Word of the Week: Sovereignty

Sovereignty, whatever the word means, matters. From the monarchs of Renaissance Europe to the populists of Brexit Britain and Trumpist America, mere political control has never been enough. Instead, legal sovereignty has been the ultimate prize for monarchs, aristocrats and democrats down the ages. Today, the issue is more pressing than ever. Not only does the United Kingdom want to leave the European Union after its fateful referendum on 23 June 2016, but also, as of 17 January 2017, now desires to leave the Single Market for the sake of taking back 'sovereignty'. Thus the word, given its relevance, needs some elucidation. 

In 1576, Jean Bodin wrote Les Six livres de la République ('The Six Books of the Republic'). A student of Roman law and a member of the French Parlement, Bodin was concerned with the fountain of legal authority. For this pre-eminent political philosopher, that very fountain needed to be absolute, supreme, indivisible and perpetual. In other words, that fountain was to be a sovereign, which possessed sovereignty over a given territory and people. Thus sovereignty is Bodin's term for unified, unfettered legal authority. But here we must acknowledge that, whilst political power may be divided up among institutions, legal authority rests exclusively in the sovereign. Thomas Hobbes, in his 1651 book Leviathan (whose cover constitutes this entry's image), gave a good example of sovereign authority, as opposed to political power. As can be seen from the image, the body of the Leviathan - the sovereign 'Mortal God' or King of a state - is composed of many little figures. These figures represent the cogs in the machine of government, the political systems comprising the political entity as a whole. Each system has certain powers, such as trade or taxation. But they all derive their legitimate political power from the Leviathan, or sovereign monarch. Thus power may be divided in a state but authority is unified in an indivisible sovereign.Bodin and Hobbes agreed, therefore, that sovereignty was a tangible, vital part of a political entity's constitution, and that this sovereignty rested entirely in the legitimate sovereign, who, more often than not, was a monarch. But in 1762, Jean-Jaques Rousseau challenged this idea with his Du contrat social ('The social contract'). Having agreed that sovereignty was indivisible, philosophers were about to take a U-turn on where this indivisible sovereignty presided. In other words, Rousseau asked the question: who is sovereign?The resounding response of Enlightenment philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Thomas Paine and Rousseau himself was: the people. Instead of the monarch being sovereign, philosophers in the 18th century asked whether sovereignty could be vested in the demos (people) themselves. Hence, after two millennia of dogmatic slumber, the concept of democracy was reborn in response to the question of sovereignty. Authority, philosophers agreed, had to rest somewhere, but the rightful question was: where? Democracy was the answer to this conundrum of sovereignty, as people looked back to the heyday of Athenian democracy, from c. 508 - 322 BC. Perhaps, after a whistle-stop tour of sovereignty, we can now define the elusive term once and for all. But, before we get over-excited, it is worth acknowledging that our definition is not restrictive. Instead, there are a myriad of definitions for sovereignty, each used for different contexts. To international relations theorists, sovereignty refers to equal rights under international law. To monarchists, sovereignty refers to the days when Kings and Queens had real influence over domestic affairs. To others, it's a more imaginative way of saying, 'Brexit means Brexit'. So let's restrict ourselves to pure political science, as the study of politics within a state, and try to define sovereignty as it has been presented by philosophers over the ages. Sovereignty is, in short, the fountain of supreme legal authority from which all legitimate political power flows within a state - whether that fountain be monarchical, aristocratic or democratic in nature. But here's some food for thought: clearly most democracies have a democratic sovereign. In the USA, that democratic sovereign is the people. Yet in the UK there is a monarchical sovereign - Elizabeth II - who possesses 'supreme legal authority'. But this authority is never exercised by Elizabeth II, such that some have claimed that the people or Parliament, and not the monarch, is the real sovereign of the UK. A.V. Dicey asserted in Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1889) that 'The sovereignty of Parliament is, from a legal point of view, the dominant characteristic of our political institutions.' So in the UK, which once controlled one third of all land on Earth, who is sovereign: the Queen, Parliament or the people? I'll let you decide...