Editing Sovereignty (section)

==History==
===Classical===
The [[Ancient Rome|Roman]] jurist [[Ulpian]] observed that:<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Or46AAAAIAAJ&q=ulpian+sovereignty&pg=PA42|title=Sovereignty|isbn=9780521339889|last1=Hinsley|first1=F. H.|date=20 November 1986|publisher=CUP Archive }}</ref>
* The people transferred all their ''[[imperium]]'' and power to the [[Roman emperor|Emperor]]. ''Cum lege regia, quae de imperio eius lata est, populus ei et in eum omne suum imperium et potestatem conferat'' (Digest I.4.1)
* The laws do not bind the emperor. ''Princeps legibus solutus est'' (Digest I.3.31)
* A decision by the emperor has the force of law. ''Quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem.'' (Digest I.4.1)

Ulpian was expressing the idea that the emperor exercised a rather absolute form of sovereignty that originated in the people, although he did not use the term expressly.

===Medieval===
Ulpian's statements were known in [[medieval Europe]], but sovereignty was an important concept in medieval times. Medieval monarchs were ''not'' sovereign, at least not strongly so, because they were constrained by, and shared power with, their [[feudalism|feudal]] [[Aristocracy (class)|aristocracy]]. Furthermore, both were strongly constrained by custom.<ref name="Britannica" /> Sovereignty existed during the Medieval period as the ''[[de jure]]'' rights of nobility and royalty.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.tititudorancea.com/z/sovereignty_07.htm|title=Sovereignty|website=www.tititudorancea.com|language=en|access-date=26 November 2018}}</ref>

===Reformation===
Sovereignty reemerged as a concept in the late 16th century, a time when civil wars had created a craving for a stronger central authority when monarchs had begun to gather power onto their own hands at the expense of the nobility, and the modern [[nation state]] was emerging. [[Jean Bodin]], partly in reaction to the chaos of the [[French wars of religion]], presented theories of sovereignty calling for a strong central authority in the form of [[absolute monarchy]]. In his 1576 treatise ''[[Jean Bodin#Les Six Livres de la République|Les Six Livres de la République]]'' ("Six Books of the Republic") Bodin argued that it is inherent in the nature of the [[State (politics)|state]] that sovereignty must be:<ref name="Britannica"/>
* Absolute: On this point, he said that the sovereign must be hedged in with obligations and conditions, must be able to legislate without his (or its) subjects' consent, must not be bound by the laws of his predecessors, and could not, because it is illogical, be bound by his own laws.
* Perpetual: Not temporarily delegated as to a strong leader in an emergency or a state employee such as a [[magistrate]]. He held that sovereignty must be perpetual because anyone with the power to enforce a time limit on the governing power must be above the governing power, which would be impossible if the governing power is absolute.

The treatise is frequently viewed as the first European text theorizing state sovereignty.<ref name=":Laikwan">{{Cite book |last=Laikwan |first=Pang |title=One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty |date=2024 |publisher=[[Stanford University Press]] |isbn=9781503638815 |location=Stanford, CA |pages=9}}</ref>

Bodin rejected the notion of transference of sovereignty from people to the ruler (also known as ''the sovereign''); natural law and divine law confer upon the sovereign the right to rule. And the sovereign is not above divine law or natural law. He is above (''i.e.'' not bound by) only [[positive law]], that is, laws made by humans. He emphasized that a sovereign is bound to observe certain basic rules derived from the divine law, the law of nature or reason, and the law that is common to all nations (jus gentium), as well as the fundamental laws of the state that determine who is the sovereign, who succeeds to sovereignty, and what limits the sovereign power. Thus, Bodin's sovereign was restricted by the constitutional law of the state and by the higher law that was considered as binding upon every human being.<ref name="Britannica" /> The fact that the sovereign must obey divine and natural law imposes ethical constraints on him. Bodin also held that the ''lois royales'', the fundamental laws of the French monarchy which regulated matters such as succession, are natural laws and are binding on the French sovereign.

Despite his commitment to absolutism, Bodin held some moderate opinions on how government should in practice be carried out. He held that although the sovereign is not obliged to, it is advisable for him, as a practical expedient, to convene a [[senate]] from whom he can obtain advice, to delegate some power to magistrates for the practical administration of the law, and to use the [[Estates of the realm|Estates]] as a means of communicating with the people.{{Citation needed|date=January 2011}} Bodin believed that "the most divine, most excellent, and the state form most proper to royalty is governed partly aristocratically and partly democratically".<ref>Bodin, Six livres, 6:254 (VI:vi).</ref>

===Age of Enlightenment===
During the [[Age of Enlightenment]], the idea of sovereignty gained both legal and moral force as the main Western description of the meaning and power of a State. In particular, the "[[Social contract]]" as a mechanism for establishing sovereignty was suggested and, by 1800, widely accepted, especially in the new [[United States]] and [[France]], though also in [[1800 in Great Britain|Great Britain]] to a lesser extent.

