Sovereignties (Once Again) in Question

Review by Timothy J. Ruback

Department of Government, Smith College

Globalization and Sovereignty. By John Agnew. Lanham, MD: Rowman & LittlefieldPublishers, Inc., 2009. 216 pp., $26.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-742-55678-2).

Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty. By Stuart Elden. Minneapolis, MN:University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 304 pp., $25.00 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-816-65484-0).

Sovereignty and the Limits of the Liberal Imagination. By Scott G. Nelson. New York:Routledge, 2009. 206 pp., $130.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-77784-1).

The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This ismy claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life.Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occurupon it save by my dispensation. (McCarthy 1985:199)

Contemporary scholars of global politics, it needs be said, are awash in sovereign-ties. Beset by suspicions that global connections have eroded sovereignty—that,given international legal norms, trade relations, global flows of people, etc. —‘‘we cannot presume ‘‘the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth’’ asBodin (1992:1) once did. For some, sovereignty became fractured and propor-tional; states could enjoy varying degrees of sovereignty, which fundamentallychanged the concept. In a lucid attempt to address the confusion, Steven Krasneropened up the term, offering four different meanings of sovereignty—all descrip-tors of authority which are neither logically nor empirically coupled (Krasner1999:9). By 2000, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri were transforming sover-eignty into a series of imperial, disciplinary, capitalist, and network practices, allgiven the name Empire. In short, we seem to have replaced Bodin’s sovereignabsolute with a series of contending, overlapping sovereignties.

Despite all of this, whenever I read new contributions to our understandingsof sovereignty, my thoughts drift back to one of the English language’s mostmonstrous literary creations. It is not, as the reader might suspect, Hobbes’sLeviathan, but instead Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden—the desert-crossingphilosopher ⁄ beast from Blood Meridian. Both violence and desire personified,one of Judge Holden’s hobbies was to kill birds and to make detailed notes andsketches of the species he had found. When queried about his purpose, heclaims that he wishes to become suzerain of the Earth—’’…a special kind of kee-per. A suzerain rules even where there are other rules. His authority counter-mands local judgments’’ (McCarthy 1985:198). The judge continues, ‘‘That manwho sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestrywill by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by suchtaking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate’’(p. 199). But his ambitions little impress his inquisitor, whose only comment is‘‘I don’t see what that has to do with catchin birds’’ (p. 199).

Ruback, Timothy J. (2011) Sovereignties (Once Again) in Question. International Studies Review, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2486.2011.01019.x� 2011 International Studies Association

International Studies Review (2011) 13, 631–636

For the judge, killing the birds and knowing them were one and thesame—their movement had to be arrested for the judge to fully observe it, toknow it. And it seems to me that, in recent years, the IR scholar has behavedtoward sovereignty like Judge Holden has behaved toward birds: we have becomecollectors and arrestors of sovereignties. Judge Holden, like many internationalrelations theorists, is ‘‘a figure who is a stranger to every place, but a figure who,just the same, seems relentlessly committed in every word and deed to the ideaof a fixed territoriality of being that he may represent as the deep source of hispowers, the intimately familiar basis for his every sovereign word’’ (Ashley 1996:249). The texts under consideration here recollect this familiar position, notonly in the ways they replicate it, but also in their efforts to interrogate it, callingattention to the restless limits of this posture.

In Globalization and Sovereignty, John Agnew puts to rest a series of misunder-standings about both of the title’s concepts, all based around the old chestnutthat globalization is transforming or weakening sovereignty. Agnew begins byexplaining how both concepts have relied on facile notions of territory as a sub-stitute for understanding sovereign power or global flows (Chapter 1). He thenlays bare the prevailing ‘myths’ about sovereignty—all designed to show howsovereign power has less to do with territory than it has to do with authority(Chapter 2). In chapter 3, we are introduced to a typology of ‘‘sovereigntyregimes,’’ four ideal types of sovereignty with differing relationships betweenauthority and territory. The typology is then put to work to explain sovereigndecisions involving flows of money and people across borders (Chapter 4).A brief conclusion warns against the dangers of oversimplifying our keyconcepts and reminds us that sovereign authority need not be contradicted bythe politics of globalization.

