Sovereignty, Interrupted: Rule in an Entangled World

Sovereignty was once imagined as a neat and rather satisfying proposition: within a territory, one authority commands, and beyond it, others abstain. The doctrine had the elegance of a well-drawn map, with lines thick enough to reassure the eye. Yet political life, being more mischievous than cartography, has never honoured such neatness for long. Trade crosses frontiers, information slips through walls, capital grows aquatic and hard to pin down, and obligations formed in one capital acquire consequences in another. In such a world, sovereignty does not disappear so much as become argumentative. It remains the organising fiction of political order, but one increasingly obliged to explain itself in the company of rivals, partners, and inconvenient facts.

The first temptation is nostalgia: to suppose that entanglement is merely a disease of modernity, and that the cure lies in recovering a lost age of full command. This is intellectually tidy and politically dangerous. No state, however vaunted, ever possessed absolute mastery over its fate; the older world was merely one in which interdependence moved more slowly and was therefore easier to ignore. Empires, dynastic bargains, religious solidarities, and merchant networks all testified that political communities have long lived in webs of dependence. What has changed is not the existence of entanglement but its density, speed, and visibility. The sovereign state still governs, taxes, coerces, and represents; it simply does so amid pressures that do not respect the old habit of imagining the border as a kind of moral wall.

Yet it would be a mistake to conclude, with equal haste, that sovereignty has become a theatrical relic, ceremonially invoked and practically hollow. States remain the principal institutions through which collective choices are made, enforced, and defended. They are the arenas in which law acquires teeth, where public goods are financed, and where citizens can still, at least in principle, hold rulers to account. Even in a heavily interconnected order, authority needs a location, and legitimacy needs an address. One may dislike this fact, as some evidently do, but a politics without final responsibility is not enlightened cosmopolitanism; it is merely a diffusion of blame. The more many hands share in shaping outcomes, the greater the danger that no hand can be made to answer for them. Bureaucracy, that great modern art, thrives on such ambiguity.

The deeper difficulty lies not in whether sovereignty survives, but in what kind of sovereignty is possible. The old model assumed that independence consisted in insulation: the power to decide without external interference. But absolute insulation is now both unreal and undesirable. No state can seal itself from climate effects, pandemics, financial shocks, cyber intrusions, or the consequences of distant wars and markets. Moreover, many of the most serious threats are themselves transnational by nature; they can be addressed only through cooperation, treaty, and restraint. Hence sovereignty today is less a fortress than a set of negotiated capacities. It is the ability to choose within constraints, to bind oneself in order to act effectively, and to accept that some freedoms are purchased only by sharing them. This is a less heroic doctrine than the older one, but perhaps more honest. Political adulthood, like the domestic variety, usually begins when one discovers that every house has neighbours.

Still, entanglement creates a moral and constitutional puzzle. If authority is dispersed across levels—local, national, regional, global—how are the citizen’s rights to be secured and the ruler’s responsibilities to be traced? There is no wholly satisfying answer, only a series of partial settlements. Strong states may need to cooperate extensively, but they must also preserve the capacity to deliberate publicly, to deliberate credibly, and to refuse what they cannot justify. International arrangements can extend the reach of law, but they can also obscure who decided what, and on what warrant. Sovereignty, then, should not be worshipped as an idol of pure autonomy, but neither should it be casually dissolved into administration by committee. Where no one is sovereign enough to protect the common good, power migrates to the least visible actors, who are rarely the most accountable. The result is not a post-sovereign harmony, but a polite disorder.

The wise course is therefore to reinterpret sovereignty as responsibility under conditions of dependence. A sovereign state need not pretend to be self-sufficient; it must be capable of making binding judgments on behalf of a political community while recognising the limits of unilateral action. It should enter entanglement knowingly, not as a victim of history but as a participant in it. That requires institutions sturdy enough to manage external obligations without surrendering democratic authority, and citizens sober enough to understand that freedom in an interdependent world is never the same thing as isolation. In the end, sovereignty is not the right to stand apart from the world, but the discipline of standing in it without becoming merely one object among others. That, if one can manage it, is still a formidable achievement. The border has become porously intelligent; fortunately, so must the state.