EJIR
The antecedents of
‘sovereignty as responsibility’
European Journal of
International Relations
17(2) 233–255
© The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066109346889
ejt.sagepub.com
Luke Glanville
Griffith University, Australia
Abstract
Notions of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ and ‘the responsibility to protect’ are often framed as radical departures from the ‘traditional’ conception of sovereignty. Many assume
that sovereignty has, until recently, entailed only rights and not responsibilities. In contrast, this article argues that sovereign authority has been understood to involve varied
and evolving responsibilities since it was first articulated in the 16th and 17th centuries.
It then traces the historical emergence of the tension between the right of sovereign
states to be self-governing and free from outside interference and their responsibility to
secure the safety of their populations. It cautions against a simplified story of ‘traditional’
sovereignty which reifies supposedly concrete and ahistorical rights of sovereigns while
casting sovereign responsibilities as a morally abstract and late-arriving challenge.
Keywords
constructivism, international history, non-intervention, responsibility to protect,
sovereignty
Introduction
The idea that sovereign statehood entails a responsibility to protect populations from grave
violations of human rights has been increasingly accepted by international society since it
was first articulated by Francis Deng and championed by Kofi Annan in the 1990s (Annan,
1999; Deng, 1995; Deng et al., 1996). According to this understanding of sovereignty,
which was given its clearest expression by the International Commission on Intervention
and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001, a state is responsible and accountable to its own
people and also to the society of states for the protection of its population. In instances
where the state is unable or unwilling to fulfil its sovereign responsibility to protect, the
responsibility shifts to international society (ICISS, 2001). This concept was unanimously
endorsed at the UN World Summit in September 2005. Paragraph 138 of the Outcome
Document negotiated by member states at the Summit declares: ‘Each individual State has
Corresponding author:
Luke Glanville, Griffith Asia Institute and Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University, Nathan
QLD 4111, Australia.
Email: [email protected]
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the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing
and crimes against humanity’. The following paragraph states that ‘the international community’, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate means
to protect populations should national authorities fail to do so (United Nations, 2005: 31).
These notions of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ and ‘the responsibility to protect’ are
often framed as radical departures from the ‘traditional’ conception of sovereignty. The
story that is repeatedly told is that sovereignty was established sometime around
the 17th century (at the Peace of Westphalia [1648], according to most reports) and,
since that time, states have enjoyed ‘unfettered’ rights to self-government, non-intervention
and freedom from interference in internal affairs.1 This ‘traditional’ story is promoted by
leading representatives of a range of schools of International Relations. English School
scholar Robert Jackson (1999: 432), for example, is one of many who hold the right of
non-intervention to be a timeless logical corollary of sovereignty. He asserts that the
‘normative logic’ of sovereignty necessitates that non-intervention be one of its basic
norms (see also ICISS, 2001: 12; Morgenthau and Thompson, 1985: 329; Vincent, 1974:
14). Stephen Krasner’s (2004: 88, 1999) realist argument about sovereignty is grounded
in a static definition of what he terms ‘Westphalian sovereignty’, the ‘fundamental rule’
of which is that states should ‘refrain from intervening in the internal affairs of other
states.’ He catalogues numerous ‘breaches’ of this model of sovereignty, suggests
that these breaches ‘have been an enduring characteristic of the international environment’ and labels this phenomenon ‘organized hypocrisy’ (Krasner, 2001: 17). Yet he perpetuates the standard story by proceeding from the assumption that, while often
compromised, ‘Westphalian sovereignty’ has always been defined in terms of these
traditional rights (Krasner, 1999: 20–25).
Even some constructivist theorists, despite their emphasis on the contingent and
contested nature of sovereignty, endorse this traditional story. Daniel Philpott (2001a),
for example, argues that sovereign statehood has entailed a right of non-intervention
since Westphalia and suggests that this right has only come under challenge with the
emerging acceptance of humanitarian intervention in the aftermath of the Cold War. He
concludes, ‘[i]n the history of sovereignty one can skip three hundred years without
omitting noteworthy change’ (Philpott, 1996: 43). In a critique of Krasner’s argument,
Philpott (2001b) again takes the supposedly timeless Westphalian model for granted
and merely insists that, rather than a case of ‘organized hypocrisy’, this traditional
understanding of sovereignty is actually honoured in the breaches that Krasner observes.
Intentionally or otherwise, proponents of this standard story reify the rights of selfgovernment and freedom from outside interference as the ahistorical and, for some, logically deducible essence of sovereignty. The notion that a state’s enjoyment of these
rights should be conditional upon their fulfilling certain responsibilities is thereby
framed as a profound revision of the rules of sovereignty, and in some important senses
it is. However, in reality, the idea that sovereignty entails responsibilities has deep historical
roots. The purpose of this article is to examine these roots; it is to examine the historical
development of the responsibilities of sovereignty.
In this article I argue that sovereign authority has been understood to involve varied
and evolving responsibilities since it was first articulated in the 16th and 17th centuries. Early modern theorists of sovereignty asserted the ‘absolute’ authority of the
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sovereign but also acknowledged a duty to abide by divine and natural law and to
protect the safety of the people, and some acknowledged a corresponding right of intervention to free people from despotism. I then argue that the notion that the sovereign is
responsible for the protection of the people can be clearly found in ideas about popular
sovereignty expressed in the American and French Revolutions. The concept of popular
sovereignty, I suggest, has always entailed two potentially conflicting ideas. The first is
the right of nations or peoples to be self-governing and free from outside interference.
The second is the idea of individual rights to life and liberty, free from tyranny and
despotism. Soon after the French Revolution, the idea of popular sovereignty travelled
down a nationalist path. The first idea came to overshadow the second. In the words of
Martin Wight (1977: 160), ‘the rights of men gave way to the rights of nations’. International
society endorsed the principle of national self-determination at Versailles (1919) and
sovereignty was increasingly understood to entail the right of nations to self-government
and non-interference in domestic matters. Nevertheless, even in this period, the responsibilities of sovereignty were clearly evident at least in Europe’s relations with the nonEuropean world. These responsibilities were expressed in justifications for colonialism,
in the so-called ‘standard of “civilization”’, and in justifications for early examples of
‘humanitarian intervention’.
The supposed ‘traditional’ rights of sovereign peoples to self-government, nonintervention and non-interference were only for the first time firmly established by
international society in the UN Charter at San Francisco (1945). These rights were
universalized over the next two decades through the process of decolonization.
However, the individual rights dimension of popular sovereignty would not be forever
held at bay. The sovereignty of the people was justified on individual rights grounds
by 18th-century revolutionaries and 20th-century anti-colonialists alike. The recent
development of the idea that sovereignty entails a responsibility to protect represents
an attempt to enforce the protection of these individual rights; it is an attempt to resolve
the tensions inherent in the idea that sovereignty derives from the people.
