Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Two conceptions of state sovereignty and their implications for global institutional design

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 15; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13698230.2012.727306

1743-8772

Miriam Ronzoni,

Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy

Abstract Social liberals and liberal nationalists often argue that cosmopolitans neglect the normative importance of state sovereignty and self-determination. This paper counter-argues that, under current global political and socio-economic circumstances, only the establishment of supranational institutions with some (limited, but significant) sovereign powers can allow states to exercise sovereignty, and peoples' self-determination, in a meaningful way. Social liberals have largely neglected this point because they have focused on an unduly narrow, mainly negative, conception of state sovereignty. I contend, instead, that we should more closely consider the positive aspects of sovereignty, understood as the capacity to maintain internal problem-solving capacities and make meaningful discretionary choices on a range of national issues. Keywords: political vs. distributive justicenegative vs. positive sovereigntycosmopolitanismbackground justice Acknowledgements I am grateful to Peter Dietsch, Terry Macdonald, Peter Niesen, Ronen Shnayderman, Milla Vaha, Laura Valentini, Timothy Waligore, an anonymous reviewer, audiences at the Political Theory Research Seminar at the University of Pavia (particularly Ian Carter and Emanuela Ceva), at a workshop on 'Global Political Justice' at the Monash Campus in Prato, and at a panel on 'Global Justice beyond Redistribution' at the ECPR 2011 General Conference in Reykjavik for helpful feedback. Notes 1. The argument was first made by Weiss (Citation1998). 2. For an argument that focuses on the positive aspects of statehood in the specific case of fiscal sovereignty see Dietsch (Citation2011a). 3. The term was first introduced by Hedley Bull as a criticism of 'Kantian' approaches to international relations, according to which the international arena must reach a 'civil condition' just as the domestic one (see for instance Bull 1968a and b). As Flikschuh (Citation2010) has persuasively argued, however, this 'Kantian' argument is not Kant's own argument. 4. In this article, I shall always use the term 'freedom' rather than 'liberty'; this is a mere convention. More importantly, I shall speak throughout the paper about conceptions, rather than concepts, of freedom. I endorse MacCallum's argument that people who disagree about the right interpretation of freedom actually share the same concept of freedom, according to which 'a subject, or agent, is free from certain constraints, or preventing conditions, to do or become certain things' (Carter Citation2003). Different conceptions of freedom provide different accounts of what should count as important or relevant agents, constraints, and ends. See MacCallum (Citation1967). 5. Hence the terms liberal nationalism (Miller Citation1995) and social liberalism (Beitz Citation1999). 6. In his insightful piece, Peter Dietsch argues that an additional fundamental way in which we should depart from the Westphalian model is by highlighting how state sovereignty entails obligations (to other sovereign states) as well as rights (to non-intervention). Although I do not focus directly on the obligations that follow from sovereignty here, the duty to establish global regulatory institutions could plausibly be construed as one such obligation (see Dietsch Citation2011a). 7. This paper deals with the extent to which positive sovereignty may help us understand what, if anything, is politically unjust about the international order. For congenial remarks regarding free statehood from a republican perspective, see Laborde Citation2010 and Skinner Citation2010. 8. I thus follow Dietsch in his account of sovereignty as fundamentally instrumental to individual well-being (and I take liberal statists to do so, as well); see Dietsch (Citation2011a). 9. For the distinction between negative and positive freedom, see Berlin (Citation1969). 10. For a partially different definition of the difference between positive and negative sovereignty, see also Schwarzenberger (1967, pp. 52, 564). 11. Jackson illustrates this point through a poignant imaginary story of time traveling. A British civil servant in 1936, he tells us, would be less surprised by our claim that we are time travellers from the late twentieth century (used as he is to eccentricity) than by the fact that all former colonies of the British Empire are now 'sovereign' states. It would take us a while to understand that he cannot get his head around what it even means for a colony with extremely poor institutional capacity to become a sovereign state, because he operates with an entirely positive account of sovereignty (Jackson Citation1990, pp. 13–15). 12. Jackson (1990, pp. 78–81) himself remains rather open on the matter, although he shows a certain predisposition towards the view that this was, at least to a certain degree, a genuine change in normative beliefs. 13. See, for instance, the interventionist politics of the United States in Latin America throughout the 1970s. 14. There are exceptions, and both purely negative and purely positive libertarian positions do survive in academic debates (see, respectively, Nozick Citation1974 and Taylor Citation1991, pp. 141–162). 15. Those who are familiar with the debate on freedom will probably find my remarks here naïve and superficial. It is not my aim here to make an informed argument within that rich and complex discussion, and I cannot possible make justice to it here. The debate has moved on immensely from the publication of Berlin's seminal essay. Indeed, several different interpretations of positive and negative freedom are currently put forward in the literature (see, for instance, Taylor Citation1991); several attempts to reconcile the two exist (see, for instance Christman Citation1991); and several schools of thought (most notably neo-republicanism) have tried to overcome the distinction altogether by proposing alternative conceptions of freedom (Pettit Citation1997, Skinner Citation2002). My aim here is, much more modestly, to see whether the broad distinction between negative and positive liberty can be of some use to highlight different conceptions of state sovereignty. 16. It has been pointed out to me that a revised account of negative freedom (and sovereignty) can account for even these problems, by having a richer and more pluralistic account of what count as constraints and acts of interference (for instance, by including internal –psychological and intellectual – constraints). This might constitute a strategic advantage (negative sovereignty is easier to swallow), but would lead, I think, to a neglect of the important phenomenological difference between the dimension of freedom that concentrates on not being constrained, and the one which focuses of being a certain kind of agent. 17. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this point. 18. For an insightful and broadly similar perspective, although within a slightly different conceptual framework, see also Valentini (Citation2012). 19. See also Mathias Risse's (Citation2005) 'institutional thesis', according to which the main cause of poverty are poor domestic institutions. 20. However, enforcing one's negative sovereignty when this is threatened by other actors might itself require a good deal of positive sovereignty. 21. And indeed, development sceptics may argue the fact that development aid often fails demonstrates that positive sovereignty can only be achieved internally by one's own means, over time. 22. This argument has a similar structure to Pogge's case about the causes of global poverty. Pogge does not deny the role of domestic factors, and in particular corruption and poor domestic politics, in perpetuating extreme poverty. His argument, however, is that we should acknowledge how much the global order systemically incentivizes such domestic politics (Pogge Citation2008, esp. chs. 4 and 5). 23. Ngaire Woods (Citation2010) argues that this has remained relatively unchanged even after the financial and then economic crisis of the last few years. 24. I have discussed this case is some more detail in Ronzoni (Citation2009). 25. Some of the most immediate implications of my approach are therefore close to those supported by Barbara Buckinx's 2011 incrementalist model. 26. The idea that the traditional winners and the perceived losers of globalization might have an overlapping long-term interest in global institutional design is also suggested by Dani Rodrik (Citation2000). 27. Thus, we ought to distinguish between positive sovereignty understood as an empirical quality that we have normative reasons to value, and the normative constraints that empirically sovereign states must respect in order to be normatively entitled to negative sovereignty, i.e. to the juridical entitlement to non-interference (see Valentini Citation2011, ch. 8).