Myth of Sovereignty

rc-am rcollins at netlink.com.au
Sun May 2 21:03:19 PDT 1999


© Fernand Braudel Center 1998.

Comment No. 14, April 15, 1999 http://fbc.binghamton.edu/14-!en.html

"Wars, wars, wars"

On May 18, 1999, we shall be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Hague Peace Congress. This Congress led to the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, predecessor of the International Court of Justice. Currently, nonetheless, there are wars all over the place - in Yugoslavia to be sure, but also (depending on how much violence you require to define a situation as a war) in Iraq and in various parts of Africa (Congo, Angola, Ethiopia/Eritrea, Sierra Leone). If you add in situations where there has been considerable violence recently and may well be some soon again (such as Afghanistan, East Timor, and Colombia), we could easily add another 30 to 40 countries to the list. So what is it that we shall be celebrating?

War has of course been endemic to human society for as far back as we know. But war in the modern world has been of a different order, both in terms of technology and destruction and in terms of its defining characteristics. What we call war today is a function of the concept of sovereignty, a modern concept that began to be utilized only in the sixteenth century. Sovereignty is the assertion that each state has clear boundaries which it claims and which are recognized by other states within the interstate system, and that within these boundaries the government of the state has the monopoly of the legitimate use of force. War is then defined as a military battle between two sovereign states. And such wars are generally thought to be of two varieties - world wars (in which all major states are involved) and smaller wars, usually between two states only (smaller in geographic scope but of course often extremely destructive of the two states involved). If one state starts a war with another state, we call the first state an aggressor. Responding to an aggressor is legitimate; it is called self-defense. Virtually no state has ever proclaimed itself an aggressor. Instead, it usually seeks to insist that the other state either has been the aggressor or has committed some heinous crime that merits punishment via war. In this sense, the concept of sovereignty has legitimated war between states.

If however violence occurs within the borders of a sovereign state, it is not defined as a war. Hence, such conflict immediately becomes illegitimate. If some group within a state rebels, whether as agent for an oppressed class or for an oppressed nation/ethnic group, the government of the state normally asserts that such a group constitutes a band of terrorists (that hence has no legitimate right to wage war). The rebellious group normally argues that the government of the state is itself illegitimate because it oppresses the group and hence has lost the right to maintain itself in office. The rebellious group normally wishes either to take over the government of the state or to carve out a new state within the old state's boundaries. If such a conflict goes on for a long time, AND IF outside nations line up on each side, the conflict is accorded the more noble name of civil war. This is thought to make it more legitimate somehow, which is why the government of the state in question resists such terminology. We talk, retrospectively, of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) or the American Civil War (1861-1865), but we haven't usually been calling the various recent violences in Central America civil wars or those in northern Ireland or Cambodia, and certainly not those in the Basque country or Turkey or Algeria.

The language we use is clear, if deceptive. The aggressor is always the other state. The defender of humanitarian concerns is always us. The terrorists are always the groups not in power. The defender of law and order is always the government in power. But of course these naming games are games, not plausible forms of analysis. The line between interstate wars and civil wars

is seldom clearcut, since outside powers tend to interfere in civil wars. Sometimes the interference is overt (sending in troops, or at least munitions). Sometimes the interference is more covert providing money to one side or at least diplomatic support). But there is rarely an internal/civil war in which the rest of the world is truly neutral. And it is rarer still that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) can do anything about such absence of neutrality. The last time the ICJ judged illegitimate U.S. intervention in a civil war (that in Nicaragua), the United States government simply ignored it.

The history of the modern world-system has been one long attempt to delegitimate internal wars. That is what sovereignty means. But sovereignty is not something a state can unilaterally proclaim. It must receive the recognition of (most) other states for its proclamation. Nor is sovereignty something which other states always respect, even if they formally recognize it (thereby promising to respect it). Sovereignty is violated constantly, most frequently by stronger states relating to weaker states. There is a generally accepted level of hypocrisy about sovereignty in which everyone participates, usually with the exception of the one whose sovereignty is being abused.

Still, the attempt to delegitimate internal violence has been partially successful, in that it occurred constantly and everywhere 500 years ago, and over the centuries it has become less frequent. States have become internally stronger (militarily and in terms of legitimacy) and therefore more able to contain or repress rebellion. The Hague Convention was not concerned with such internal wars. It sought merely to constrain interstate wars. Of course, the most destructive world war in the history of the modern world - the German-American world war that went on in reality from 1914 to 1945 - occurred in splendid disregard of the Hague Convention.

What is the situation today? We are unlikely to have another world war in the next 50 years or so. World wars are infrequent and the three that we have had - the Thirty Years' War (1614-1648), the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1792-1815), and the German-American wars - have come at long intervals, each crowning a long contest for hegemony in the world-system. So-called smaller interstate wars are probably occurring at about the same pace today as they have been for a long time. The big change in the situation is the sharp rise in internal/civil wars that started about 25 years ago and promises to explode over the next 50 years. The cause is quite obvious. The increasing authority of the individual states over their internal zones has, for the first time in 500 years, begun to decline seriously. This decline is the result of the delegitimation of the state structures by their populations, itself the result of their disillusionment with the ability of the sovereign states to fulfill the liberal dream of gradual improvement in their real economic and social situation through gradual reformism. The consequence has been growing withdrawal of acceptance of state authority by the populations of the states. But this leads to disorder, and people react to disorder fearfully and by organizing self-defense groups of all sorts. And it is such groups that have been fueling the civil wars. We shall never begin to understand what is going on and what we ought to do about it if we do not cut through the hypocritical languages we have developed and continue to use. Terms like sovereignty and terrorism, and even genocide, simply blind us, or are used to blind us. Internal/civil wars are the result of some kind of injustice and/or inequality. The solution is more justice and equality. Outside powers intervene for all kinds of reasons, most of them seldom good ones. We should be suspicious of their motives, and keep our eye on the ball of increasing justice and equality.

Immanuel Wallerstein



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