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Whose Sovereignty? Empire Versus International Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Jean L. Cohen
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Abstract

This article focuses on the impact of globalization on international law and the discourse of sovereignty. It challenges the claim that we have entered into a new world order characterized by transnational governance and decentered global law, which have replaced “traditional” international law and rendered the concepts of state sovereignty and international society anachronistic. We are indeed in the presence of something new. But if we drop the concept of sovereignty and buy into the idea that transnational governance has upstaged international treaty organizations, we will misconstrue the nature of contemporary international society and the political choices facing us. In the contemporary context where there is a powerful imperial project afoot (on the part of the United States) that seeks to develop a useful version of global (cosmopolitan) right to justify its self-interested interventions, proposals to abandon the default position of sovereignty and its corollary, the principle of nonintervention in international law, are both premature and dangerous. Instead, we should rethink the normative dimensions of the concept of sovereignty in light of the new principle of sovereign equality articulated in the UN Charter, and show how it can complement cosmopolitan principles such as human rights and collective security. The task is to strengthen, not abandon, international law and supranational institutions, and to foster a global rule of law that protects both the sovereign equality of states, based on a revised conception of sovereignty, and human rights.

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Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , December 2004 , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2004

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References

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9 EIA's “The Revival of Empire” is more nuanced than this characterization. There is, of course, a debate over whether the United States is an empire, whether it can be a successful empire, when the empire began, and whether recent activity, including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, are signs of its demise. See also Emmanuel Todd, C. Jon Delogu, and Lind, Michael, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. My interest is the fate of the discourse of state sovereignty in these claims and counterclaims.

10 Of course, international law can also be instrumen-talized by the powerful. But the principle of sovereign equality and its correlate, nonintervention, provides a powerful normative presumption against unwarranted aggression. Abandoning it would be a mistake. I also provide noninstrumental, normative arguments in favor of the discourse of sovereignty and public international lawGoogle Scholar.

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44 Chapter I, Article 2 of the UN Charter states, “The Organization is based on the principle of sovereign equality of all its Members”; available at http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter.

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51 See Walker, “Late Sovereignty.”Google Scholar

52 The example of the EU is most instructive. Strong claims to state sovereignty coexist with strong claims to supremacy of EU law over union matters. This is a productive paradox involving division and the increase of powerGoogle Scholar.

53 See the debate in Holzgrefe and Keohane, eds., Humanitarian Intervention, over whether a new norm of unilateral humanitarian intervention has in fact emerged and whether legal reform should occur to make it hard lawGoogle Scholar.

54 On the productivity of legal paradoxes, see Fletcher, G. P., “Paradoxes in Legal Thought,” Columbia Law Review 85 (1985), pp. 1263–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Luhmann, Niklas, “The Third Question: The Creative Use of Paradoxes in Law and Legal History,” Journal of Law and Society 15, no. 2 (1988), pp. 153–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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66 In Buchanan and Keohane, “The Preventive Use of Force,” the authors offer a very long list that includes not only genocide, ethnic cleansing, and torture but also the “more damaging forms of discrimination” and the “right to the means of subsistence.” They support interventions by “coalitions of democratic states” without the detour of the UNSC. Others, like Michael Reis-man, support intervention in favor of a right to popular sovereignty that “trumps state sovereignty.” Still other lists, like that of Michael Walzer, are more minimal. Moral philosophy cannot adjudicate among these different lists of “fundamental” human rights. See my “Loi Internationale ou intervention unilatérale?”Google Scholar

67 See the three-volume work of Muller, Joachim, ed., Reforming the United Nations: New Initiatives and Past Efforts (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1997Google Scholar).

68 See, e.g., ICISS, The Responsibility to ProtectGoogle Scholar.