[[Thomas Hobbes]], in ''[[Leviathan (Hobbes book)|Leviathan]]'' (1651) put forward a conception of sovereignty similar to Bodin's, which had just achieved legal status in the "[[Peace of Westphalia]]", but for different reasons. He created the first modern version of the social contract (or contractarian) theory, arguing that to overcome the "nasty, brutish and short" quality of life without the cooperation of other human beings, people must join in a "commonwealth" and submit to a "Soveraigne{{sic}} Power" that can compel them to act in the common good. Hobbes was thus the first to write that relations between the people and the sovereign were based on negotiation rather than natural submission.<ref name=":Laikwan2">{{Cite book |last=Laikwan |first=Pang |title=One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty |date=2024 |publisher=[[Stanford University Press]] |isbn=9781503638815 |location=Stanford, CA}}</ref>{{Rp|page=10}} His expediency argument attracted many of the early proponents of sovereignty. Hobbes strengthened the definition of sovereignty beyond either Westphalian or Bodin's, by saying that it must be:{{Citation needed|date=January 2011}}<ref>{{Cite web |last=Philpott |first=Daniel |date=Fall 2020 |title=Sovereignty |url=https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/sovereignty/ |access-date=2023-08-16 |website=Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy}}</ref>
* Absolute: because conditions could only be imposed on a sovereign if there were some outside arbitrator to determine when he had violated them, in which case the sovereign would not be the final authority.
* Indivisible: The sovereign is the only final authority in his territory; he does not share final authority with any other entity. Hobbes held this to be true because otherwise there would be no way of resolving a disagreement between the multiple authorities.

Hobbes' hypothesis—that the ruler's sovereignty is contracted to him by the people in return for his maintaining their physical safety—led him to conclude that if and when the ruler fails, the people recover their ability to protect themselves by forming a new contract.

Hobbes's theories decisively shape the concept of sovereignty through the medium of [[social contract]] theories. [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]]'s (1712–1778) definition of [[popular sovereignty]] (with early antecedents in [[Francisco Suárez]]'s theory of the origin of power), provides that the people are the legitimate sovereign. Rousseau considered sovereignty to be inalienable; he condemned the distinction between the origin and the exercise of sovereignty, a distinction upon which [[constitutional monarchy]] or [[representative democracy]] is founded. [[John Locke]], and [[Montesquieu]] are also key figures in the unfolding of the concept of sovereignty; their views differ with Rousseau and with Hobbes on this issue of alienability.

The second book of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ''[[Du Contrat Social, ou Principes du droit politique]]'' (1762) deals with sovereignty and its rights. Sovereignty, or the [[general will]], is inalienable, for the will cannot be transmitted; it is indivisible since it is essentially general; it is infallible and always right, determined and limited in its power by the common interest; it acts through laws. Law is the decision of the general will regarding some object of common interest, but though the general will is always right and desires only good, its judgment is not always enlightened, and consequently does not always see wherein the common good lies; hence the necessity of the legislator. But the legislator has, of himself, no authority; he is only a guide who drafts and proposes laws, but the people alone (that is, the sovereign or general will) has authority to make and impose them.<ref>{{Cite book|title=The Social Contract and Discourses|url=https://archive.org/details/thesocialcontrac46333gut|last1=Cole|first1=G.D.H.|last2=Rousseau|first2=Jean-Jacques|year=2018|orig-year=1762|publisher=Project Gutenberg|via=[[Internet Archive]]}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|title=The Social Contract|last=Rousseau|first=Jean-Jacques|url=http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/rousseau1762.pdf|publisher=Jonathan Bennett|year=2017|orig-year=1762|via=earlymoderntexts.com}}</ref>

Rousseau, in the ''Social Contract''<ref>''Social Contract'', Book II, Chapter III.
</ref>
argued, "the growth of the State giving the trustees of public authority more and means to abuse their power, the more the Government has to have force to contain the people, the more force the Sovereign should have in turn to contain the Government," with the understanding that the Sovereign is "a collective being of wonder" (Book II, Chapter I) resulting from "the general will" of the people, and that "what any man, whoever he may be, orders on his own, is not a law" (Book II, Chapter VI) – and predicated on the assumption that the people have an unbiased means by which to ascertain the general will.  Thus the legal maxim, "there is no law without a sovereign."<ref name="max-seydel">{{Cite web| url = https://archive.org/details/asocietystatess00stalgoog | page = [https://archive.org/details/asocietystatess00stalgoog/page/n104 80] | quote = there is no law without a sovereign Seydel. | title = A society of states: Or, Sovereignty, independence, and equality in a league of nations | publisher = G. Routledge & sons, Limited | last1 = Stallybrass | first1 = William Teulon Swan | year = 1918}}</ref>