I conclude that this understanding of the history of sovereignty can be read as a caution against framing the contemporary debate about rights and responsibilities in a way
that reifies sovereign rights to self-government and non-interference as concrete and
ahistorical principles while positing the idea of sovereign responsibilities for the protection of individual rights as a morally abstract and late-arriving challenge. Understanding
this history enables us to comprehend more clearly the political and moral complexities
inherent in present discussions about sovereignty as responsibility.
The social construction of sovereignty
Since the early 1980s, critical theorists and, more recently, constructivists have problematized the concept of sovereignty. They have challenged the assumptions of some
realist and liberal theorists that sovereignty is an ahistorical and empirical attribute of
states which can be measured in terms of power and have sought to highlight its contingent and contested nature (see, for example, Ashley, 1988; Bartelson, 1995; Biersteker
and Weber, 1996; Walker, 1993; Weber, 1995). Instead of a static concept, they suggest,
‘sovereignty is a practical category whose empirical contents are not fixed but evolve in
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a way reflecting the active practical consensus amongst coreflective statesmen’ (Ashley,
1984: 273). Constructivists in particular have demonstrated that sovereignty is not a
timeless and unchanging organizing principle by tracing significant shifts in its meaning
since it first emerged in early modern Europe (see, for example, Barkin, 1998; Barkin
and Cronin, 1994; Biersteker, 2002; Philpott, 2001a; Reus-Smit, 2001; Sikkink, 1993;
Thomson, 1994). Given the historical variation in the precise meaning of sovereignty, a
categorical definition of the concept is of little use.2 Instead, constructivists view sovereignty as ‘a variable, practically constituted institution, its precise content and political
implications varying with time and context’ (Reus-Smit, 2001: 538).
It may be possible to define sovereignty very broadly and provisionally as a legitimated claim to political authority, but the content and meaning of the authority claim is
not static. For example, while the right of non-intervention is often assumed to be a
corollary of sovereign statehood, this principle is historically contingent. The sovereign
right of non-intervention was not fully articulated until the mid-18th century, well after
the initial establishment of sovereignty in Europe, in Emmeric de Vattel’s Law of Nations.
Moreover, Vattel balanced the pluralist rule of non-intervention with a right of ‘every
foreign power’ to ‘succour an oppressed people who implore their assistance’. He argued
that those sovereign states that were tyrannical and oppressive should be denied the
protection of the non-intervention rule (Vattel, 1853: II:iv:56).3 Over the subsequent two
and a half centuries, the non-intervention rule has continued to be limited in various
and evolving ways and these limits themselves reveal much about the changing meaning
of sovereignty.
Of course this conception of sovereignty as being socially constructed and historically
contingent is challenged by Krasner’s well-known and formidable thesis. Krasner argues
that the repeated breaches and compromises of sovereignty that he observes in relations
between states since the 17th century reveal the limits of constructivist theorizing: ‘Norms,
though not irrelevant, do not have the weight that constructivism has attributed to them’
(Krasner, 1999: 51). The frequent violation of the ‘Westphalian’ model of sovereignty, he
suggests, demonstrates that ‘rules, when they exist in the international system, are instrumental, not deeply embedded’ (Krasner, 1999: 52). However, Krasner provides no reason
why a sociological approach needs to begin with his static model of sovereignty. Indeed,
he acknowledges that there has been no such thing as a Westphalian sovereign state in the
sense in which he defines it. This model, he notes, ‘has never been an accurate description
of many of the entities that have been regarded as states’ (Krasner, 2001: 17). He observes
that a principle of absolute autonomy cannot even be found in the Peace of Westphalia
itself (Krasner, 1993, 1999: 79–82). It should not be surprising then that he finds his model
of sovereignty to have been so regularly breached. If there has been no such thing as
‘Westphalian sovereignty’, it makes little sense to label violations of this model as
‘hypocrisy’ (Suganami, 2007: 512–513; see also Biersteker, 2002: 162).
In short, the challenge for the student of sovereignty is not to determine a timeless
definition of the meaning and content of sovereignty but to explore the ways in which
sovereignty has been socially constructed and reconstructed over time (Reus-Smit,
2001: 526). Many of the examples of ‘hypocrisy’ that Krasner catalogues can be better
understood as indications as to how sovereignty has been constructed at various moments.
Rather than hypocritical violations of sovereignty, the international enforcement of
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anti-slavery norms, minority rights or human rights, for example, can be understood in
terms of intersubjectively mediated developments in the rights and responsibilities of
sovereign statehood.4 This is not to deny that there have historically been breaches of the
prevailing rules of sovereignty. However, these rules can be recognized, indeed sometimes they can be detected through the recognition of their breach, and the rules have
varied over time.
Sovereignty is socially constructed. Claims to sovereign status are forceful only because
they represent shared understandings and expectations that have been intersubjectively
mediated, and the content of these claims evolves across time (Sikkink, 1993: 412).
Certainly some of the rights of sovereigns are now so taken for granted that, as Alexander
Wendt (1992: 413) suggests, ‘it is easy to overlook the extent to which they are both
presupposed by and an ongoing artefact of practice’. However, the requirements for sovereign recognition and the rights and responsibilities that follow are continually negotiated rather than fixed. With this in mind, the intention in this article is to demonstrate
that sovereignty has historically involved varied and evolving responsibilities, and also
to present a picture of the origins of the contemporary notions of ‘sovereignty as
responsibility’ and ‘the responsibility to protect’.
Sovereignty in early modern Europe
The purpose of this section is to examine how sovereignty was understood as it first
emerged in early modern Europe.5 In particular it reveals that, from its earliest articulations
by political theorists, the idea of absolute sovereign authority was conceived to be limited
by certain responsibilities. The intention is not to deny the absolutist imaginary, but
merely to demonstrate that even the most important champions of absolute sovereignty
in this period were unable to resist the notion that sovereigns should be bound to a range
of responsibilities. Seeking to justify centralized and stable political rule that could put
an end to civil war and confessional conflict, early modern political theorists and natural
jurists emphasized the ‘absolute and perpetual’ nature of sovereign authority (Bodin,
1955: I:viii). The sovereign was held to be autonomous; supreme over all other rulers
within the territory and independent of authorities outside the territory such as other
sovereigns, the emperor and the Pope. Yet these theorists were also sincerely concerned
with opposing the arbitrary and tyrannical use of power, and they therefore insisted that
sovereign authority was limited by various divine, moral and juridical responsibilities.
