Sovereignty is the bedrock of international relations. The concept lays out basic rules for how countries are allowed to interact with one another. In principle, it means countries get to control what happens inside their borders and can’t interfere in what happens elsewhere. This protects countries from being invaded over internal matters.
But the concept of sovereignty doesn’t play out perfectly in reality. There are limits to the control a country can exercise over what happens inside its borders. In the case of grievous human rights abuses like genocide, many countries argue breaches of sovereignty should be allowed on humanitarian grounds. Meanwhile, dozens of countries around the globe choose to give up a degree of sovereignty to join organizations like the European Union and the World Trade Organization.
Today, as the world grows increasingly interconnected, what constitutes a violation of sovereignty is up for interpretation—and world leaders have to decide how to tackle problems like climate change and terrorism that know no borders.
Nationalism can unite people—but also divide them, to destructive ends. Countries that respect one another’s independence are the building blocks of our modern international system and learn what it takes for groups of people to form a new country.
Questions:
- Why countries as different as Poland and Germany would give up some sovereignty to join the European Union?
- Is a country’s sovereignty justifiable to protect human rights, such as the NATO-led intervention in Libya in 2011?
- Why some countries breach each other’s sovereignty for non-humanitarian reasons leaving other countries and governments deciding how to respond to such actions?
Online, we see sovereignity this way: Sovereignty is the supreme authority within a territory. Sovereignty entails hierarchy within the state, as well as external autonomy for states. In any state, sovereignty is assigned to the person, body, or institution that has the ultimate authority over other people in order to establish a law or change an existing law. In political theory, sovereignty is a substantive term designating supreme legitimate authority over some polity. In international law, sovereignty is the exercise of power by a state. De jure sovereignty refers to the legal right to do so; de facto sovereignty refers to the factual ability to do so. This can become an issue of special concern upon the failure of the usual expectation that de jure and de facto sovereignty exist at the place and time of concern, and reside within the same organization.
