Sovereignty and the Third World

The ideas of the French bourgeois-democratic revolution recreated the political and ideological map of Europe.  Everywhere in Europe feudalism was smashed and a new era of political liberty began.  In one way or another, old degenerating social relations and resulting ineffective institutions, crumbling structures and tottering constitutions were swept away by new revolutionary ideas.  Ideas of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

In this paper I will try to show that the contradiction between the “economic” and the “political” in bourgeois ideology is extended into the international realm as a contradiction between sovereignty and imperialism.  This approach helps us understand that relations in the international arena are intricately linked to domestic social relations.  Furthermore, this approach helps to explain the current debate over the definition of sovereignty in academic circles as an attempt to reconcile this contradiction to the contingencies of global capitalism.

The ideas of the French Revolution brought forward a new notion of equality on which the modern world is based.  During feudalism, the political status of an individual was tied to his or her birth and family background.  The nobility maintained its monopoly of power by an ideology of political inequality based on birthright.  In the new society, the concept that “all men are created equal” was a “self-evident truth”.  In a word, the modern world destroyed the political power of the nobility and monarchy. 

However, revolutionary as these ideas were, especially in the context of 18^th century Europe, they were stamped with the birthmarks of their own historical conditions.  We can better understand and appreciate the impact of this change on the modern world if we unpack the constitutive elements of this transformation.  The objectives of the revolution could not help but be conditioned by the nature and interests of the classes that participated in the transformation.  The class leading the revolutionary forces was the bourgeoisie that had arisen from the merchant class.  Allied to this class were the small producers, peasants, and proletariats.  Opposed to this transformation were the feudal lords and the nobility (Hobsbawm, ch.4).  This class breakup is obviously a generalization and simplification but it helps us to better understand the essential ingredients of the revolution. 

From the objective position of the classes contending for power sprang their interests that created their revolutionary demands.  First and foremost, the revolution had to take power.  For this the “people” and “nation” had to be mobilized against the nobility.  The very real need for mass mobilization created the powerful demand for political equality understood as republican democracy.  Second but no less important, the revolution transformed property relations by destroying feudal property and consolidating the dominance of private property.  But private property presupposes a certain degree of economic inequality. By the term equality in the economic realm I do not mean equality in the sense of equal income for everyone regardless of the amount of work performed.  Economic equality means an equal opportunity to access the means of production and self-development.  In conclusion, the revolution stood for political equality—understood as republican democracy—and economic inequality—understood as the existence of private property.  These were the objective demands of the leading classes of the revolution.  Furthermore, the objective interests of the leading revolutionary classes and the resulting demands for transformation created, and indeed were bound to create, a divorce in the realm of ideology between the “economic” and the “political”.  In a word, equality in the realm of the “political” and inequality in the realm of the “economic” created a “rigid partitioning of spheres” between the two in realm of ideology (Wood, 1995, Ch. 1).

Private property has its own inexorable laws of development.  Naturally, when we use the term “laws” in social science we only mean tendencies that become apparent over time.  This understanding presupposes that these tendencies may be prone to fluctuations and inconsistencies in the short-run.  It is not far-fetched to assert that the market mechanism contains certain demonstrable and empirically verifiable tendencies.  In particular, private property obeys the law of concentration of capital as defined by Marxian economics, or what is called the law of increasing returns to scale as defined by Marshallian economics.  This law implies that big capital (which is more efficient) will swallow small capital (which is less efficient).  It is also self-evident that, amongst other factors, power is intricately tied to access to economic resources.  The conclusion is that the market mechanism conditions (but does not wholly determine) the development of political power.  In conclusion, the imbalance of economic power, conditioned by the inexorable laws of economic development, necessarily creates an imbalance of political power.  Claims of political equality between individuals, therefore, become utopias in the context of economic inequality.

It is not enough to say that the system is self-contradictory, that much is perhaps obvious.  It is more important to understand that the objective class interests behind the modern world and its ideology result in the inevitability of this self-contradiction in bourgeois society.

How does the above approach help explain international relations and the concept of state sovereignty with respect to the third world?

Let us assume that social relations, which inevitably give rise to certain dominant ideas and an ideology, condition and determine the relations of the society in question to other societies.  In simple words, let us assume that foreign policy is the extension of domestic policy in the international arena.  For the above assumption to be true, a parallel contradiction between the “economic” and “political” must exist in the theory and practice of international relations.  And indeed there is a parallel contradiction that arises as a necessary outgrowth of the first contradiction. 