Jean Bodin’s Six Livres de la Republique (Six Books of the Commonwealth), written
in 1576, is widely agreed to be ‘the first systematic discussion of the nature of sovereignty’
(Merriam, 1900: 13). One writer suggests that ‘it is almost possible to speak of him as its
inventor’ (Rowen, 1980: 40–41). The distinguishing mark of the sovereign, Bodin
suggested, is the authority to make law by command: ‘The first attribute of the sovereign
prince therefore is the power to make law binding on all his subjects in general and on each
one in particular’ (Bodin, 1955: I:x). This authority does not require the consent of
others, nor is the sovereign ruler subject to the commands of any other authority.
Moreover, ‘the prince is not subject to his own laws’ (Bodin, 1955: I:viii). Bodin’s
sovereign is liberated from the law and wields supreme authority. However, Bodin
insisted that this authority is limited. Sovereign rule must conform to the principles of
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divine and natural law. ‘All the princes of the earth are subject to them, and cannot
contravene them without treason and rebellion against God.… The absolute power of
princes and sovereign lords does not extend to the laws of God and nature’ (Bodin, 1955:
I:viii). He provided two examples of duties which the prince was bound to observe under
natural law: the responsibility to honour contracts, even those made with his own
subjects, as a consequence of the obligation to keep one’s promises; and also the responsibility to respect private property as an inalienable right (Skinner, 1978: 295–296). Bodin
also retained some traditional constitutionalist limitations in his new theory of sovereignty. He claimed that the prince must abide by those constitutional norms which define
the basis and location of sovereign authority such as the Salic law which determined
rightful succession to the French throne (Burns, 1990: 29–30). Thus, in the first systematic
articulation of the concept, the ‘inherent contradictions of sovereignty’ were displayed
(Kriegel, 2002: 17–18). While the power of the sovereign was absolute, it remained a
power that must only be used within bounds (Burns, 1990: 28). Hinting at a notion that
would become so central to Hobbes’ justification for sovereign authority, Bodin spoke of
‘the mutual obligation between subject and sovereign, by which, in return for the faith
and obedience rendered to him, the sovereign must do justice and give counsel, assistance,
encouragement and protection to the subject’ (Bodin, 1955: I:vi–vii). Bodin’s doctrine of
absolute sovereignty, therefore, was no defence of tyranny. Sovereign rule was absolute
in the sense that it was supreme and irresistible within a territory and independent of
other sovereigns, but absolute authority did not equate to arbitrary authority. It entailed
both rights and responsibilities.
In the middle of the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes developed a secular defence of
absolute rule which swept away many of the limitations on sovereign authority imposed
by Bodin. In Leviathan, written in 1651, Hobbes advanced the idea of a social contract
in which individuals agree to escape the insecurity and brutality of the state of nature and
to enter into civil society by submitting to the ‘artificial man’ that is the sovereign state.
The rights of the Hobbesian sovereign are expansive: he can commit no injustice, cannot
be punished and cannot forfeit his right to the people; he chooses what doctrines are fit
to be taught to his subjects; and he has the right to make war and peace, the right to
reward and the right to punish (Hobbes, 1996: XVIII, XX:3). Hobbes’ unrelenting logic
led him to argue against the possibility of limitations on absolute rule. While he
accepted that the sovereign should be guided by the laws of God and of nature, he
declared that their effectiveness as binding rules of conduct was dependent upon their
being established as civil laws by the sovereign (Burns, 1990: 39–40). However,
Hobbes permitted an exception in insisting that the right of individuals to personal
safety could not be legitimately contracted away. The right to safety was not a ‘liberty’
that individuals could do with as they pleased. It was an ‘obligation’ of natural law. ‘A
law of nature’, he argued, ‘is a precept, or general rule, found out by reason, by which a
man is forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his life’ (Hobbes, 1996: XIV:3). For
Hobbes, the right of individuals to safety is inalienable and unchanging as they move
from the state of nature to civil society since this right of natural law remains an abiding
principle.6 The safety of the people, then, becomes for Hobbes a responsibility of the
state which cannot be revoked by civil law; it is the end for which the sovereign is
trusted:
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The office of the sovereign, (be it a monarch or an assembly,) consisteth in the end, for which
he was trusted with the sovereign power, namely the procuration of the safety of the people, to
which he is obliged by the law of nature, and to render an account thereof to God, the author of
that law, and to none but him. But by safety here, is not meant a bare preservation, but also all
other contentments of life, which every man by lawful industry, without danger, or hurt to the
commonwealth, shall acquire to himself. (Hobbes, 1996: XXX:1; emphasis in original)
Indeed, Hobbes (1996: XXI:21) admits that the authority of the sovereign is lost if he
fails to fulfil his end of protecting the safety of the people:
the obligation of subjects to the sovereign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the
power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by nature to protect
themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no covenant be relinquished.… The end
of obedience is protection.
This intimate connection between sovereign authority and responsibility was not only to
be found in the works of political theorists in early modern Europe. Louis XIV, the French
monarch who is often held to represent the apogee of absolute rule, acknowledged in his
own writings his sovereign responsibilities both to God and for his subjects. He argued
that supreme power in the state must not be limited by any human institution or persons
lest the powerful members of society arrogate to themselves too much authority and the
people suffer under ‘thousands and thousands of petty tyrants’ (Lossky, 1968: 109). As
sovereign, Louis claimed to ‘possess all and command all’ (Church, 1969: 72). Yet he
acknowledged his subordination and responsibility to God. God entrusts a king with
some of His power, he believed, and ‘kings show their gratitude for [God’s] favours by
enforcing the observance of His laws’ (Lossky, 1968: 110). While he denied that he was
accountable to the people, Louis accepted that sovereigns were responsible for the people
(Rowen, 1980: 76). ‘It is only for [our subjects’] advantage that we must give them
laws’, he advised his son, ‘and we must not use the power that we have over them except
to work more effectively to further their happiness’ (Lossky, 1968: 111–112).
To be sure, the responsibilities of sovereignty accepted by theorists and practitioners
in this period were not easily enforced. One scholar has observed that the limitations to
sovereign authority suggested by Bodin were ‘ethical rather than political in character,
and could at best bind only the conscience of the ruler’ (Merriam, 1900: 16). The primary
intention of theorists of absolute sovereignty was not so much to limit the authority of
rulers as it was to justify their supreme and independent rule. Nevertheless, as the above
discussion reveals, their justifications partly rested on limitations. They were unable to
resist the idea that sovereignty ought to entail responsibilities. Indeed, some jurists
supplemented their declarations of sovereign responsibilities with provision for outside
intervention to enforce them.
