Sovereignty

Sovereignty is the supreme and independent authority to rule over a territory and its population, with the power to make and change laws without being subject to any higher authority. The term has two dimensions: internally, it implies hierarchy within the state; externally, it implies autonomy from other states.

The concept was not used by the Greeks or the Romans in its modern sense. It is generally traced to the Middle Ages, in the struggle among the Church, the empire and the great feudal lords, and it took firm shape in the late sixteenth century. Jean Bodin defined it as an absolute and perpetual power, indivisible and residing in a single authority, so as to prevent factional strife. Thomas Hobbes made it a form of power with no source beyond the sovereign, while Jean-Jacques Rousseau placed it in the collective body, so that each citizen is at once sovereign and subject. Against this view, the abbé Sieyès argued that sovereignty lies in the nation rather than in the changing will of the people, a distinction that still shapes modern constitutions.

Other thinkers treated sovereignty as a different principle of legitimacy. Hugo Grocio and Johannes Althusius held that power comes from the people and that the ruler receives it in trust, so that he may be resisted if he becomes a tyrant. Marsilio of Padua and John Mair assigned legislative authority to the body of citizens. Emerich de Vattel, by contrast, stressed the inherent rights of nations and their mutual respect. In religious thought, authors such as R. C. Sproul and Franz Volkmar Reinhard speak of divine sovereignty, in which God is the ultimate foundation of order.

In practice several dimensions coexist: de jure sovereignty, the legal right to rule, and de facto sovereignty, the real capacity to do so. When the two do not coincide, disputes over legitimacy arise. Today the debate centres on the tension between state sovereignty and international intervention on humanitarian grounds, as well as on economic and cultural sovereignty in a globalized world.