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Negative sovereignty in sub-Saharan Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Robert H. Jackson
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Extract

Martin Wight once compared ‘the increasing number of small states which are the debris of colonial empires’ to ‘the increasing number of small principalities’ of an earlier period in international history which were ‘the debris of feudalism’. The citystates, monarchies, republics, confederations and various other emergent states of Europe eventually found an alternative to the mediaeval societas Christiana on which their independence and intercourse could be legitimately based. This was, of course, the practice of dynastic legitimacy or what Burke glorified as ‘prescription’: the right of inherited and established states to international recognition which sufficed as the constitution of European international society until the French revolution. Burke invoked it to condemn the revolution and justify foreign intervention not only to destroy the Jacobins and restore the monarchy but also to defend ‘the college of the ancient states of Europe’.3 It was a lost cause.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , October 1986 , pp. 247 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1986

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References

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64. Martin Wight remarked on another aspect of this ironic double standard some three decades ago: ‘The existence of the United Nations has exaggerated the international importance of the have-not powers…The paradoxical consequence has been that powers which, taken collectively, exhibit a low level of political freedom, governmental efficiency, public probity, civil liberties and human rights, have had the opportunity to set themselves up in judgement over powers which, taken collectively, for all their sins, have a high level in these respects.’ Power, op. cit. note 1, p. 238.

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