Bodin, for example, denied that subjects had a right to resist despotic rulers, but granted
sovereign princes a right ‘to take up arms in defence of a whole people unjustly oppressed
by a cruel tyrant’ (Bodin, 1955: II:iv–v). Hugo Grotius similarly maintained that intervention by one sovereign on behalf of the persecuted subjects of another was not unlawful.
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Like Bodin, he refused to allow that oppressed subjects could ‘redress grievances by force
of arms’, but he insisted that ‘it does not necessarily follow that other powers are prohibited
from giving them assistance when labouring under grievous oppressions’ (Grotius, 1901:
II:xxv: 8). Such provisions for intervention hinted at a future in which the society of states
would express a willingness and an ability both to determine and to enforce not only the
rights but also the responsibilities of legitimate sovereignty.
We are too often told about a ‘traditional’ conception of sovereignty which focuses on
sovereign rights, particularly the right of non-intervention, and the notion that sovereignty
entails responsibilities is portrayed as a recent and, for some, suspicious challenge to this
timeless conception. This rendering of sovereignty is mistaken. From its earliest articulations in early modern Europe, sovereignty was conceived to entail not only rights but
also responsibilities. The justification for the supremacy and independence of sovereign
authority rested at least in part on divine, moral and juridical duties and notions of mutual
obligations between ruler and subject.
Popular sovereignty
Sovereignty in early modern Europe was generally located in the person or the office of
a hereditary ruler. By the 18th century, it was increasingly accepted that sovereignty was
located in the state, as outlined by Hobbes. In the second half of that century, American
and French revolutionaries demanded a more radical revision of the concept of sovereignty. This revision would change for ever the nature of both domestic and international
politics. The purpose of this section is to consider the emergence of popular sovereignty
in the contexts of revolutionary America and France. The subsequent endorsement of
popular sovereignty as a legitimacy principle by international society will be considered
in the following section. The present intention is to explore how the protection of individual rights was central to both the American and French understandings of popular
sovereignty, and to acknowledge that, in the French context in particular, the responsibility for the protection of these rights was established in tension with the rights and
objectives of the nation-state.
In 1776, the 13 United States of America unanimously declared their independence
with powerful and universalized claims. At the heart of their declaration was the idea of
the rights of man which had been emerging in Enlightenment discourse (see Hunt, 2007).
The American colonists stated what they perceived to be a ‘self-evident’ truth that ‘all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. They claimed that
governments are instituted ‘to secure these rights’ and that these governments derive
‘their just powers from the consent of the governed’. Moreover, ‘whenever any form of
government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or
to abolish it’ (Laqueur and Rubin, 1979: 107). This was a theory of popular sovereignty.
A legitimate government, according to this conception, derived their powers from the
consent of the people and was only legitimate so long as it secured the rights of all men.
These inalienable rights were at the heart of the American theory of sovereignty.7
The debate about the possible inclusion of a bill of rights in the Constitution at the
National Convention in 1787 reveals even more clearly the centrality of inalienable
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individual rights to the American conception of popular sovereignty. The Anti-Federalists
argued that the Constitution must include a bill of rights which would protect the people
and place limits on what the people’s representatives could rightfully do. The Federalists,
on the other hand, claimed that a bill of rights was something that a king conceded or
contracted with his subjects. If the people were sovereign, they argued, such provisions
were not necessary since the ruler and the people were one and the same. In the Constitution’s
preamble, it is ‘we the people’ who convey particular powers to the national government.
According to one Federalist, James Wilson, this opening sentence ‘is tantamount to a volume
and contains the essence of all the bills of rights that have been or can be devised’ (Morgan,
1988: 283). Others expanded this argument claiming, for example, that the Constitution
‘goes on the principle that all power is in the people, and that rulers have no powers but
what are enumerated in that paper’ (Wood, 1969: 540). Ultimately the support for a written
declaration of the people’s liberties was too strong for the Federalist arguments to overcome and such a bill of rights was passed as the first 10 amendments to the Constitution.
James Madison, who initially did not see the need for the enumeration of individual rights,
allowed that the bill might serve the ‘double purpose of satisfying the minds of well
meaning opponents, and of providing additional safeguards in favour of liberty’ (Wood,
1969: 543). For the Americans, both Federalist and Anti-Federalist, the protection of
individual rights was at the heart of the idea of popular sovereignty. Government was
justified by the consent of the governed and was entrusted with securing their rights.
Shortly after the French Revolution began in 1789, the National Assembly of France
approved the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Echoing the claims made
across the Atlantic, the French declared that ‘all sovereignty resides essentially in the
nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed
directly from the nation.’ The rights of man were again at the heart of their programme for
change. ‘The aim of all political association’, they declared, ‘is the preservation of the
natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and
resistance to oppression’ (Laqueur and Rubin, 1979: 118–119). However, the French were
guided by Rousseau’s notion of the ‘general will’ of the nation or the collective people
rather than the individualism of thinkers like Locke which had directed the Americans.
Both Locke and Rousseau had imagined a social contract that binds individuals together
in a ‘body politic’. For them, sovereignty was not legitimated on the grounds of rightful
dynastic succession, but through an agreement of this body or community. Sovereignty
was legitimately found in the people and could not be alienated from them. However,
whereas Locke (1967: II:ii:6) had placed weight on the rights of individuals to their ‘Life,
Health, Liberty [and] Possessions’, Rousseau (1968: II:iv) emphasized the idea of the
general will as a unity of interests: ‘every act of sovereignty, that is, every authentic act of
the general will, binds or favours all the citizens equally, so that the sovereign recognises
only the whole body of the nation and makes no distinction between any of the members
who compose it’. This principle of the general will guided revolutionary France, and an
obsession with the unity of the French state gradually eroded concern for individual rights
and liberties (Best, 1988; Bukovansky, 2002; Furet, 1981).
The ideals of the French Revolution were proclaimed to be universal. French popular
sovereignty demanded an end to dynastic rule not only in France but across all of
Europe. The National Assembly’s Edict of Fraternity (1792) promised ‘fraternity and
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aid to all peoples who wish to recover their liberty’ (O’Brien, 1988: 32). However, wars
of liberation quickly gave way to wars of conquest. Out of the Revolution had emerged a
violently nationalist understanding of the purposes of the French state. Napoleon tapped
into this fervour and his military successes provided Europe with a model of ‘nationalism
wedded to the state’ which demanded imitation (Bukovansky, 2002: 224; Posen, 1993).
