Sovereignty and Power of International Politic - Essay Example

? Analysis of international politics: sovereignty or power Introduction International politics touches on bothsovereignty as well as power in a typical country. The major influence of international politics is sovereignty of states as compared to the power. Sovereign equality is one of the major pillars of state sovereignty. The principle of territorial sovereignty stipulates that no external power exceeds the sovereign power. This forms the basis for the relationships among different states. In the modern sense, there is no international law hence the main powers limited the sovereign rights, and there was no proper framework of an international community that could officially limit their exercise. Sovereignty forms a strong foundation of both international relations and international politics (Shilliam 2009, p.665). Analysis of the international politics Power of states in international politics was a major factor in the analysis of the international politics before the world war. In the states that could not defend their territories from the claims of other states, sovereignty could not apply to them. The cases were different from those states with sufficient military force to defend themselves. This enabled these super powers to regulate their territorial acquisition directly. This enabled these states to exert their actions to several other states due to the belief that their actions could not be questioned by the local domestic legislation. This led to the Westphalian system. In the Westphalian system, the common feature was the capacity of the most powerful states to use force against the less powerful states. This made power a very important factor in the analysis of international politics then (Chandler 2000, p.56). This approach limited the application of the international law to a great extent during this regime. After the Second World War, things changed tremendously. It is after this war that sovereignty became important in the analysis of international politics as compared to the power. According to the earlier Westphalian model, the superior force assisted in enforcing effective superiority. The Hague conference of 1905 was a major challenge to the Westphalian model because it shifted the policy makers away from the strong Westphalian model to a judicial concept of sovereignty. This created a framework for the application of the international law. The Paris Peace Conference proclaimed by Woodrow Wilson in 1919 was important in exercising the principle of national self-determination for the newly created states of the Central Europe (Krasner 1999, p.215). The extension of such rights to the rest of the world was important in the international politics environment. The principle of sovereignty led to the creation of sovereign equality. This is critical in establishing an international community that recognizes all the members as equal. This forms the basis for the international political environment. In this scenario, all the members are as equal as stressed by the article 2(1) of the UN charter. This emphasized the principles of equal rights and self-determination of people. The UN system did not realize full sovereign equality, but the Security Council dominated most of the activities approved (Saco 1997, p.308). In the analysis of the international politics, sovereign equality is very vital. This is because it establishes a new conception of states whose legal authority does not depend on the volume of wealth or power but nationhood. The principle of sovereignty is, therefore, useful as it makes the non western and western states have the same standing within the international order. This has helped in the creation of a framework of international law that has limited the spread of the exercise of the state sovereignty including the rights to wage war against other states. The administration of the global justice has led to the emergence of a new ‘human rights’ based order of the international relations leading to dynamics in the international political scene (Weiss 1992, p.15). The order and stability are key issues regarding the international relations among different countries. The relevant powers applied sovereignty regimes to the European affairs that differed significantly from those applicable in Africa and other regions. In order to tolerate their designs, modern powers become a necessity to control the knowledge and circulation of means of war and violence to their advantage. These disparities contribute to unique forms of sovereignty and functioning of states in each region. The different regimes of sovereignty show historical dynamics of conflict and negotiation among the dissimilar agents across geographic regions. In the international politics, sovereignty reflects the changing aspects of conflicts and negotiations among unequal agents across time and space (Shilliam 2006, p.380). Sovereignty is very crucial in the contemporary world politics. It plays a substantive role in the international politics. The world politics in this modern regime focused on a complicated system of hierarchy that has been slowly differentiated with time and place. After the end of the Second World War, the British empires became widely delegitimized in a political authority and imagination. During the period, the post colonial breaking of European empires needed sponsorship by a superpower. In the modern regime, there has been the development of the multistate system that avoids the presence of the imperial guarantors. The international relations can better be characterized in terms of imperial hierarchy rather than sovereign equality (Blaney 1995, p.58). In the international politics, sovereignty is important. The uniqueness of sovereignty as a form of political rule is because the traditional society’s official political power, was neither institutionally concentrated nor widely implicated in the ordering of social processes outside its own apparatus. This shift is accomplished in expansion of control requiring the state power to be reproduced as a social relation (Rosenberg 1990, p.252). The cases of international surveillance like diplomacy are conditions of domestic sovereignty in the state organization. This political structure