Article by Nicholas T. Parsons
In 1661 France and Spain came to the brink of war. The casus belli was a dispute about precedence between the French and Spanish ambassadors to London for a procession welcoming a new Swedish ambassador. The argument erupted into violence, there were fatalities among the ambassadorial entourages and two unfortunate coach horses were killed. King Charles II prudently tried to stay out of the matter, but I regret to say that Londoners thoroughly enjoyed the fracas and behaved like fans at a football match.
Nowadays such matters are handled in a more genteel way, but there was still a whiff of the operetta about, for example, the post-Brexit stand-off between the UK and the EU, the latter demanding full ambassadorial privileges for its London envoy, the former saying we already had twenty-seven European ambassadors of sovereign states, so a further one claiming to represent the interests of all the others was superfluous.
An Austrian diplomat emailed me when the EU–UK trade agreement was concluded to remark satirically how very relieved he was to know at last who had sovereignty over the fish swimming around in the English Channel. These somewhat Gilbertian issues may make you wonder whether the idea of sovereignty in today’s world is perhaps a bit of a joke.
Some intellectuals evidently think so. Wading recently through my liberal newspaper’s weekend dose of climate catastrophism, vaccine apartheid and transgender victimhood, my eye fell upon an interview with a well-known writer who demanded the establishment of global world government to solve the world’s problems.
To the idealistic liberal mind, this is a recurrently alluring prospect, promising to do away with messy democracies whose electorates keep misbehaving and to shame tyrannies into good behaviour. Governance would be benevolently authoritarian, the rulers—consisting of incorruptible technocrats and philosopher kings, persons indeed very similar to those advocating such governance—periodically confirmed in office by means of global digital voting.
In an economically globalised system where the revenues of some international corporations can exceed that of smaller nations and transnational bodies may strive to act beyond and above national jurisdictions, there is room for irony and scepticism in regard to the sovereignty of the nation-state. However, the argument for globalisation is challenged by the fact that few people see it that way.
Indeed, the world has become more, not less, fissiparous since 1989 and the break-up of the Soviet Union into historico-geographical and ethnic nation-states. This proliferation has put some ethnically diverse states on the defensive. Spain, Italy, Belgium and the United Kingdom are looking somewhat wobbly as unitary states that might split into smaller ones. It is therefore worth looking at the origins and theory of sovereignty and its post-Westphalian offspring, the sovereign state, and also at the viability of the concept of the nation-state that arose in the post-Enlightenment period.
The historians of political science originate the philosophical, as opposed to the de facto, concept of sovereignty with the Frenchman Jean Bodin in his Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576). His notion of it was founded on the divine right of monarchy, since, if more than one person or body was entitled to make laws, he believed the state would be popular or democratic, synonymous in his mind with anarchy. As Ulysses puts it in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: “Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark, what discord follows!”
In the seventeenth century political thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius emphasised that a ruler’s sovereignty in his own domain required recognition of his authority by other sovereigns, the germ of the doctrine of non-interference. That doctrine was theoretically the basis of the Westphalian Peace of 1648 concluding thirty years of war which had caused up to eight million deaths in Central Europe.
The former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger based his diplomatic modus operandi on the historical template of the Westphalian settlement. The settlement is seen as the fons et origo of independent nation-states, each sovereign over religion and other core issues and not interfering in the internal affairs of other states. Peace was to be maintained by shrewd statesmen negotiating the balance of power, while yet protecting national interests. Realpolitik would be employed for idealistic ends, as indeed might be said of Kissinger’s perseverance in negotiating bewteen Israel and the Arab states.
Kissinger, as a student of history, was opposed to overly moralistic foreign policy (he was an admirer of Metternich, about whom he wrote a book). “The most fundamental problem of politics,” he wrote in his doctoral dissertation in 1966, “is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.” His comments on the current war between Ukraine and Russia have stayed true to that principle, consequently upsetting those trying to prop up the moral solidarity of the West against Russian aggression.
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Nicholas T. Parsons is a freelance author, translator and editor who lives in Vienna. He wrote on Viktor Orban in the June issue. This article is a revised and expanded version of a lecture he gave to the Institute of Advanced Studies Koszeg (iASK) in Hungary in 2021.
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