The idea of popular sovereignty thus travelled down a nationalist path.8 As Wight
(1977: 160) suggests, ‘[t]he imperialism of the French Revolutionaries and Napoleon
drove popular politics into the channels of nationality; the rights of men gave way to the
rights of nations’. Over the next century, the struggle for popular sovereignty within
Europe would be increasingly expressed as a struggle for national self-determination. To be
sure, it was commonly argued that the self-determination of the nation was essential to the
advancement of individual rights, but the legitimacy of the nation-state was not thought
to be conditional on these rights being secured. The American and French revolutionaries
had placed the liberty and equality of individuals at the heart of their justifications for
popular sovereignty. However, it was the right of nations to govern themselves, not the
rights of the individuals within these nations, that came to dominate the understanding of
the sovereignty of the people in 19th- and early 20th-century Europe.
National sovereignty
While scholars have long differentiated between the internal and external dimensions of
sovereignty, it should be stressed that dominant modes of discourse about legitimate
sovereign authority within and between states have historically tended to feed into each
other. Thus, while the external sovereignty of states is contingent upon recognition by
international society, the constructed criteria for recognition are commonly derived from
the justifications for sovereign authority prevailing within states.9 A clear instance of this
is the eventual internationalization of the domestic principle of popular sovereignty as
a principle of international legitimacy. While the French Revolution posed a direct
challenge to international society’s prevailing principle of dynastic legitimacy, which
had almost immediate international repercussions, the domestic principle of popular
sovereignty was not internationalized by the society of states until the end of World War I.
The Versailles settlement has been referred to as ‘the final victory in Europe of the French
Revolution over the Holy Alliance’ (Wight, 1978: 85). Whereas the Holy Alliance had
sought to preserve the principle of dynastic or at least monarchical legitimacy in the
early 19th century, the settlement at the end of World War I saw popular sovereignty
established as the principle of international legitimacy. However, popular sovereignty
was here couched not in terms of the natural rights of individuals, as it was originally in
the context of the American and French Revolutions, but in terms of the rights of nations.
What was established at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was the principle of national
self-determination.
This principle was championed by US President Woodrow Wilson, among others, at
the close of World War I. Central to his demands to international society was the right of
peoples or nations to self-government on the grounds that no people should ‘be forced
under sovereignty under which it does not wish to live’ (Musgrave, 1997: 23).10 Although,
due to competing priorities, the concept was not always applied consistently at Versailles,
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scholars are in agreement that it was here that national self-determination became the
new ‘legitimizing principle’ or ‘master principle’ of international order; it became the
accepted criterion for membership in international society (see Clark, 2005: 116). This
principle established the right of nations to govern themselves but was silent on the
rights of individuals. As Samuel Barkin (1998: 241) notes, ‘nationalism as a legitimating
norm … requires of states neither democracy nor a respect for liberal rights. It requires
of them only that they represent nations.’
The principle of national self-determination was complemented by both an emergent
principle of domestic jurisdiction and a weak right of non-intervention which were
included in the Covenant of the League of Nations.11 The mindset of international society with respect to sovereign responsibilities in this period is perhaps well reflected
in the words of Robert Lansing, Wilson’s Secretary of State. Lansing conceded that
sovereignty entailed responsibility to the people, but he maintained that, with respect to the
international community, ‘The essence of sovereignty [is] the absence of responsibility’
(Willis, 1982: 74).12
The principle of national self-determination established at Versailles conceived of
self-governing ‘peoples’ or ‘nations’ in ethno-linguistic terms and the ensuing decades
saw a multitude of claims and counter-claims by nation-states seeking to expand their
territories to include all their scattered nationals. The horrors of World War II exposed
clearly the disastrous consequences of constructing an international order on racial
grounds. Thus, when reaffirming in 1945 the principle of self-determination, negotiators
at San Francisco had in mind more simply the right of peoples to govern themselves
within their existing territorially bounded states (UNIO, 1945: VI:296; Cassese, 1995:
39–41). The principle of sovereignty as self-government and freedom from outside
interference was firmly established in international law in 1945. That popular sovereignty
now represented the sole legitimate form of sovereign statehood was affirmed in the
preamble to the UN Charter. Echoing the American Founding Fathers, the UN Charter
begins with the phrase, ‘[w]e the peoples’. The Charter then grants to sovereign peoples the right to self-government, freedom from intervention and freedom from interference in matters of domestic jurisdiction.13
These principles of self-government and freedom from outside interference are often
assumed to represent the ‘traditional’ conception of sovereignty. Contemporary notions
of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ and ‘the responsibility to protect’ are typically framed
in opposition to these supposedly timeless principles of sovereign authority. Yet, these
‘traditional’ principles were not established by international society until the first half
of the 20th century. Moreover, as the following sections demonstrate, they developed
alongside enduring notions that sovereignty entails responsibility at least in Europe’s
relations with the non-European world. And when finally established in the UN Charter,
these sovereign rights were held in uneasy tension with an emergent international human
rights regime.
Sovereignty and the non-European world
The idea that sovereignty entails responsibility can be clearly found in the relations
between European international society and the non-European world in the 19th and early
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20th centuries. It can be observed in justifications for colonialism, in the standards set for
those non-European states who wished to enter the family of nations and in justifications
for ‘humanitarian intervention’. It does not require much imagination to understand ideas
of trusteeship and the so-called ‘standard of “civilization”’ as germs of contemporary
notions of ‘the responsibility to protect’ and ‘sovereignty as responsibility’.14
Colonialism
The rules of sovereignty were very much shaped by the colonial encounter. In the
European justifications for colonialism we can find a clear connection between sovereignty and responsibility in two senses. First, the right of peoples to be free from colonization and to enjoy sovereign statehood was held to be conditional on the capacity of
these peoples to responsibly govern themselves. Through the 19th century, humanity was
increasingly divided into those who were ‘civilized’ and those who were ‘uncivilized’.
Only civilized peoples, it was argued, had the capacity to govern themselves and, therefore, to enjoy sovereign statehood. In the previous century, Enlightenment thinkers such
as Montesquieu and Rousseau had argued for the universal rights of peoples. Yet they
had also suggested that not all nations were capable of enjoying the fruits of liberty
(Bain, 2003: 18). The distinction between civilized and uncivilized peoples served to
clarify and justify the position of European international society regarding which peoples
would be able to carry out the responsibilities of sovereign self-government and which
could be legitimately subject to colonization (see, for example, Mill, 1984). The idea that
sovereignty should be conditional upon peoples having developed a capacity to govern
themselves responsibly was central to justifications for colonialism until as late as the
1940s and 1950s (Bain, 2003; Crawford, 2002; Louis, 1977).
The second connection between sovereignty and responsibility in justifications for
colonialism is found in the idea of trusteeship. The distinction between civilized and
uncivilized peoples did not justify domination and exploitation. Each of the European
imperial powers understood that colonization entailed some form of responsibility.
