Global Sovereignty
I’ve been reading a large collection of John Locke’s political writings recently and somehow they make me keep thinking of the invasion of Iraq. There’s this odd concept of sovereignty floating around in Locke’s writing, a spirit he tries hard to banish, at least in his later works. From our modern perspective, especially in America, we don’t think about sovereignty as a single entity, invested in a single person, but rather we envision a set of checks and balances- sovereignty is diffuse but all pervasive among the American people. This perspective, at least in large part, comes from Locke. The older ghost he was fighting against was the sense of sovereignty as an absolute, an absolute power invested in an absolute monarch. Locke’s viewpoint is, of course, immeasurably more tolerant of peaceful dissent than the old ghost, for dissent is to Locke but one mechanism by which the system of sovereignty operates.
And as I read, I began to realize that human history has seen a number of battles over the nature of sovereignty, with each battle occurring at a larger spatial scale. As modern nation-states were formed, there were undoubtedly those who argue that absolute sovereignty rested in one’s tribe or clans, and that all politics above that level are essentially anarchic. Then, there were those who agued that absolute sovereignty must at least rest in a single person, for the only other alternative is anarchy. And now we live in an age where it is commonplace to think of sovereignty spread diffusely among the citizens of nations, but many conservatives argue strongly that the relationships between states are essentially anarchic. We progressives have said, and must continue to say, no to this limitation.
This brings me back to the Iraq invasion. The millions who marched in the streets to try to stop the invasion have become demoralized by their defeat. The only consolation, perhaps, was the New York Times proclamation that the protestors were the “world’s other superpower.” We should take some comfort in the phrase, as recognition of our strength, but we should acknowledge the metaphor is wrong. We do not want to be a superpower, in an anarchic battle with other superpowers. Rather, we want to be a powerful check in a global system of checks-and-balances, in a global system of sovereignty.
To put it another way: the anti-war contingent lost not because the United States is too strong but because the global system of checks and balances is too weak. But to whom can we look to strengthen the global system of sovereignty? The United Nations is unlikely to save much of a barrier, as its structure forces all real power to the Security Council, where the United States has dominance. Global civil society, as we saw in February 2002, can exert pressure but is relatively powerless if its protests are mostly linguistic. What are some other possible ways to make the check against United States aggression stronger? Perhaps international unions, like the dockworkers in major ports, could agree to a week-long boycott of transporting United States products. Perhaps the EU countries and Japan could agree to a temporary moratorium on buying United States Treasury bonds. A whole series of little steps like this must be developed, at an international level, to exert our global collective sovereignty over the nation-states of the world, to finally exorcise the ghost.
