The problem of sovereignty in European history

American Historical Review

Volumn 111, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 1-15

  Sheehan, James J ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33749870917     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.111.1.1     Document Type: Article

References (91)

1. Lord Acton, "Beginning of the Modern State" (1906), in Acton, Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History: Selected Papers, ed. William H. McNeill (Chicago, 1967), 419.
2. James Bryce, "The Nature of Sovereignty," in Studies in History and Jurisprudence (Oxford, 1901), 2:50.
3. Two influential examples of this view: "By 1300," Joseph Strayer wrote, "it was evident that the dominant political form in western Europe was going to be the sovereign state." Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, N.J., 1970), 57.
4. "All evolution from primitive pre-state methods has been inexorably towards the establishment and consolidation of the state." F. H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1986), 219.
5. For a critique of the concept of the state, see Timothy Mitchell, "Society, Economy, and the State Effect," in George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999), 76-97.
6. Hinsley, Sovereignty,
7. remains the best introduction to the problem. I am also indebted to the work of my colleague Steven Krasner, especially Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, N.J., 1999). I am not convinced that "hypocrisy" is quite the right word to use, but the tension I see between sovereign theory and practice is obviously related to Krasner's argument, which, unlike mine, concentrates on the international dimensions of sovereign claims.
8. Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory 8 (1969): 11.
9. A good example of what I mean by reification is the role played by "Westphalian Sovereignty" in the study of international relations. See Andreas Osiander, "Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth," International Organization 55 (2001): 251-287.
10. Quoted by Antonio Perez, "Who Killed Sovereignty? Or: Changing Norms Concerning Sovereignty in International Law," Wisconsin International Law Journal 20 (1996): 467.
11. Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990), 4.
12. Charles Tilly points out that only a couple dozen of the five hundred entities present in 1500 survived into the twentieth century. Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1975), 24.
13. Weber's definition can be found in several places in this work: for example, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), 904. By using words such as "successfully," Weber introduced into his definition the same sort of limitation that I try to capture with the notion of "claim." For Weber, being sovereign is not a condition but the ability to do something. Every sovereign claim need not succeed, but if enough claims fail, then sovereignty is lost or at least fatally compromised.
14. Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in A Authority and Control (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 41.
15. Tilly, The Formation of National States in Western Europe, 24.
16. The concept of sovereignty did not exist in the ancient world, Georg Jellinek argued, "because it lacked what is necessary to make this concept manifest, the conflict between political power and other forces. "Allgemeine Staatslehre, 3rd ed. (Berlin, 1922), 440.
17. Leopold von Ranke, Die römischen Päpste in den letzten vier Jahrhunderten, 3rd ed. (Cologne, 1962), 16-17.
18. For an introduction to the problem, see the documents in Brian Tierney, ed., The Crisis of Church and State, 1050-1300: With Selected Documents (Toronto, 1988).
19. See also Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages: The Papal Monarchy with Augustinus Triumphus and the Publicists (Cambridge, 1963).
20. See Margaret Lavinia Anderson, "The Divisions of the Pope: The Catholic Revival and Europe's Transition to Democracy," in Austen Ivereigh, ed., The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America (London, 2000), 22-42.
21. Gladstone is quoted in J. F. Maclear, ed., Church and State in the Modern Age: A Documentary History (New York, 1995), 177-180.
22. For a recent survey of these issues, see Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics from the French Revolution to the Great War (London, 2005).
23. Harold Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (New Haven, Conn., 1917), 137.
24. Herbst, States and Power in Africa, 16, has some comparative data on population density.
25. On dominium, see Peter Birks, "Roman Law Concept of Dominium and the Idea of Absolute Ownership," Acta Juridica 7 (1985): 1-37.
26. Although the Romans recognized that their public authority (imperium) had a spatial dimension, this authority was marked by frontiers rather than boundaries. The Roman limes measured how far Rome's power reached, not where another's power began. See Friedrich Kratochwil, "Of System, Boundaries, and Territoriality: An Inquiry into the Formation of the State System," World Politics 29 (1986): 36,
27. and James Muldoon, Empire and Order (New York, 1999), 18-19.
28. On boundaries, see Malcolm Anderson, Frontiers; Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (Oxford, 1996);
29. Ainslie Embree, "Frontiers and Boundaries: The Evolution of the Modern State," in Imagining India: Essays in Indian History (New Delhi, 1989), 67-84;
30. Lucien Febvre, "Frontiere: The Word and the Concept," in Febvre, A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Lucien Febvre, ed, Peter Burke (London, 1973), 208-218;
31. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, Calif., 1989).
32. A point made by Herbst, States and Power in Africa, 20-21.
33. For some German examples, see James Sheehan, German History, 1770-1866 (Oxford, 1989), chap. 1.
34. Edward Fox, History in Geographic Perspective: The Other France (New York, 1971), 56.