Those uncivilized peoples who did not have the capacity to govern themselves, it was
argued, ought to be governed for their own good. Discussing the plight of the colonized
in British India in 1783, Edmund Burke claimed, ‘all political power which is set over
men … ought to be some way or other exercised ultimately for their benefit’ (Bain,
2003: 23). One hundred years later, the responsibilities of trusteeship were confirmed by
international society.
In the General Act of the Berlin Conference of 1884–5, colonizing states charged
themselves with a responsibility for the protection and improvement of natives under
their authority. In Article VI, states bound themselves ‘to watch over the preservation of
the native tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and
material well-being’ (Crawford, 2002: 209–210). By all accounts, the Berlin Act led to
imperial actions motivated by commercial interest that harmed native interests and welfare more than they protected them. Nevertheless, the Act established in international
law the responsibility of trusteeship that states had with respect to their colonized subjects;
it established that the treatment of natives was a legitimate matter of international concern
(Bain, 2003: 67–68). In the case of the Congolese Free State, over which Leopold II
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of Belgium was personally sovereign, international condemnation of atrocities and
diplomatic demands saw the Belgian government eventually assume authority over the
territory and, after further insistence from Britain in particular, this government provided
assurances that it would meet its responsibilities to protect Congolese natives as outlined
in the Berlin Act (Bain, 2003: 71–74; Ewans, 2002; Hochschild, 1998).
The responsibility of colonizers to protect those within their trust was institutionalized
by international society after World War I in the form of the mandates system.15 To those
subject peoples of the defeated imperial powers who were ‘not yet able to stand by
themselves’, declared the Covenant of the League of Nations, ‘there should be applied
the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust
of civilisation and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in
this Covenant’. States were to be entrusted with the ‘responsibility’ for the ‘tutelage’ of
these peoples ‘as Mandatories on behalf of the League’ (Article 22, in Miller, 1928:
737). The mandates system confirmed the responsibility of states to protect and
‘improve’ peoples in their trust. It also established the idea that, in those cases where
states neglect their obligations, the burden of responsibility shifts to the international
community. It is reasonable to suggest that the responsibilities found in the mandates
system can be rightly understood as antecedents of the contemporary doctrine of ‘the
responsibility to protect’.16
The standard of ‘civilization’
The notion of ‘civilization’ which was used to justify colonialism also found expression
in the so-called ‘standard of “civilization”’ which was established in customary international law around the beginning of the 20th century. This standard was used to distinguish between those ‘civilized’ states that were recognized as fully sovereign members
of the ‘Family of Nations’, and those ‘uncivilized’ states beyond Europe that found
themselves outside of this family. It was a test of admission that non-European states
were required to fulfil if they wished to enjoy the rights and responsibilities that were
entailed in membership of international society.
In his classic study of the standard of ‘civilization’, Gerrit Gong (1984) suggests
that the concept evolved to include a number of requirements which were thought to
generally reflect the norms of European ‘civilization’. One requirement was the guarantee of ‘basic rights, i.e. life, dignity, and property; freedom of travel, commerce, and
religion, especially that of foreign nationals’. To be considered ‘civilized’, states were
also required to demonstrate an organized political bureaucracy, and to adhere to both
accepted diplomatic practices and the principles of international law. One further and
more subjective requirement that Gong describes is that ‘a “civilised” state by and
large conforms to the accepted norms and practices of the “civilised” international
society’ (Gong, 1984: 14–15). This fairly elastic requirement entailed the expectation
that ‘members of the same society of “civilised” states would share sufficiently in fundamental, underlying assumptions about the world; in customary, historically proven
institutions; and in ordinary, everyday life-styles, so as to feel part of a common society
and a shared civilisation’ (Gong, 1984: 21). The normative requirements that the standard imposed on states should not be exaggerated. Georg Schwarzenberger (1955: 220)
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summarizes that the test for recognition of a state as a member of international society
was ‘merely whether its government was sufficiently stable to undertake binding commitments under international law and whether it was able and willing to protect adequately the life, liberty and property of foreigners’. Nevertheless, the application of the
standard, as weak as it was, demonstrates the willingness of an expanding international
society of states to impose requirements and responsibilities on those who wished to be
recognized as fully sovereign members.
Scholarship that identifies new manifestations of the standard of ‘civilization’ in
contemporary international society has become increasingly common in recent years.
Parallels have repeatedly been drawn between the standard and contemporary notions
of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ (Bowden, 2004; Donnelly, 1998; Fidler, 2001; see
also Gong, 1984: 91–93). While the comparison should not be overdrawn, consideration of the standard does reveal that, even while Europeans were strongly emphasizing
their own rights to national self-determination in the early 20th century, they were
attaching responsibilities to sovereign recognition at least in their relations with the
non-European world.
Humanitarian intervention
One other example of sovereign responsibilities in the non-European world in the 19th
and early 20th centuries bears brief mention. The 19th century was witness to a number
of early examples of so-called ‘humanitarian intervention’. While the intent of the intervenors has been questioned by some scholars, a number of military interventions by
European states and coalitions of states in territories within the Ottoman Empire such as
Greece (1827) and Syria (1861–2) were justified on grounds of protecting the rights of
individuals and minority groups against abuse (see Chesterman, 2001: 28–33). This idea
of intervention to protect peoples from immense suffering also found expression across
the Atlantic in US President Theodore Roosevelt’s doctrine of international police power
at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1904, he informed Congress:
Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of
civilised society, may in America [i.e. the American hemisphere], as elsewhere, ultimately
require intervention by some civilised nation, and in the western hemisphere the adherence of
the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States however reluctantly, in
flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police
power. (Zimmerman, 2002: 441)
This was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine which had earlier sought to
deter European intervention in the American hemisphere. Roosevelt claimed that he
‘most severely criticized the European powers for not interfering on behalf of the
Armenians’ during the Turkish pogroms, and he believed that America’s ‘duty to humanity’ required it to intervene on behalf of its own neighbours who were suffering under
irresponsible governments (Holmes, 2006: 86, 109). Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, Elihu
Root, expressed these principles in terms of sovereign responsibilities: ‘All sovereignty
in this world’, he argued, ‘is held upon the condition of performing the duties of
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sovereignty’ (Holmes, 2006: 114). The contrast between these words and Secretary
Lansing’s declaration only a few years later that sovereignty essentially meant ‘the absence
of responsibility’ is striking. It provides some indication of the tensions within the concept
of sovereignty that would only become clearer in the second half of the century.
