Kuus 2002), but since that flexibility has limits, the Westphalian sovereignty norm arguably remains a force worth recognizing and investigating. Much of the literature in keeping with this perspective is case-study specific, showing how particular developments are influenced by traditional sovereignty norms. A number of studies focus attention on the role played by the Westphalian territorial ideal in the agendas of particular political movements. Kolossov and O’Loughlin (1989), for example, look at the attempt to form “pseudo-states” on the periphery of the former Soviet Union, showing that the sovereign territorial ideal provides an impetus for creating the de facto sovereignty that characterizes entities such as the Transdneister Moldovan Republic (TMR). Since attempts to create new states can destabilize a de jure sovereignty regime, these initiatives might be seen as corrosive of the Westphalian political-territorial order. Yet unlike other corrosive forces (economic globalization, international human rights regimes, etc.), the emergence of new territorial states does not necessarily challenge the logic of the system itself, since leaders of independence movements are typically seeking not to change the structure of the system, but to carve out a niche within it. A different kind of example of the on-going power of Westphalian sovereignty principles comes from a study by Berg (2005) of territorial conflicts in both Cyprus and Moldova. Berg looks at efforts to create federalization arrangements in these two divided states. Such arrangements would give the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus (TRNC) and the TMR a high degree of autonomy within Cyprus and Moldova, respectively, while keeping the states together. In both cases, however, such arrangements have been rejected by dominant interests in the capital cities. The explanation, according to Berg, lies in their unwillingness to embrace political-territorial structures that would significantly compromise the extension of governmental authority within state boundaries, as defined by the Westphalian territorial ideal. As Berg explains: With the implementation of the federal structure, the central governments of Cyprus and Moldova would have to grant legal status to and reduce their future control over the federal entities of TRNC and TMR. Although Nicosia and Chisinau presently do not have any control over the separated territories, they are not willing to settle for an agreement granting legal status to TMR and TRNC with a risk of not having full control perpetuating their separateness and prefer to keep the unrealistic option of full control of the total territory open (ibid., p. 234). In other words, those in power in Cyprus and Moldova would rather accept a de facto arrangement in which they have no power over parts of their countries than less-than-full sovereignty in a portion of their territories. There are numerous other studies documenting the ways in which an ideological commitment to Westphalian sovereignty principles shapes political outcomes. Such commitments have worked against the construction of joint sovereignty arrangements in places such as Jerusalem and Northern Ireland (Sucharov 1998; Anderson 2008), they have made it all-but-impossible for India and Pakistan to contemplate any kind of partitioning of Jammu and Kashmir (Murphy 1990), and they have influenced the types of solutions that are even contemplated in places that have disintegrated into civil war (e.g., Bosnia; see Jeffrey 2008). Indeed, Jeffrey argues that dominant framings of Bosnia “do not challenge the primacy of the state, despite the prevalence of references to forms of cosmopolitan solidarity beyond the nation-state” (ibid., p. 441). Instead they serve to “promote the state as the primary territorialisation of political life” (ibid., p. 429). Another example of the power of the Westphalian territorial ideal comes from Glenn Petersen (1998), who studied the efforts of Micronesians to assert sovereign control over their homeland. While recognizing the contested nature of sovereignty as an international legal principle, Petersen shows that Micronesians view the doctrine as a “resource to be cultivated and exploited” (ibid., p. 179). Sovereignty, following Petersen, provides Micronesians with “a means of remaining true to their own traditional values, to free themselves from some of the risks their colonial status has exposed them to, and to enhance their ability to negotiate their future situation” (ibid., p. 202). Arguments about the on-going significance of traditional sovereignty notions even arise in the context of analyses of developments that explicitly challenge sovereign territorial norms. Stuart Elden (2007), for example, contends that even as sovereignty is being undermined in the “War on Terror,” important parts of it are preserved—especially the principle mandating deference to existing boundaries. Even Luke’s (1991) study of the Kuwait government in exile (discussed above) acknowledges that the existence of a concrete territorial base was symbolically necessary for the government in exile to function. Of course Luke’s principal purpose was to highlight a case that showed the declining importance of territory for statehood in the contemporary era, but Murphy (1994) has argued that the larger set of events surrounding the Kuwait affair show the enduring significance of Westphalian territorial norms. He bases this assertion on the fact that, even though the United States’ willingness to become involved in the situation was widely seen to be a product (at least in part) of its own geopolitical and geoeconomic interests, the U.S. was able to assemble an unprecedented international coalition of states in support of its move to remove Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait by force. What allowed this to happen was the clear, unambiguous challenge to de jure territorial sovereignty that occurred when Iraq’s armies marched into Kuwait and “temporarily obliterated from the map a recognized state” (ibid., p. 216). Without that provocation, it is almost unimaginable that the United States could have rallied the international community in the way that it did. The European Union (EU) represents perhaps the most explicit political-territorial challenge to the Westphalian state system because it disrupts the notion of a world politically