a1.
Dr.Jur. Eric Allen Engle, JD (St. Louis), DEA (Paris), LLM
(Bremen) is a research aid at the Berkman Center for Internet and
Society at Harvard Law School. Dr. Engle is writing his
habilitation in the theory of international law at the University
of Bremen.
1.
The supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power by which any
independent state is governed; supreme political authority; the
supreme will; paramount control of the constitution and frame of
government and its administration; the self--sufficient source of
political power, from which all specific political powers are
derived; the international independence of a state, combined with
the right and power of regulating its internal affairs without
foreign dictation; also a political society, or state, which is
sovereign and independent.
2.
See, e.g., Cherokee
Nation v. S. Kan. R.R. Co., 33 F. 900, 906 (W.D. Ark. 1888)
(Wheaton defines sovereignty, "the supreme power by which any
citizen is governed." Hurd says: The supreme power in the state
must necessarily be absolute, in being subject to no judge.
"Jameson says: By the term 'sovereignty' is meant the person or
body of persons in a state to whom there is politically no
superior." Leiber has said: "The necessary existence of the state,
and that right and power which necessarily follow, is
sovereignty." Story says: "By sovereignty, in its largest sense,
is meant supreme, absolute, uncontrollable power; the jus summi
imperii; the absolute right to govern." Yeaman, in his Study of
Government, says: "This sovereignty is the last and supreme will
in the direction and control of the affairs of society, and beyond
or above which there is no political power, and no legal appeal.
The word which by itself comes nearest being the definition of
sovereignty is will or volition, as applied to political affairs.
Government is not sovereignty. Government is the machinery or
expedient for expressing the will of the sovereign power."
Definitions of sovereignty might be almost indefinitely
multiplied, but these which have been given I believe to be
sufficient to give an accurate idea of its nature. This sovereign
power in our government belongs to the people, and the government
of the United States and the governments of the several states are
but the machinery for expounding or expressing the will of the
sovereign power. (internal citations omitted));
See also Gerard Cornu, Vocabulaire Juridique
754 (1987).
3.
Black's Law Dictionary
1252 (5th ed. 1979).
4.
See Gherebi v. Bush, 352
F.3d 1278, 1296 (9th Cir. 2003)
(Black's
Law Dictionary, defines sovereignty, in pertinent part, as: The
supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power by which any
independent state is governed; supreme political authority; the
supreme will ... The power to do everything in a state
without accountability ... It is the supreme power by
which any citizen is governed and is the person or body of
persons in the state to whom there is politically no superior.
By sovereignty in its largest sense is meant supreme, absolute,
uncontrollable power ... the word by itself comes nearest to
being the definition of ‘sovereignty’ is will or
volition as applied to political affairs (emphasis added)).
See also Dictionnaire de la Pense
Politique, supra note 1, at 741.
5.
Lisa
A. Morin, Roman Family & Law Traditions, http://bama.ua.edu/~
morin002/ (last visited **
Oct. 9, 2008).
6.
Joseph A. Camilleri
& Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a
Shrinking and Fragmenting World 60 (1992).
7.
Stephen
Humphreys, Legalizing Lawlessness: On Giorgio Agamben's
State of Exception, 17 Eur. J. Int'l L. 677, 683 (2006). See
also Albert
Rigaudière, L'invention de la souverainete, dans
Pouvoirs, 67, 5, 6 (1993).
8.
Camilleri & Falk,
supra note 6, at 19.
9.
See generally Treaty
of Westphalia, Fr.-Holy Roman Empire, Oct. 24, 1648, available
at http://www.avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/westphal.asp
(last visited **
Oct. 24, 2008).
10.
See, e.g., Cherokee Nation, supra note 2; Michel
Troper, La Titulaire de la souverainete, in Rechtstheorie, Rule of Law,
137, 137 (1997).
11.
Troper, supra note 10, at 139.
12.
Id.
13.
Id. See also Susi
Dwi Harijanti & Tim Lindsey, Indonesia: General
Elections Test the Amended Constitution and the New
Constitutional Court, 4 Int'l J. Const. L. 138, 144 (2006).
14.
Pater
Suber, The Paradox of Self-Amendment in Constitutional Law,
Stan. Lit. Rev.,
Spring/Fall 1990, 53, 55, available at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/psaessay.htm.
15.
"How can a power supposed to be omnipotent irrevocably limit
itself?" Id. at 55.
16.
See, e.g., Robert Gerwarth, Twisted
Paths: Europe 1914-1915 91 (2007).
17.