In the “political” realm, the theory of international relations revolves around the concept of state sovereignty.  The ideals of the international system, for example the very reason for existence of the United Nations, are constructed on the notion of sovereignty of states.  Therefore, in the “political” realm there is equality of states captured by the concept of sovereignty.  However, different authors have different definitions about what sovereignty exactly means.

For example, E. H. Carr talks about sovereignty as an ideological prism that states picked up after the collapse of the medieval system.  Hans Morgenthau talks of “the appearance of a centralized power that exercised its lawmaking and law-enforcing authority within a certain territory” (Morgenthau, 1967, pg. 299).  Kenneth Waltz argues that “to say that a state is sovereign means that it decides for itself how it will cope with its internal and external problems” (Waltz, 1979, pg. 96).  Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber argue that the definition of sovereignty includes territory, population, authority, and most importantly recognition by other states (Weber, 1996, pg. 3).  Alan James defines sovereignty as an authority derived from the state’s constitution (James, pg. 40).  Robert Jackson describes third world countries as quasi-states because their ability to exercise sovereignty exists only on in the juridical realm but not in reality (Jackson, pg. 1).  We will see that the apparent inability of theorists in international relations to agree upon a final definition of sovereignty has its roots in the contradiction between the “economic” and the “political”.

In the “economic” realm the international system is constructed on the basis of private property and a market system.  The market system, especially in its current phase of development, is inexorably moving towards monopoly formation.  The concentration of industry and banking, the super-abundance of capital in the advanced countries, the export of capital into the third world for a higher rate of profit (Lenin, 1916), the creation of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, combined with military alliances for the protection of this capital such as NATO, are all facts of the twentieth and twenty first century that owe their existence to the development of the world economy. 

The question “can third world states exercise sovereignty, in the full sense of the term, given the fact that they are dependent in the economic realm?”  Is just like asking, “can a worker exercise political equality, in the full sense of the term, given the fact that he/she is dependent in the economic realm?  It is empirically demonstrable that the third world is not even being able to close the relative income gap let along the absolute income gap between itself and the OECD countries.  Under conditions of widening economic disparity it is inevitable that the ideals of political equality, that is, sovereignty, are compromised.  In other words, there is a contradiction between the “political” ideals of sovereignty and the “economic” inequality between states in the realm of international relations. 

Once again, the existence of the contradiction is, perhaps, obvious.  What is perhaps less obvious is the inevitability of the contradiction within the framework of the modern world as created by the bourgeois democratic ideals given the separation between the “political” and the “economic”.  The fact that the sovereignty of third world states exists merely as an ideal is no coincidence.  It is the very essence and reflection of the contradiction between the “economic” and the “political” in bourgeois ideology.

The attempt to resolve this contradiction has given rise to endless debate between academics about the exact meaning and definition of sovereignty.  The apparent “fierce” debate in the international relations field, the countless references to the treaty of Westphalia 1648, and so on, are centered around the concern to bring the concept of sovereignty in line with the practice of international relations in a world marked by a high degree of economic inequality.  In other words, the debate about sovereignty is an attempt to define and redefine the concept of sovereignty in order to resolve the contradiction created by the divorce between the “economic” and “political” on the one hand.  And to resolve the contradiction between the ideals of sovereignty and the reality of twenty first century global capitalist imperialism by a redefinition of concepts.  The notion that these contradictions can be resolved by reference to history or changing the meaning of words, that is by an ideological reconstruction and not by political practice, is the fetishism of the intellectual or his or her false consciousness.  The contradictions have arisen from the very nature of the system and can therefore only be resolved by a fundamental change in the structure of society.  A fundamental change that has become a material demand owing to the fact that, on the one hand, bourgeois society has mobilized and awoken the “peoples” of the world to the new concept of equality.  And on the other hand, the bourgeoisie is attempting to quell this new idea and consciousness in order to maintain the rule of private property.

In conclusion, the rule of private property, which I have been referring to as economic inequality, undermines the ability of the system to deliver the goods of political equality between classes and full sovereignty between states.  Only with the full realization of equality, including economic equality for the individual and for all nations and states of the world can there be full political equality.  The bourgeoisie democratic revolutions have awoken the sleeping giant of equality.  Having awoken it, they can not now make it go back to sleep.

Bibliography

Jackson, Robert H., 1990, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World, Cambridge University Press.

James, Alan, Sovereign Statehood

Lenin, V. I., 1965, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Peoples Publishing House Peking.

Morganthau, Hans J. 1967. Politics Among Nations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Waltz, Kenneth, 1979, Theory of International Politics, Oxford University Press.

Weber, Cynthia and Biersteker, Thomas J., 1996, State Sovereignty as Social Constructs, Cambridge University Press.