Decolonization
The atrocities perpetrated by Europeans in the two World Wars undermined the distinction between the civilized and the uncivilized worlds. This not only put paid to the notion
that some non-European states could be denied admission into international society on
civilizational grounds, it also damaged the justification for colonization (Crawford,
2002). A system of trusteeship was incorporated into the UN Charter at the end of World
War II which reaffirmed the responsibilities of sovereign states to protect the interests
and well-being of those within their trust. However, within two decades the era of
colonialism had been brought to an end and the rights of peoples to self-government and
freedom from outside interference had been universalized. All peoples now enjoyed an
unqualified right to sovereign independence. In the celebrated Declaration on the
Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, adopted in 1960, it was
explicitly stated: ‘Inadequacy of political, economic, social or educational preparedness
should never serve as a pretext for delaying independence’ (UNGA Resolution 1514
[XV], 1960). According to this formulation, sovereign statehood was to be granted by
international society regardless of the capacity of the state to secure the rights and liberties of individuals that 18th-century revolutionaries had demanded. This was a concept
of unconditional sovereignty; sovereignty without responsibility. However, as the following section observes, anti-colonialists themselves grounded their claims for independence in principles of human rights just as the American and French revolutionaries had
done before them. Moreover, these newly independent peoples entered into a society of
states in which the rights of national sovereignty would be increasingly challenged by
an emerging international human rights regime.
Sovereignty and human rights
The theory of popular sovereignty contains two potentially contradictory ideas. The first
is the idea that people have a right to govern themselves free from outside interference.
The second is the idea that the rights of these sovereign people to life and liberty should
be secured. The possible conflict between these two ideas was perhaps observed most
plainly in the so-called ‘quasi-states’ that emerged out of the process of decolonization
(Jackson, 1990). Anti-colonialists successfully argued that sovereign independence was
a human right that ought to be enjoyed by all and, in turn, sovereign independence was
necessary for the realization of human rights. However, the sovereignty granted to colonized peoples by international society was not conditional upon the rights of individuals
being secured. As it turned out, many of the newly sovereign states displayed little
capacity to protect these individual rights.
Christian Reus-Smit’s (2001) discussion of the relationship between human rights
and the principle of sovereignty is worth considering at this point. Focusing on the
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justifications employed for decolonization, he argues that the tendency among scholars
to treat sovereignty and human rights ‘as separate, mutually contradictory regimes
obscures the justificatory role that human rights principles have performed in the constitution of the modern sovereign order’ (Reus-Smit, 2001: 520). Decolonization, he
observes, was explicitly tied to human rights. Anti-colonialists deliberately ‘grafted’ the
right of self-determination on to emergent principles of individual rights. It was appeals
to human rights norms which delegitimized the perpetuation of colonialism and trusteeship, and provided the moral justifications for the granting of sovereignty to dependencies. However, it would seem that Reus-Smit overstates his case when he concludes that
self-determination for formerly colonized peoples was, therefore, ‘[f]ar from being a categorical right with no strings attached’ (Reus-Smit, 2001: 536). The right to self-determination may have been tied to the satisfaction of basic human rights but it was not
necessarily conditional upon the ongoing protection of these rights. Strings would only
be attached if the society of states chose to attach them. Since the American and French
Revolutions, sovereignty had been grounded in the rights of man, but the extent to which
international society would hold states responsible for the protection of these rights has
always been a different question.
The society of states had been developing tentative answers to this question, in addition to its agreements about the responsibilities of sovereignty with respect to the nonEuropean world, for many years prior to decolonization. Guarantees for the protection of
minority rights, for example, had been a common requirement of recognition for newly
sovereign states since the 17th century, first in relation to religious minorities and later in
relation to national minorities (Jackson Preece, 1998). When the principle of national
self-determination was established after World War I, it was complemented by an international minority rights regime that aimed to ensure the protection of the rights of national
minorities. The tension between this regime and the understanding of sovereignty
expressed by Secretary Lansing at that time is hard to miss.
A generation later, American negotiators at Dumbarton Oaks (1944) unsuccessfully
endeavoured to persuade British and Soviet delegates that the right of non-intervention
in the internal affairs of a sovereign state should be ‘subject to the performance of [a]
duty’ to ‘respect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all its people and to
govern in accordance with the principles of humanity and justice’ (FRUS, 1966: 829).
Instead, provisions for fundamental human rights were incorporated in the UN Charter
in uneasy tension with provisions for the right of states to freedom from intervention and
interference in their internal affairs.17
By attaining sovereign statehood, formerly colonized peoples entered into an international society which was struggling to work through this tension. Their sovereignty may
have been unconditional but not for long. An international human rights regime had
already begun to emerge which posed a challenge to the rights of sovereignty. While
most international agreements left enforcement of human rights in the hands of states,
some, such as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
(1948), arguably provided for the international enforcement of sovereign responsibilities
(Schabas, 2000). During the course of the Cold War, the normative tensions between
principles of human rights and non-intervention were suppressed by bipolar tensions.
The idea of enforcing human rights for the most part made little headway against a firmly
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non-interventionist conception of sovereignty.18 However, the dismantling of the Soviet
Union in 1991 profoundly changed the dynamics of international relations. In contrast to
its earlier relative stagnation, the Security Council was now able to address questions
directly related to the tension between human rights and non-intervention. Through this
process, international society found itself once again consensually (re)constructing and
clarifying the rules of sovereign statehood.
The development of the idea of sovereignty as a responsibility to protect in the years
since the end of the Cold War represents an attempt to reconcile or at least deal with the
inherent contradictions in the idea of sovereignty. This conceptualization of sovereign
responsibilities suggests that, while peoples have a right to govern themselves free from
outside interference, this should be conditional on their protection of human rights; the
legitimate expression of the will of a sovereign people entails the protection of their
individual rights. When a sovereign people prove unwilling or unable to protect their
own population, they yield their sovereign right to non-intervention, and the responsibility
to protect passes to international society.19 This indeed represents a new conception
of the rules of sovereignty, yet it can also be understood as the society of states imposing
upon sovereign peoples only that which anti-colonialists recently declared for themselves and which American and French revolutionaries declared for themselves more
than two centuries ago; or international society universalizing only those principles
of responsibility which it had accepted in relation to the non-European world over one
century ago; or indeed international society demanding adherence only to those principles
of natural law that were central to the legitimation of sovereignty when it first emerged
in early modern Europe.