According to [[Hendrik Spruyt]], the sovereign state emerged as a response to changes in international trade (forming coalitions that wanted sovereign states)<ref name=":1" /> so that the sovereign state's emergence was not inevitable; "it arose because of a particular conjuncture of social and political interests in Europe."<ref>{{Cite book|last=Spruyt|first=Hendrik|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzxx91t|title=The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change|date=1994|volume=176|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=978-0-691-03356-3|pages=18–19|doi=10.2307/j.ctvzxx91t|jstor=j.ctvzxx91t|s2cid=221904936}}</ref>

Once states are recognized as sovereign, they are rarely recolonized, merged, or dissolved.<ref>{{Citation|last=Strang|first=David|title=Contested sovereignty: the social construction of colonial imperialism|date=1996|url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/state-sovereignty-as-social-construct/contested-sovereignty-the-social-construction-of-colonial-imperialism/A95771700FB31411013256C3E5DA4344|work=State Sovereignty as Social Construct|pages=25|editor-last=Weber|editor-first=Cynthia|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-56599-8|editor2-last=Biersteker|editor2-first=Thomas J.}}</ref>

===Post World War II world order===
Today, no state is sovereign in the sense they were prior to the Second World War.{{sfn|Grimm|2015|p=57}}  Transnational governance agreements and institutions, the globalized economy,<ref>{{cite book |last1=Ozcelik|first1=Burcu |last2=Xidias|first2=Jason  |title=An Analysis of Seyla Benhabib's The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens  |date=2017 |publisher=Routledge- Taylor & Francis Group |isbn=9781912284870|location=London|edition=e-book|page=11,21}}</ref> and pooled sovereignty unions such as the European union have eroded the sovereignty of traditional states.  The centuries long movement which developed a global system of sovereign states came to an end when the excesses of World War II made it clear to nations that some curtailment of the rights of sovereign states was necessary if future cruelties and injustices were to be prevented.{{sfn|Philpott|2016}}{{sfn|Kallis|2018|p=6}}   In the years immediately prior to the war,  political theorist [[Carl Schmitt]] argued that sovereignty had supremacy over constitutional and international constraints arguing that states as sovereigns could not be judged and punished.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Minakov|first1=Mikhail |chapter=Sovereignty as a Contested Concept: The Cases of Trumpism and Putinism |title= Inventing Majorities: Ideological Creativity in Post-Soviet Societies  |isbn=9783838216416 |date=2022 |publisher=ibidem-Verlag|location=Stuttgart|page=286 }}</ref>  After the [[Holocaust]], the vast majority of states rejected the prior Westphalian permissiveness towards such supremacist power based sovereignty formulations and signed the [[Universal Declaration of Human Rights]] in 1948.  It was the first step towards circumscription of the powers of sovereign nations, soon followed by the [[Genocide Convention]] which legally required nations to punish genocide.  Based on these and similar human rights agreements, beginning in 1990 there was a practical expression of this circumscription when the Westphalian principle of non-intervention was no longer observed for cases where the United Nations or another international organization endorsed a political or military action.  Previously, actions in [[Kosovo War|Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Kosovo]], [[Somalia War (2006–2009)|Somalia]], [[United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda|Rwanda]], [[United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti|Haiti]], [[United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia|Cambodia]] or [[United Nations Mission in Liberia|Liberia]] would have been regarded as illegitimate interference in internal affairs.  In 2005, the revision of the concept of sovereignty was made explicit with the [[Responsibility to Protect]] agreement endorsed by all member states of the United Nations.  If a state fails this responsibility either by perpetrating massive injustice or being incapable of protecting its citizens, then outsiders may assume that responsibility despite prior norms forbidding such interference in a nation's sovereignty.{{sfn|Grimm|2015|pp=50-56}}

European integration is the second form of post-world war change in the norms of sovereignty, representing a significant shift since member nations are no longer absolutely sovereign. Some theorists, such as [[Jacques Maritain]] and [[Bertrand de Jouvenel]] have attacked the legitimacy of the earlier concepts of sovereignty, with Maritain advocating that the concept be discarded entirely since it:{{sfn|Philpott|2016}}
*stands in the way of international law and a world state, 
*internally results in centralism, not pluralism
*obstructs the democratic notion of accountability

Efforts to curtail absolute sovereignty have met with substantial resistance by [[sovereigntism|sovereigntist]] movements in multiple countries who seek to "[[take back control]]" from such transnational governance groups and agreements, restoring the world to pre World War II norms of sovereignty.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Kallis |first1=Aristotle |date=2018 |title=Populism, Sovereigntism, and the Unlikely Re-Emergence of the Territorial Nation-State  |journal=Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences |volume=11 |issue=3 |doi=10.1007/s40647-018-0233-z |url= https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s40647-018-0233-z.pdf  |page=10,14|s2cid=158092242 }}</ref>