Sovereignty

Have you ever wondered who invented countries? I mean, why not a global entity? Or city-states? Or empires? Why is the world order entirely dominated by states (which is the precise term for what we generally refer to as countries).

And how did we come upon the notion that states are equal? I mean, what do Liechtenstein and India have in common? Or Russia and Kyrgyzstan? Yet international affairs professionals generally work off a basis of states as equals, much as people are equals - at least in dignity and personhood. God endowed people with personhood, soul, and dignity. Who endowed states?

I'm not going to try and answer those questions. They serve merely to broaden the "box" through which we see the world.

Briefly, states began in 1648. Before that many entities existed in different forms all over the world. Sovereignty was explained a number of ways, but when push came to shove, it all depended on who had more guns or swords or pointy sticks. After the brutal Thirty Years war decimated Central Europe, the major powers sat down to work out a comprehensive peace. The war had been religious, and the Conference of Westphalia really began the state system by saying that any ruler had sovereignty in his or her territory to determine the official religion. This necessitated defining either territory ruled or people ruled. In Africa, for example, control has traditionally has been over people rather than territory (hence the tradition of slavery, and the lack of strong property rights traditions). For Europeans, however, territory was the natural dividing line, since there were no clear ethnic lines on the continent.

So Europe was delineated, and states at peace with one another were obliged to respect others' right to rule as they pleased within their respective territory. This system included large kingdoms like France, England and Sweden, and it also included tiny princedoms in Germany and elsewhere. It placed these tiny states above the admittedly toothless Holy Roman Empire, which essentially ceased to exist in all but name (and it wasn't much more than a name before that). The system worked fairly well, and it was exported with Europeans, who had just begun conquering the world. The Pilgrims had founded Plymouth Colony twenty-eight years before the Westphalia Conference, Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded eighteen years before, and fourteen years later the Town of Milton was chartered and separated from Dorchester.

The United States were originally a federation, but with the erosion of states rights, particularly in the Civil War, we become a much more unitary state, though we retain some federal elements (and we've essentially redefined federal to mean "like the U.S."). The War of 1812 established us on par with European states - we fought because our sovereignty was being denied and abrogated by Britain. The newly independent Latin American states followed our model, and though they failed to form large continental federations (except Brazil), they did bring the system of state sovereignty to the rest of the Americas. States did not exist in their modern form in Africa, Asia, and Oceania until the 20th century.

During the 1800's statehood evolved, and mass militaries changed the necessities for state defense. A "balance of power" system developed between the major powers. Small powers lost a measure of sovereignty by developing unequal protection relationships with major powers. The erosion of small state sovereignty increased during the Cold War. States like Korea, Israel, Bulgaria, Cuba and many more became dependent on the backing of major powersm - and their nature and actions were increasingly defined by their major power relationships. Furthermore, the number of major powers eroded as power concentrated itself among a handful of nuclear powers.

George H.W. Bush heralded a New World Order with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992. Now, there are not just two superpowers above the major powers, there is a single hyperpower. The United States spends 4% of its GDP on defense - equal to the total of all other countries in the world combined! The Arab world's strongest military power was vanquished in two one-month wars executed by the U.S. and her allies, those wars bracketing a transition period which seems to be rapidly winding to a close with the world coming to grips with the new distribution of power, America having shown her massive strength and her erstwhile unknown willingness to use it.

In a world with a single hyperpower unconstrained by allies, acting with an apparent lack of regard for consensus, what is sovereignty? It must now be defined as ruling a country within broad parameters defined by the U.S. Only Russia, China and a few others could actually deter us from invading if we wanted. Anyone else can expect to be forced into line if they stray too far. Now, the U.S. does not have all the power, even if it could win a war (nuclear or non-nuclear) against the rest of the world put together. Our limits are budgetary and political, as well as logistical. We also have no desire to precipitate conflict, since we're quite enjoying the current equilibrium. That's why we're not overthrowing Robert Mugabe or Muammar Qaddafi or Kim Jong Il. We could, at a cost, but as long as they're not a direct threat or acting too egregiously, we won't.

However, the fact that we could conquer all three of them at the same time by August severely limits the sovereignty of all other nations. Sovereignty isn't what it used to be - except for the United States, where sovereignty is much, much more. Now the President of the U.S. is the most powerful man in the world, and people in the Czech banking system, the Rwandan government or the Ecuadorian oil industry all have an interest in who is in that position. This new, unique situation will yield a very different pattern of global state and non-state behavior than the bipolar system or the multipolar myth of the 1990's. The United Nations is not a threat to become a world government; the United States is too close for comfort.