Conclusion
Sovereign rights are too often assumed to be objective and ahistorical principles that are
only now for the first time being challenged by amorphous and historically contingent
responsibilities. When we dehistoricize the rules of sovereignty, and reduce them to
rights of self-government and non-interference, we reify them and place them beyond
question.20 The contemporary tension between sovereign rights and sovereign responsibilities is, then, debated on unequal grounds. The understanding of the history of sovereign responsibilities that has been advanced in this article should shift the terms of
the contemporary debate. No longer should the idea of sovereignty as a responsibility to
protect be understood as an abstract and late-arriving challenge to concrete and timeless
sovereign rights of internal control and non-interference. When we historicize the sovereign state, we can recognize that it is not only the responsibilities of states to protect their
populations that are socially constructed but also the rights of states to be self-governing
and free from outside interference. Responsibility for the protection of populations is
not simply a new idea that has been grafted on to a once-static organizing principle of
sovereignty. By scrutinizing the history of sovereignty, we recognize that it has always
entailed varied and evolving responsibilities; these responsibilities have been found at
the heart of both the justifications for sovereign authority and the construction of its
meaning and content. We see not only that the rights of sovereigns can be subject to
certain limitations and responsibilities, but that they have been subject to such things by
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both domestic and international societies in varied and evolving ways since the idea of
sovereignty was first articulated in early modern Europe.
Indeed it would seem that sovereign rights and sovereign responsibilities are codependent. The history of sovereignty is in many ways a history of domestic and international demands that the practices of sovereigns be reconciled to the justifications for
sovereignty; that the rights of sovereigns be limited by the responsibilities that underpin
the legitimation of their authority. The contemporary idea that sovereign states are
responsible to their populations and to the international community does not break with
a centuries-old tradition of unaltered and untrammelled sovereign rights. The boundaries
of legitimate sovereign action have always been contested. The idea that states have a
responsibility to protect the rights of individuals has been an enduring feature of the
discussion of legitimate sovereignty since it first emerged in early modern Europe.
It is surely more fruitful to consider the contemporary debate about ‘sovereignty as
responsibility’ with this history in mind. The question of what sovereigns can legitimately
do has always been debated and, moreover, the answers constructed at different times
have made the objectives of international society easier or harder to achieve. Understanding
the historical development of sovereign responsibilities perhaps helps us understand better where we can push and how hard we can push the rules of sovereignty if we want to
effect normative change in the name of individual rights.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was presented at the Oceanic Conference on International Studies
at the University of Queensland in July 2008. I am indebted to Alex Bellamy, Richard Devetak,
Mark Chou, Seb Kaempf, Andrew Phillips, Sarah Teitt, Martin Weber and the two anonymous
reviewers for invaluable comments that strengthened this article.
Notes
1. To be sure, when speaking about the ‘traditional’ conception of sovereignty, some scholars are
simply referring to the non-interventionist meaning of sovereignty that obtained after 1945.
They do not necessarily mean that sovereignty has always been understood in this sense.
Nevertheless, as I demonstrate, others do. In addition to the scholars discussed in this article, see also introductory International Relations and human rights texts including Goldstein
(2005: 74), Kegley and Wittkopf (2006: 542, 582) and Forsythe (2006: 20, 25), as well as
Gareth Evans’ (2008: 11–30) recent monograph on the ‘responsibility to protect’.
2. Walker (1993: 10) suggests that ‘the very attempt to treat sovereignty as a matter of definition and
legal principle encourages a certain amnesia about its historical and culturally specific character’.
Likewise, Bartelson (1995: 13) warns us to hesitate before defining sovereignty because, as Nietzsche
claims, only that which has no history can be defined. See also Biersteker and Weber (1996: 2–3).
3. Furthermore, the principle of non-intervention continued to be challenged by an accepted
right of conquest until as late as the first half of the 20th century (Korman, 1996).
4. This argument parallels neatly with Cynthia Weber’s (1995) claim that we can learn what
sovereignty ‘means’ at a particular time by considering the justifications offered for intervention. See also Helle Malmvig’s (2006) observation that the converse of Weber’s argument also
holds: sometimes the failure to intervene in the affairs of other states itself requires justification.
5. Examination of non-European traditions of sovereign authority would also be a worthwhile
project. The Chinese concept of the ‘mandate of heaven’ which was enjoyed by just rulers but
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6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
denied to rulers who acted despotically, for example, parallels with the European tradition in
interesting ways. However, an exploration of such ideas is beyond the scope of the present
article.
Kriegel (2002) contrasts this understanding shared by Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke with the
contract theories of Grotius and Pufendorf who sever the rights of subjects from natural law
and instead seek these rights in a rational contract of submission. For Kriegel, these latter
thinkers, in the end, are simply theorists of ‘voluntary servitude’.
On the development of the argument for popular sovereignty in 18th-century America, see
Bailyn (1992), Morgan (1988) and Wood (1969).
On the connections between popular sovereignty and nationalism, see Canovan (2005), Hont
(1994) and Yack (2001).
This claim parallels with Wight’s (1977: 153) discussion of the principles of ‘international
legitimacy’ which he suggests are the principles that prevail ‘within a majority of the states
that form international society, as well as in the relations between them’.
On Wilson’s conception of self-determination, see also Pomerance (1976) and Whelan (1994).
Covenant of the League Articles 15(8) and 10.
Elsewhere, Lansing (1921: 6–7) defined sovereignty to be ‘the power … to do all things in a
state without accountability’. But compare this claim with his recognition, in the same work,
of the limits that were increasingly being placed on the sovereign rights of states by international society (Lansing, 1921: 74–75).
UN Charter Articles 1(2), 2(4) and 2(7).
Moreover, the enduring memory of the humiliation and unequal treatment suffered by nonEuropean peoples in the name of ‘civilization’ in this period is a key reason for the widespread resistance to present-day constructions of sovereign responsibilities.
The formulation that trusteeship was ‘internationalized’ at Berlin and ‘institutionalized’ under
the mandates system is borrowed from Bain (2003).
The question of whether the mandatory powers enjoyed ‘sovereignty’ over the people within
their trust was never fully resolved (see Wright, 1930: 319–339). It can at least be said that
these powers enjoyed authority over these peoples that was held to be conditional upon certain responsibilities being carried out.
The human rights provisions in the Charter can be found in the Preamble and Articles
1(3), 13, 55, 62, 68 and 76.
An important exception being the willingness of the UN Security Council to impose sanctions
against the South African and Rhodesian governments on the grounds of human rights abuses
and denial of majority rule.
This is of course a simplified formulation of what remains a contested idea. For a nuanced
analysis of international consensus about the process by which the responsibility to protect
civilians shifts from the sovereign state to international society, see Bellamy (2009).
A similar criticism of this process of reification can be found in Devetak (2007: 166–167).
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Biographical note
Luke Glanville is a Research Fellow in the Griffith Asia Institute and Centre for
Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University, Australia. He recently submitted his
PhD thesis at the University of Queensland.
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