ABSTRACT
Sovereignty is one of the foremost institutions of our world: it has given political life a distinctive constitutional shape that virtually defines the modern era and sets it apart from previous eras. Sovereignty expresses some core ideas of political modernity including the fundamentally important notion of political independence. A striking impression that the middle ages convey to anyone looking back from our vantage point at the dawn of the third millennium is one of astonishing diversity concerning political authority. The political unification of Italy and Germany in the mid-nineteenth century are instances of smaller states and statelets transferring their sovereignty, either voluntarily or under military duress, to a government of one larger resultant national state. In that traditional way of thinking, sovereignty is a right of membership, historically determined, in what amounts to a very exclusive political club. The greatest historical threat to the European societas of states before the twentieth century was posed by Napoleon's bid for continental hegemony.
