ABSTRACT
This chapter shifts our attention to International Relations and the construction of a democratic sovereignty. If early political theorists defined sovereignty in relation to the political community sovereign authorities represent and serve, then several of sovereignty’s IR theorists conceive (or produce) a rift between community and state elites. Indeed, some dominant strands of IR sovereignty theory appear to be a variation on an Austinian theme: law is the command of the sovereign backed by force, which theoretically and practically translates into a substantial degree of prerogative. For instance, Kenneth Waltz’s (1979: 96) sovereignty is the right of a state “to decide for itself how it will cope with its internal and external problems.”1 Similarly, Stephen Krasner’s sovereignty reflects the cold calculations “of material and ideational interests” of rulers who “hope to retain power and satisfy constituents,” and “not taken-for-granted practices derived from some overarching institutional structures or deeply embedded generative grammars” (1999: 9, 66). Robert Keohane attempts to extricate sovereignty from “the realist trap” by defining it as “an institution-a set of persistent and connected rules prescribing behavioral roles, constraining activity, and shaping expectations” (1995: 167). Yet he embeds sovereignty deeper into realism by tying it to “the rational interests of elites that run powerful states.” Anthony Clark Arend, a legal social constructivist, defines sovereignty as “the notion that states are independent, that they can be bound to no higher law without their consent, that they are juridically equal” (1999: 138). In contrast to Bodin, Althusius, Hobbes, and Hegel, none articulate a conception of the state or of sovereignty as having anything manifestly to do with people or their welfare (the populist basis of sovereignty and common good theses, Table 1.1).