constituted at a single scale: that of the state. Yet a number of commentators have argued that even in this case territorial assumptions rooted in traditional conceptions of sovereignty have shaped how the EU is conceptualized and what it has done. Ruggie (1993) has argued that scholars and policy makers are so deeply mired in notions of territoriality associated with the modern state system that they lack even a vocabulary for describing what the EU might be. Moisio (2006) has shown how conceptions of sovereignty frame debates over EU membership. And Murphy (2008, 1996) has highlighted the ways in which the political geographic imagination about the EU is caught up in an often unacknowledged, Westphalian-rooted idea that casts the success of the European integration project against the backdrop of the EU’s "state building” capacity; those developments that make the EU look more state-like are generally treated as signs that integration is proceeding well, whereas those that challenge the concentration of power in Brussels are typically seen as signifying the opposite. The problem of viewing the EU in this way is that it focuses attention on governmental institutions as opposed to underlying social, political, and cultural processes. Moreover, it presents European integration fundamentally as a movement aimed at merging the interests of several states into one superstate rather than as a potential challenge to the concept of the territorial state itself. These conceptual predispositions are expressed concretely in some of the EU’s principal policy priorities of the last decade: monetary Europe, the crafting of a constitution, the enhancement of executive power, and the expansion of EU competence in the foreign policy arena. While some of these initiatives have been successful, they have also contributed to the EU’s recent difficulties—rooted as they are in growing reservations about the further concentration of powers in a centralized bureaucracy. None of this means that the EU does not represent a challenge to the Westphalian political-territorial system. Those living in the EU are currently facing environmental despoliation, uneven development, ethnic conflict, and other difficult problems. Each of these has a particular spatial character that bears little resemblance to the pattern of states, and the EU offers a potential framework for developing a less fragmented, more coherent, approach to confronting them. That potential is being realized to some extent through programs that foster transboundary cooperation, planning initiatives that are not organized on a state-by-state basis, and environmental research programs that collect and analyze data without concern for interstate boundaries. But these more bottom-up projects are up against larger, classic state-building initiatives—leading many in Europe to view the EU as a direct challenge to nationalist political-territorial aspirations rather than as a supplementary, or even complementary, force. This last point is arguably of particular significance because the continuing vitality of nationalism may well represent the single greatest on-going impact of traditional sovereignty principles. This is because nationalism is at least partially a product of the Westphalian territorial ideal, meaning that some notion of territorial self governance is at the heart of the concept itself (White 2000). The bond between sovereign territorial norms and nationalism is evident in the very definitions that are used to define terms such as nation, which reference both the territorial dimensions of nationhood and the ideological commitment of nations to self government. Konstantin Symmons-Symonolewicz (1985, p. 221), for example, defines a nation as “a territorially based community of human beings sharing a distinct variant of modern culture, bound together by a strong sentiment of unity and solidarity, marked by a clear historically-rooted consciousness of national identity, and possessing, or striving to possess a genuine self-government” (emphasis added). Moreover, nationalism itself is generally understood to be associated with the quest for “nation-state” status, with all that implies in terms of the de jure territorial norms of the modern state system. Of course nationalism has been challenged in places by the rise of transnational cosmopolitan communities (Held 2004), as well as by many of the other dynamics that have undermined the traditional capacities of the territorial state. But the majority of the human population does not participate in those communities, and nationalism remains a fundamental force in the world today. The struggle over Iran’s nuclear program is rooted in a deeply held notion of the “Iranian nation’s” right to make its own decisions in its own territory. Russia’s efforts to assert its authority in the Arctic reflects a national sense of prerogative in a region being transformed by climate change. China’s outrage at external agitation over its policies in Tibet is rooted in a historically based sense of territory that casts Tibet as part of China’s sovereign territorial space. Ecuador and Peru’s long-standing boundary dispute is framed by nationalist territorial sensibilities. Even in supposedly post-nationalist Europe, Irish votes against integration treaties and French protests over EU agricultural regulations show the continuing significance of a territorially grounded nationalism. All of these examples, and many more, support Daniel Philpott’s (2001) contention that de jure sovereignty should remain an object of analysis, if only for its power as an idea—albeit one with an institutional/legal grounding. Indeed, Philpott, following Hall (1999), argues for a research agenda focused on the normative impacts of traditional sovereignty principles. Such an agenda would include investigations of the ways in which “sovereignty constitutes authority,” the impacts of sovereignty norms on individual state decisions, and the normative status of the sovereignty principle itself (Philpott 2001, p. 321-323). The goal of such an agenda is to move studies away from a focus on compliance with traditional sovereignty principles, which, he argues, ignores “a much deeper way in which the norms exercise influence—by constituting the very polities that enjoy sovereignty, and the very international system that helps to establish their authority” (ibid., p. 299).