One of the greatest strengths of Agnew’s book is also its most dizzying ele-ment: typologies. Indeed, Agnew shows a remarkable ability to categorize. Inorder to make sense of sovereignty, Agnew fractures it, offering a set of overlap-ping ‘‘sovereignty regimes.’’ The typology that helps us name these regimes isbased upon ‘‘the relative strength of central state authority (state despoticpower) on one axis and its relative consolidation in state territoriality (state infra-structural power) on the other’’ (p. 129). This typology yields four modes of sov-ereignty: the classic (Westphalian state), the integrative (models like theEuropean Union), the imperialist (most akin to the Jacksonian ‘‘quasi-state’’),and the globalist (a hegemonic sort of authority) which would all respond differ-ently to the pressures of globalization. While some greater specificity on the idealtypes would be welcomed—particularly with regard to the contours of the global-ist regime—the basic point about the diffusion of authority into multiple formsis well established.

Because rethinking the relationship between sovereignty and territory is impor-tant for Agnew, it follows that he would also wish to rethink the relationshipbetween territory and identity. So, he uses immigration policy as a way to elabo-rate upon sovereignty regimes, and in doing so, offers another typology. Here,Agnew explains variations in immigration policy through four trichotomous vari-ables: importance of immigration as an issue, mode of immigration faced, mod-els of citizenship, and types of regulation. What emerges is as follows:

[F]our categories of immigration regulation ⁄ citizenship can be identified:

1. Immigrant state: immigration recognized as important to state, a netdestination state, historical emphasis on ex-ante regulation, civic modelof citizenship

2. Reticent immigrant state: immigration relatively less accepted, a netdestination state, historical emphasis on ex-post regulation, ethnicmodel of citizenship

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3. Source state: immigration not important, a net source state, littleexplicit regulation, mixed or unclear model of citizenship

4. Territorial state: immigration usually not important to state (except forco-ethnics), source and destination for immigrants, emphasis on ex-postregulation, an ethnic model of citizenship (Agnew 2009:184)

These four models of immigration regulation are then paired with the regimesof sovereignty they are said to exemplify: immigrant ⁄ globalist (example: USA),reticent ⁄ integrative (example: Italy [EU]), source ⁄ imperialist (example: Mexico),and territorial ⁄ classic (example: South Korea). The doubling is convenient, andthe additional explanation helps make clear the principles at stake.

But these virtues are, at times, also the text’s worse vices insofar as its typolo-gies offer more possible empirical sovereignties than the theorist can keep upwith. A typology based on four trichotomous variables has a property space of 81cells. Unless it is possible that many of these cells were to be compressed for log-ical, empirical, or pragmatic reasons (Elman 2005 esp. p. 305–308), this quicklybecomes far too unwieldy to serve as any sort of explanatory typology. And if thisis simply a descriptive typology, then much like Judge Holden, we have a gooddeal in front of us which must be arrested and ordered before we can be confi-dent in our knowledge of the world.

Where Agnew’s book strikes me as the most useful is in his attempts to clearup the conceptual underbrush regarding the relationship between sovereigntyand globalization, particularly in his lucid explanation of the ‘myths’ surround-ing sovereignty. What is offered, overall, is a series of frames that are useful asheuristic devices to train students on the range of complexity that attends to anysovereign claim. The prose is clear enough, and the examples are sufficientlyengaging that the book could be adopted for undergraduate coursework. At thesame time, the specification of Agnew’s typologies is probing enough that theycould conceivably help more advanced readers generate and frame hypotheseson state behavior.

For many critical international relations scholars, the problem of sovereigntyin the age of globalization was understood to take on a desperately importantregister following the events of 9 ⁄ 11. The prospect of a war against a ‘‘network’’rather than a ‘‘territory’’ suggested that our preexisting concepts might not beup to the task, and that terrorism—even more than globalization itself—mightprovide new challenges to the idea of sovereign power. The argument, asWilliam Connolly once put it, is, ‘‘The production of ‘terrorism’ protects theidentity of particular states and the state system as a whole more than it reflectsan ethical imperative to apply general principles to distinctive instances ofviolence’’ (2002:207). In a phrase, Connolly suggests that terrorism attracts theattention of states precisely because such threats call attention the fragility ofterritorial order, and thereby offer states an opportunity to reaffirm that order.

In Terror and Territory, Stuart Elden expands Connolly’s observation into a full-scale inquiry on the territorial aspects of the war on terror. The focus, for Elden,is more on territory than terror; terror is simply an instantiation of a broaderprinciple in which political violence has become unmoored from geographic ter-ritory. Designed to examine the territorial aspects of the war on terror, Elden’sbook locates sovereignty as the most crucial concept which frames the logic ofthis global war. Although inspired by the war on terror, the book’s focus straysfrom the details of terrorism and counter-terrorism to a broader meditation onthe role of geography in the contemporary security environment. The usualstory—one of states trying to reassert a necessary connection between legitimateviolence and sovereign territorial control against the threat of informal violencenetworks—is replaced with a more nuanced take. For Elden, the goal is to showhow ‘‘territorial integrity was never really accepted by the dominant powers,’’

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and that, in the current age, ‘‘the difference now is that they are being explicitabout the challenge to internal competence or territorial sovereignty while simul-taneously stressing the importance of territorial inviolability’’ (Elden 2009:176).Elden’s text crystallizes a series of arguments that have too often been gesturedtoward without being made explicit.

