ABSTRACT
The European MSNS required centuries to reach democratic maturity. By the end of the Cold War, looking back at its wars and the tyrannies it had engendered, European elites decided that the old MSNS had become obsolete and so embarked on the grand project of a sovereignty-soft European Union. The United States, in some ways resembling a new empire similar to the late Roman Republic, was taking sovereignty, national interest, and national security to its limits and has been roundly criticized for refusing to accommodate international law’s restrictions on sovereignty (the International Criminal Court) or international cooperative ventures of environmental action (the Kyoto Protocols). In the European case, state sovereignty has been implicitly deemed destructive to human security, while for America, its maximization was the efficient solution to human security through national interest and preemptive interventions. In both cases, the gap between actualized sovereignty and claimed sovereignty is far less a concern than in contemporary China, where a perception of incomplete sovereignty underlies fundamental issues of state.