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Sovereignty Michael Fowler and Julie Bunk’s (1995) book on Law, Power, and the Sovereign State System ends with a chapter titled “Why is Sovereignty Useful?” (p. 127-152). This question has been taken up in one form or another by a number of commentators, including those who have largely side-stepped debates on the evolving character of the doctrine. On one side are commentators who view sovereignty primarily as pernicious rather than useful. Peter Taylor (1994, 1995) sees sovereignty as a doctrine that institutionalizes a territorial structure that is fundamentally at odds with the spatial realities of contemporary life and that serves to encourage and reinforce structures of exchange and control that are repressive and unjust. He thus presents sovereignty as principle that is “sure to be abolished in any viable sustainable world. The competition engendered by states in their territories is ultimately a route to doomsday” (Taylor 1995, p. 14). He pays particular attention to the problems posed by ecological degradation, which he argues are rooted, at least in part, in economic competition among quasi-sovereign states. As Taylor sees it, the need to address such problems will inevitably propel humanity toward a post-sovereign world (Taylor 1994, p. 161). In an effort to advance that project, over the past decade Taylor has devoted much of his energy to a project on World Cities, which focuses attention on some of the connections and flows that are most destabilizing of the traditional territorial state system. Other indictments of the sovereignty principle focus on its negative impacts on particular places, regions, and problems. Some of these negative impacts have been suggested above (e.g., the ways in which sovereignty principles have prioritized “top-down” initiatives in the EU, worked against federal solutions to internal conflicts in Cyprus and Moldova, and discouraged joint sovereignty arrangements in zones of conflict). James Anderson’s (2008) review of the history of ethno-national conflict in Northern Ireland provides another example. He argues that Westphalian notions of territoriality have served to reinforce the simplifications that have driven ethno-national conflict in the region. As Anderson explains: the problems of national conflict and conflict management stem from shortcomings inherent to nationalism, ethnicity, sovereignty, and representative democracy, and particularly from their common dependence on territoriality or the use of bordered geographical space to organise, symbolise and control. The shortcomings are compounded by the fact that flawed assumptions about them are typically shared by external conflict managers from other national governments, as well as by the immediate nationalistic protagonists they are trying to manage. Territoriality simplifies control, and its strengths in delimiting nations and states, sovereignty and democracy, underpin the tenacity of national conflicts. But it oversimplifies and distorts social realities, especially at contested borders, and its inherent weaknesses help explain the high failure rate of management solutions (ibid., 86). Countering these negative assessments of sovereignty’s role are studies that highlight the doctrine’s significance as a protector of rights and peoples. A theme running through some of the literature on indigenous communities in North America, for example, is the importance of juridical commitments to Indian sovereignty—despite the long history of violations of those commitments. The special sovereignty status of American Indians in U.S. law arguably represents a principle of signal importance—one that has been fought over repeatedly and that continues to offer hope as indigenous communities struggle to confront social and environmental challenges (e.g., Ranco and Suagee 2007). At a broader scale—that of the state system—it is interesting to note that some of sovereignty’s greatest proponents are those living in relatively weak, poor states. For all the fact that their de facto sovereignty has been seriously compromised by the actions of more powerful states and by globalized economic forces, those living in the global economic periphery often make the point that sovereignty provides the only check on the political and economic reach of more powerful countries—and provides at least a weak shield that permits a degree of local resistance to the forces of globalization (e.g., Peterson 1998). The foregoing line of reasoning runs counter to the frequently held assumption that state sovereignty works in opposition to human rights. There are certainly many examples where sovereignty gives state governments cover to oppress those within their jurisdictions, but Jim Russell (2005) draws the opposite lesson from U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, where an explicit erosion of legal rights has taken place based on the idea that the prison is located outside the United States’ sovereign territory. Russell argues that states may stand in the way of human rights, but they also serve as important guarantors of human rights. In support of the latter point, Russell notes that “where state territorial sovereignty is ambiguous, such as in borderlands or military bases overseas, human rights are threatened. The advancement of universal human rights may well depend on strong state sovereignty, not its erosion” (ibid., p. 38). Taking a somewhat different tack on the same case study, Derek Gregory (2006) argues that we should not simply accept the notion that Guantánamo Bay represents a space of exception (using the term coined by Giorgio Agamben), but we should instead see it as a space of struggle, where arguments can (and should) be advanced countering the notion that the prison is exempt from the principles of law applied to the sovereign territory of the U.S. because of its off-shore location. The foregoing examples highlight the complexities involved in assessing the advantages and disadvantages of territorial sovereignty. Adding to that complexity is the changing nature of sovereignty itself. Austen Parrish’s (2006/2007) analysis of sovereignty’s impact on indigenous peoples takes the position that, over the long term, dominant