One of the book’s great strengths is offering a fine-grained reading of the mal-leable relationship between sovereignty and territory—one in which the UnitedStates can be said, on the one hand, to have insisted upon the principle of sover-eign territoriality as a justification for its incursions into Afghanistan, while, onthe other hand, dismissing claims for the primacy of territorial integrity as it pre-pared for deployment in Iraq. Unlike Agnew, Elden offers few typologies or sche-mas for understanding sovereignty in the aftermath of 9 ⁄ 11. Rather, we are leftwith the notion that ‘‘the state of territory in the ‘war on terror’ cannot beunderstood straightforwardly’’ (174), and no easy answers are forthcoming aboutthe relationship between territory and authority in the current age. Some mightbristle at the lack of a more definitive conclusion about the relationship betweensovereignty and territory; nevertheless, it is Elden’s serious commitment to theproblem that requires him to leave the reader in such ambiguous circumstances.Could it be that Elden, then, has found an altogether different way of speakingabout sovereignty?

If he has, then his contributions would likely be welcomed by Scott Nelson.Whereas the first two books considered are concerned with relating sovereigntyto territory, Nelson takes on a different task. Rather than pinpointing the space ⁄place ⁄ time of sovereignty today, Nelson wishes to explore the roots of our desireto pin down sovereign authority, to consider the sovereign subject in all its histo-ricity, and to ask about the ways in which our political concepts constrainthought and practice when it comes to understanding authority in global politi-cal life. This is a different task than Agnew’s or Elden’s. And as a consequence,although this book speaks to that literature, it needs to be compared to slightlydifferent literatures. Nelson’s work has more in common with those who haveworked to trace the development of sovereignty as a political concept, like JensBartelson’s A Genealogy of Sovereignty. Whereas Bartelson’s purpose is to show how‘‘sovereignty and knowledge implicate each other logically and produce eachother historically’’ (1995:5), Nelson traces the ways in which the legacy of liberaland Enlightenment thought has created and constrained a subject whose ways ofknowing sovereignty are limited by his very subjectivity.

The argument defies schematization. At its crux, Nelson wishes to show howthere are ‘‘metaphysical imperatives lodged at the heart of Western politicaltheory,’’ legacies of liberal and Enlightenment thought, which ‘‘produce sover-eignty as a rarefied idea bearing upon what can be made to be regarded asthe proper locus and function of legitimate political authority’’ (Nelson2010:7). The purpose is not only to show how the legacy of liberal and Enlight-enment thought produces political subjects that desire sovereign power (anddesire to understand sovereign power) but also to show how one effect of thisknowledgeable production is to efface the social production of both sovereignpower and sovereign subject so that both can seem inevitable, natural, and nec-essary.

Nelson accomplishes this through a patient reading of the literature in bothinternational relations and political theory. After setting his agenda, and framingthe metaphysics of sovereignty (Chapter 2) in contemporary international rela-tions discourse, Nelson begins his archaeology of sovereignty. This takes placefirst through a patient reading of political liberalism, in which Hobbes assumesa privileged voice (Chapter 3). Then, Nelson turns to the Enlightenment to showhow Hobbesian doubt about making sovereignty stick can be endlessly deferredthrough a belief in progress (Chapter 4). In Chapter 5, Nelson traces liberal

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political ideas into the development of 18th and 19th century economic ideals asa way of showing how presumptions of sovereignty become depoliticized. At thispoint, a double reading of international relations theory is now possible, expos-ing the desire at the source of any would-be empirical claim about sovereignty(Chapter 6). In the conclusion, Nelson begins to speculate about what otherforms of politics would be possible if we were to relax our grip on our common-place hidden presumptions about sovereignty, borne of our own anxiety, andpolitical subjectivity.

For all its strengths, Nelson’s book is not for the generalist. To keep up withhis ambitious task of showing how our conceptions of sovereign power areencumbered by our liberal Enlightenment subjectivity, Nelson must delve deeplyinto political theory while surveying a wide swath of international relations the-ory. Readers should already have a firm grasp on the writings of Hobbes, Machia-velli, Kant and Foucault, and a background understanding the literature onsovereignty and international political economy. Moreover, given that much ofthe book pursues the argument that sovereignty is an effect of a desire in theface of a lack—’’desire that a sovereign center of pure Being and power beeffected through human artifice’’ (p. 49), readers will do well to have alreadyspent time with Derrida and Lacan. In short, a good deal of background knowl-edge required for the reader to profit fully from the arguments made.