Alexander Olten, The
European Crucible (forthcoming) (manuscript at Ch. II,
pg. 18).
18.
Europa, The History of the European Union, http:// europa.eu/abc/history/index_en.htm
(last visited **
Oct. 9, 2008).
19.
Camilleri & Falk,
supra note 6, at 54.
20.
Olli
Lagerspetz, National Self-Determination and Ethnic
Minorities, 25 Mich.
J. Int'l L. 1299, 1313 (2004).
21.
Ileana
M. Porras, Constructing International Law in the East Indian
Seas: Property, Sovereignty, Commerce and War in Hugo Grotius'
De Iure Praedae--The Law of Prize and Booty, or "On How to
Distinguish Merchants from Pirates," 31 Brooklyn J. Int'l L.
741, 804 (2006).
22.
See
Kenneth W. Abbott, Enriching Rational Choice
Institutionalism for the Study of International Law, 2008
U. Ill. L. Rev.
5, 12 (2008). See also Joseph
Krulic La Revendication de la Souverainete, Pouvoirs 67,
31-32 (1993).
(D'une
part, la nation deracine l'individu scolarise et urbanise des
communautes ... locales et l'intègre dans un group plus global
dont les id eologies d'integration nationales, voire
nationalistes, le persuadent qu'elle constitue une communaute
naturelle matricielle. Cet ensemble sociologique de rebricolage
ideologique organiciste que constitue la nationa inter-pose, ou
veut interposer, entre le marche international, l'economie monde
et l'individu atomise, une communaute de substitution, d'autant
plus necessaire que les autres cadres (religions, ideologies
familles) se trouvent erodes.) (On the one hand, the nation
uproots the indivudal, scholarised and urbanised into ... local
... communities ... and integrated into a more global group in
which the ideologies of national, including nationalist,
integration persuade him that they constitute a natural
womb-like community. This sociological assembly of ideological
organic "do it yourself" projects which constitutes the nation
interposes, or wants to interpose, between the international
market, the world economy and the atomised individual a
substitute community necessary as much as the other frameworks
(religions, ideologies, families) are eroded.).
Id.
23.
George E. Karamanolis,
Plato and Aristotle in Agreement: Platonists on Aristotle from
Antiochus to Porphyry 236 (2006).
24.
See, e.g., Edward
W. Younkins, Capitalism & Commerce: Hegel's
Authoritarian State as the Divine Idea on Earth, Nov. 15,
2005, http://www.quebecoislibre.org/05/051115-11.htm.
(last visited **
Oct. 19, 2008).
25.
Id.
26.
Susan
Bibler Coutin, Bill Maurer, & Barbara Yngvesson, In the
Mirror: The Legitimation Work of Globalization, 27 Law & Soc. Inquiry
801, 804 (2002). See also Joseph
Krulic, La Revendication de la Souverainete, 67 Pouvoirs
24 (1993). ("Economiquement, dans un monde d'une economie de
grands espaces et de mondialisation, il semble avere que la
souverainete est largement fictive ou illusoire."). Id.
(Economically, in a world of an economy consisting of great spaces
of globalization, it seems true that sovereignty is largely
fictive or illusory).
27.
Philippe
Sands, Lawless World: The Cultures of International Law,
41 Tex. Int'l
L.J. 387, 390 (2006). See also Krulic, supra
note 26, at 26. ("l'accroissement du nombre d'acteurs ... rend
plus difficiles la gestion et la stabilite du monde
interetatique") ("The increase in the number of actors ... makes
the management and stability of the inter-state world more
difficult.")
28.
("We are encountering today an ever more widespread belief that a
world map composed of sovereign states no longer provides--if it
ever did--a useful conception of how the world as a whole is
constituted.") Richard Falk, Evasions of Sovereignty, in Contending Sovereignties
Redefining Political Community 61, 61 (1990). (Nous
rencontrons aujourd'hui une croyance de plus en plus commun qu'une
carte-mondiale compose des Etats souveraines ne presente pas
encore--s'il a jamais le presente--une conception utile du monde
tel qu'il se constitue."). Id.
29.
World Trade
Organization, Understanding the WTO 1 2007, http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/tif_e/understanding_e.pdf.
30.
Warren Magnusson, The Refication of Political Commmunity,
in Contending Sovereignties
Redefining Political community 45, 45 (1990).
31.
Id. at 47.
32.
Id. at 49.
33.
Id. at 45.
34.
Id. at 52.
35.
Magnussson, supra note 30, at 52.
36.
Id.
37.
Id.
38.
Id.
39.
Id.