Westphalian territorial notions have worked against the interests of native peoples by legitimating nation-state ideals that leave little room for minorities. He argues, though, that shifting sovereignty norms brought about by the forces of globalization and the expansion of extrastate regimes are opening up opportunities for indigenous communities and expanding their recognition under international law. He directs particular attention to decisions by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that recognize the territorial rights of indigenous peoples (ibid., p. 309). These decisions in effect bolster the territorial sovereignty of native peoples, although in the process they undermine a key component of Westphalian sovereignty: the dispersion of power across discrete units at only one scale. It should be clear from the foregoing examples that evaluative assessments of sovereignty are wide-ranging and disparate as to their conclusions. They reflect the complexities of sovereignty itself, as well as its potential to favor certain interests and facilitate particular possibilities at different scales and in different places. This all works against consensus, but a number of commentators see positive transformative potential in the negotiations that are taking place over the doctrine’s nature and meaning. Such negotiations are seen as enhancing the prospect for more responsive, representative political orders in places experimenting with strong suprastate institutional arrangements (Moisio 2006), and facilitating the emergence of multi-layered governance structures that could give some degree of concrete political expression to the complex patterns of culture that are sublimated in a world divided into 200-odd discrete “nation-states” (Ranco & Suagee 2007). Whether such negotiations might ultimately spell the end of de jure sovereignty in its Westphalian form, however, is an open question.
Where from here? Over the past few decades, sovereignty has gone from being treated as a taken-for-granted principle to being an object of intense scrutiny. Given sovereignty’s checkered history and its changing character as an international legal norm, it is not surprising that tensions run throughout the recent literature on the concept. As the foregoing account suggests, a divide of particular significance has developed over the continuing usefulness of tying sovereignty to its Westphalian territorial roots. Almost everyone would agree with Yishai Blank’s (2006, 265) contention that “[s]tates are no longer the sole bearers of rights and duties in the international sphere, nor are they the sole actors in the international arena.” The question is whether the workings of international capital, the emergence of new constellations of actors and interests, and the growing power of extrastate governance regimes have so undercut traditional sovereignty notions that we need to sever sovereignty from its historic roots. John Agnew argues that we should because a de jure territorial system is little more than an illusion. In Agnew’s (2005, p. 437) words, de facto sovereignty “is all there is.” Countering this position, Philpott (2001), following Hall (1999), has argued that the territorial sovereignty regime that is scripted into modern international law has great normative power. He thus calls for a major research agenda focused on de jure sovereignty’s enduring impacts There is an irony to this debate, as a number of commentators who are philosophically aligned with Philpott and Hall derive inspiration from some of John Agnew’s earlier writings, especially his piece on “the territorial trap” (Agnew 1994), which highlights the influence of a particular geographical framing of the world with roots in Westphalian territorial norms. Agnew does not directly address this tension in his 2005 piece, but perhaps it can be best reconciled by seeing his recent call for a focus on effective sovereignty as a plea to examine critically the types of arrangements that are likely to expose the vacuity of a geographical imagination that cannot see beyond states. After all, Agnew does not suggest that certain practices are not governed by Westphalian territorial norms; he just sees those practices as part of one sovereignty regime among many—and therefore concludes that the Westphalian sovereignty regime should not be privileged. The counter argument is that if sovereignty is unmoored from its territorial roots, then it simply becomes a synonym for power or control. This, in turn, ignores sovereignty’s special legal status and directs attention away from the powerful role that Westphalian territorial norms play in a variety of political, economic, and cultural arenas. Those norms do not operate in an unchanged, uncontested way, but their on-going significance undercuts the idea that de facto sovereignty is all there is. Instead, de facto sovereignty arrangements are in dynamic tension with an institutionalized territorial system that is under increasing strain, but that continues to shape ideas and actions. The foregoing statement offers a promising premise for advancing understanding of the geography-sovereignty-institution nexus. Following Agnew (2005), it is clearly important that our assessments of the changing political geography of power not be constrained by a preoccupation with a de jure political-territorial system that never, in fact, was realized and that is under intense contemporary pressure. But following Philpott (2001) and Hall (1999), it is important to recognize that the variable geometries of power that are currently at work coexist with an institutional arrangement of great normative significance—one that, in the minds of many, still serves to cast alternative geographies of power as deviations from the norm, rather than as new norms. The danger in this approach is that focusing on the influence of older norms could occlude our ability to recognize when new norms have taken hold. But a concern with the dynamic interaction between long-standing institutionalized principles and evolving arrangements/practices may well offer the best hope for understanding the shifting spatial parameters of politics and power in the contemporary world.
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