2 - The problem: deconstructing sovereignty

Summary

External/internal, image/reality, representation/presence, such is the old grid to which is given the task of outlining a domain of science. And of what science? Of a science that can no longer answer to the classical concept of the epistémè because the originality of its field … is that the opening of the ‘image’ within it appears as the condition of ‘reality’.

Derrida, Of Grammatology

What does the term sovereignty mean? In this chapter, I shall focus on the troubled attempts by modern political science to provide an answer to this question, directly as well as indirectly. First, I shall argue that the vain attempts of conceptual analysis have less to do with the inherent ambiguities of the concept, and more to do with the philosophical tools utilized to this purpose. Second, and as a response, I shall turn the question of meaning into one of function, and investigate how the concept of sovereignty silently informs and takes on meaning within the empirical discourses of international political theory and macrosociology. Third, I shall analyse the recent effort by structuration theory to make sense of sovereignty by turning it into a constitutive rule of both domestic and international politics.

Making sense of sovereignty: centrality and ambiguity

Passing through the hands of politicians and philosophers during centuries, the concept of sovereignty has been not only constitutive of what modern politics is, and what modern political science is all about, but also a perennial source of theoretical confusion.