ABSTRACT
For much of the second half of the twentieth century, from the early 1950s to the late 1980s, concepts of sovereignty made surprisingly few explicit appearances in scholarly discussions of political life, at least in those societies in which sovereignty could be assumed as an already achieved condition. Clichés about presence and absence prevailed. The origins of an internationalized modernity, and thus the trajectories of a modernizing internationalism, had sedimented into place. Radically ahistorical accounts of systemic logic could become the exemplary ambition of a properly scientific theory of international relations. Contradictions could be converted with little protest into dualistic articulations of a here and a there, of a national and an international, of an east, west, north and south, of friends, enemies and transitions from undeveloped to developed. In retrospect, at least, the discursive categories that helped to shape and legitimize political trajectories and events expressed spatiotemporal clarity, which in turn enabled considerable analytical confidence. In this context, the twin discourses of (normative, liberal) political theory and (realist, illiberal but not non-liberal) theories of international relations were able to assume, but rarely discuss, sovereignty as their shared condition of possibility. Sovereignty, it seemed, was no longer an interesting problem, scarcely even an essentially contested concept, merely a more or less achieved condition to be celebrated or endured. This is not to say that questions about sovereignty were entirely neglected,1
or to doubt that scrupulous investigations of particular literatures might still reveal a more disruptive field of scholarship. Most political discourses of the Cold War era encouraged homogenizing stereotypes that quickly settled into comfortably narrow ruts, but revisionist investigation may well tell a much more interesting story at some point. Even less is it to say that the effects of a specific understanding of sovereignty were in any way diminished. The moreor-less character of the condition still offered some scope for engagement and debate. International and constitutional lawyers offered technical commentaries
on its application in specific circumstances, in ways that were sometimes of great consequence in those specific circumstances, though rarely discussed in relation to the way an increasingly professionalized discipline might engage with the limits and possibilities of political life.2 There also remained a strong sense in some places that questions about sovereignty remained provocative in attempts to engage with the dangers of authoritarian and totalitarian states, especially in the context of the always uncertain relationship between state sovereignty and popular sovereignty. Questions about sovereignty were especially prominent in debates about
“change,” about histories, futures and temporalities: debates largely organized through claims about the temporal presence and absence of spatially articulated sovereign states and their spatialized boundaries. The more that sovereignty was discussed in this context, however, the more a specific account of what sovereignty must be was reproduced in accounts of possible alternatives. In some contexts, literatures on the development of international organizations and European integration generated evolutionary and functionalist narratives about a world of sovereignties that should be, or was being, left behind. In others, questions about sovereignty were posed in relation to processes of formal decolonization, primarily in relation to claims about selfdetermination.3 Such claims were explicitly understood as the completion of the project of political modernization shaped in sixteenth-and seventeenthcentury Europe, the project already supposedly achieved in those societies that could consequently afford to believe that sovereignty was no longer a problem and might now be abandoned in pursuit of something more progressive. International society, it seemed, had expanded almost as far as it could go. Modernity had been internalized, again more or less, even if its full potential might still be unfulfilled (as Habermas was inclined to say when it had become clear that such complacencies were becoming more difficult to sustain after the structural formations of the Cold War era had begun to realign), critiques of modern reason had become briefly fashionable once again, and claims about globalization were able to congeal into an alternative discourse about necessities and possibilities.4