of the nation states is the route for the forecast of political and economic powers across the borders. The international political integration has raised the effective coercive power of the state. The rise of the military power as a frequent available sanction in the management of an international diplomatic system involves the accumulation of eternally mobilized military powers in the borders of the country. The international political environment involves interlink of the logic of sovereignty and capitalism. Sovereignty is a social practice in the world political economy and a critical aspect of the international economy. The different types of sovereignty that exist in the international political scene are internal and external sovereignty. The internal sovereignty proposes that the final authority lies within the community. The external sovereignty suggests that no state has a final authority because each state is independent of the other. The absence of a supreme political authority in the world has led to classification of the international society as anarchical. The logic of sovereignty in the international politics requires that all people develop a sense of nationhood and be allowed both the rights and responsibilities of formally equal states (Gowan 2003, p.20). The international principles depend on the experience. After the Second World War, there were so many changes in the international politics. The human rights movements rose to due to the needs to do humanitarian interventions. Sovereignty is crucial in the determination of whether to intervene or not under humanitarian grounds. Intervention implies violation or interference upon authority which also includes the territorial boundaries (Shilliam 2009, p.662). The conflict created as a result of crossing of borders occurs not only due to the extent of local political control, but because the right to this control is a sacred support of the international order. Sovereignty is a legal fiction that evolves continuously; perceiving it as immutable and beyond question needs a selective memory. The direct application of the international law to different individuals has evolved over time and circumvented the once resistant membrane of sovereignty. This is the major consequence of attributing rights and duties to human beings. There is also direct participation of individuals in the international systems like International Court of Justice. These institutions constitute of specialists appointed by the government as well as serving in their individual capacity as experts. The different revolutions in technology and information including the appearance of important actors without elements of sovereignty have diminished to the importance of sovereignty in states. Because of this, the criteria for statehood have shifted to include more complex subjective standards and not only the characteristics of people, government, territory and sovereignty (Grovogui 2002, p.327). The supremacy of sovereignty over the set laws is untenable. Sovereignty as a supreme source of law should operate hierarchically between the ruler and ruled. The unanimous voting in the League of Nations became decision making by the majority in the United Nations. This meant that all the sovereign states can be bound against their will by the votes of other states. The veto power bestowed upon the permanent members of the Security Council spoils the sovereignty of all the other members. This is because from the original definition, one cannot be more sovereign than the other (Chandler 2000, p.56). Conclusion Sovereignty is a very crucial aspect as compared to power in the international political environment. Eliminating sovereignty from international relations in the near future is unlikely. However, for the state centered power structures, they will not easily form the basis for their status quo. The redefinitions that include humanitarian intervention would initiate the fiction of sovereignty, and continue to slow the perception of such quickly developing principles like cross boundary environmental protection. The Westphalian model came under criticism with the modernization and the growing world importance of the non European states. There is a clearly marked difference between the Westphalian model and sovereignty of nations in the international relations. The Westphalian model depended on power superiority whereas sovereignty relied on overall nationhood. Sovereignty gives different standings to those actors within the states and across them. It takes shape through multiple and complex institutions that develop into formal and informal regimes of power, and acts that set the various regions of the world for its major participants. The major activities done for differentiation are recognizable norms, and ethical standards that guide the collaborating and competing geopolitical entities. In the analysis of the international politics, sovereignty is the key pillar that provides a wide analysis as compared to the power. References List Blaney, N. et al. (1995). Realizing sovereignty. Review of International Studies,, 21(1), pp. 3-20. Chandler, D. (2000). International Justice. New Left Review, 6(1), pp. 55-66. Gowan, P.(2003). US:UN. New Left Review, 22(2), pp. 5-28. Grovogui, S.(2002). Regimes of Sovereignty: International Morality and the African Condition. European Journal Of International Relations, 8(3), pp. 315-338. Krasner, S.(1999). Globalization and sovereignty. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, pp.214-220 Rosenberg, J. (1990). A Non-Realist Theory Of Sovereignty?:Giddens'The Nation-State and violence. Millenium-Journal Of International Studiies, 19(2), pp. 249-259. Saco, D.(1997). Gendering Sovereignty: Marriage and International Relations in Elizabethan Times&apos. European Journal of International Relations , 3(3), pp. 291-318. Shilliam, G. L. et al.(2009). Beyond hypocrisy? Debating the ‘fact’ and ‘value’. International politics, 46(6), pp. 657-670. Shilliam, R.(2006). What about Marcus Garvey? Race and the transformation of Sovereignty debate. Review of International Studies, 32(3), pp. 379-400. Weiss, J.et al.(1992). overeignty is No Longer Sacrosanct:Codifying Humanitarian Intervention. Ethics and International Affairs , 6(2), pp. 1-16. Read More