Moreover, the prose is equally demanding and requires a patient reader. Nel-son chooses his words carefully, yet the complexity of the prose reflects the com-plexity of the argument. Here, we should be reminded that clarity does notalways equal simplicity—particularly not when tracing the political conception ofthe liberal Enlightenment subject. To his credit, Nelson is aware of the difficultyof the argument and regularly reminds the reader of his argument’s key moves,its justifications, and its stakes.

The reader who is undaunted by these demands will be greatly rewarded byher willingness to stick with the text. One key contribution is Nelson’s patientdemonstration of how to locate and analyze a constitutive lack. This book isclearest and most persuasive when it exposes the claim that ‘‘[r]egardless of theparticular form of the order, that there be an order and an orderer already in the mak-ing seems to be the necessary, qualifying, engendering source of all modernistethics and politics. That this imperative, that this necessity be lodge deep withinthe moral fabric, the subterranean levels of the late modern political imagina-tion’’ (p. 69). Granted, several poststructuralist interventions in internationalrelations theory have asserted the would-be theorist’s ‘‘disposition to territorial-ize… making a disciplined territory function as power’s necessary source andconstituting a sovereign voice of rule whose word alone can represent this terri-tory’’ (Ashley 1996:252). Rather than simply locate this desire in the contempo-rary age, Nelson plots how we moderns have come to exhibit and efface thisdesire whenever we write about sovereignty by carefully tracing the metaphysicalpresumptions behind liberal and Enlightenment arguments. Ernst Kantorowicz’stracing of the sovereign legitimacy of divine right rule in Mediaeval political the-ology from the corporeal body of the king to the immortal body politic of thekingdom is a good analogue for what Nelson accomplishes here. Kantorowiczshows how the immortality of sovereignty can be reconciled with the death ofthe sovereign and how the problem of the divine sovereign’s mortality recedesinto the background as questionable legal arguments become presumptions ofpolitical fact (Kantorowicz 1957:314–450). Here, though, Nelson traces the con-cept of political sovereignty from an anxiety to an unquestioned inevitability ofthe modern age.

Overall, Nelson’s intervention also recalls the aforementioned passage fromBlood Meridian, although his authorial position resembles the Judge’s inquisitor.Yet, whereas Holden’s critic did not know what catching birds had to do with sov-

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ereign power, Nelson seems to know very well the purpose—and the futility—ofattempts to collect and arrest sovereignties. And while the Judge remains set inhis ways, Nelson opens to the question: what other politics might be possible? Thequestion goes unanswered in this text, with only gestures toward plausible futures,and it would be worthwhile to see the author continue this line of inquiry infuture work.

All three of these books are motivated by the desire to know sovereignty, to getat the sources of sovereign power. All are critical in their approach to sovereignty.The Agnew and Elden volumes contribute to the literature in critical geographywhich seeks to decouple sovereignty from territory. Nelson’s book differs in itsambitions, but it is likewise informed by a critical, post-structural ethos. Takentogether, these texts offer both critical appraisals of sovereignty, as well as an invi-tation to reassess our own participation in the production of sovereignty, callinginto question our presumptive privilege in naming, placing, and knowing sover-eign authority. These texts can help us explain what all these digressions intoglobalization, territory, and liberal Enlightenment thought have to do with sover-eignty. And, taken together, they can help us to understand our own place inunderstanding (and misunderstanding) sovereignty—to answer, in short, for theIR theorist the question that was asked and left unanswered of Judge Holden:

The kid looked at Tobin. What’s he a judge of, he said.

What’s he a judge of?

What’s he a judge of.(McCarthy 1985:135)

References

Ashley, Richard. (1996) The Achievements of Poststructuralism. In International Theory: Positivismand Beyond, edited by S. Smith, K. Book, and M. Zalewski. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Bodin, Jean. (1992) On Sovereignty, edited by Julian Franklin. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Connolly, William. (2002) Identity ⁄ Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. Minneapolis,MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Elman, Colin. (2005) Explanatory Typologies in Qualitative Studies of International Politics.International Organization, 59 (2): 293–326.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Kantorowicz, Ernst. (1957) The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press.Krasner, Stephen. (1999) Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.McCarthy, Cormac. (1985) Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West. New York, NY: Random

House, Inc.

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