35. For a comparison of property and sovereignty, see Kratochwil, "Of System, Boundaries, and Territoriality,"
36. As Hendrik Spruyt has persuasively argued, the most important reason why the territorial state prevailed over alternative forms of political organization was its superior ability to use violence. Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton, N.J., 1994).
37. For a brilliant synthesis of the role of violence in the history of states, see Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt: Eine vergleichende Verfassungsgeschichte Europas von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Beck, 1999).
38. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book I, chap, 3.
39. Andreas Anter called Weber's concept of legitimacy "the Archimedian point of his political sociology." See Anter, Max Webers Theorie des modernen Staates: Herkunft, Struktur und Bedeutung (Berlin, 1995), 64ff.
40. Alessandro Passerin d'Entrèves, The Notion of the State: An Introduction to Political Theory (Oxford, 1967), 8.
41. Anthony Pagden, "Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent," in The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge, 2002), 42-43.
42. On canon law, see R. H. Helmholz, The Spirit of Classical Canon Law (Athens, Ga., 1996).
43. William Bouwsma, "Lawyers and Early Modern Culture," in A Usable Past: Essays in European Culture and History (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 129-156,
44. emphasized the significance of law, lawyers, and legal education for European political thought. See also Harold Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, 1983),
45. and J. M. Kelly, A Short History of Western Legal Theory (Oxford, 1992).
46. There is a convenient edition of Bodin's Six Books of the Commonwealth, edited by M. J. Tooley (Oxford, 1955).
47. Julian Franklin's Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge, 1973) remains indispensable.
48. See also chap. 4 of Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago, 1995).
49. Robert M. Maclver, The Modern State (Oxford, 1926), 149.
50. Donald Kelley examines the movement toward codification in the context of his rich and subtle history of legal thought in modern Europe: The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, 1990), 222ff.
51. The classic formulation of law and legitimacy is Weber, Economy, 904ff.
52. On law and state making, see Gianfranco Poggi, The State: Its Nature, Development and Prospects (Stanford, Calif., 1990),
53. and of particular value, the work of Dieter Grimm, for example, Recht und Staat in bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1987).
54. Paul Kahn, The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship (Chicago, 1999), 55-56.
55. See the important account of Imperial Germany's divided sovereignty in Siegfried Weichlein, "Europa und der Föderalismus: Zur Begriffsgeschichte politischer Ordnungsmodelle," Historisches Jahrbuch 125 (2005): 133-152.
56. For a provocative analysis of the role of territoriality in the formation of the modern state, see Charles Maier, "Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,"AHR 105, no. 3 (June 2000): 807-831.
57. A model study of state making is Pierre Rosanvallon, L'État en France de 1789 à nos jours (Paris, 1990).
58. For the German case, see Siegfried Weichlein, Nation und Region: Integrationsprozesse im Bismarckreich (Düsseldorf, 2004).
59. De l'esprit de conquête de de l'usurpation dans leurs rapports avec la civilisation européenne (Paris, 1992), 86.
60. Part of this passage is quoted by James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 30.
61. For a theoretically alert and historically rich account of the relationship between state and nation, see Istvan Hont, "Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind: 'Contemporary Crisis of the Nation' in Historical Perspective," Political Studies 42 (1994): 166-231.
62. In my opinion, John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 2nd ed. (Manchester, 1993), remains the best book on the subject.
63. Nations and national consciousness certainly have a long history. I remain convinced, however, that the blend of nationality and sovereignty that appeared at the end of the eighteenth century created two distinctively modern products, nationalism and the nation-state. For the latest on the controversy surrounding the chronology of nationalism, see the essays in Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer, eds., Power and the Nation in European History (Cambridge, 2005).
64. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, Calif., 1976);
65. Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (Berkeley, Calif., 1975).
66. There is a useful summary of this situation in Krasner, Sovereignty.
67. On the internal politics of the Balkan states, see Charles and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920 (Seattle, Wash., 1977),
68. and Katrin Boeckh, Von den Balkankriegen zum Ersten Weltkrieg: Kleinstaatenpolitik und ethnische Selbstbestimmung auf dem Balkan (Munich, 1996).
69. Laurence Lafore, The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War I (Philadelphia, Pa., 1965). Although outdated in some ways, Lafore's analysis remains instructive and stimulating.
70. The place to begin examining the role of nationalism between the wars remains C. A. Macartney, National States and National Minorities (London, 1934).
71. See also Joseph Rothschild, Ethnopolitics: A Conceptual Framework (New York, 1981).
72. For some recent scholarship, see the essays in Hans Knippenberg and Jan Markusse, eds., Nationalising and Denationalising European Border Regions, 1800-2000: Views from Geography and History (Dordrecht, 1999).
73. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951), 275-276, 268.
74. On Arendt's enduring relevance, see Douglas Klusmeyer, "Hannah Arendt's Critical Realism: Power, Justice, and Responsibility," in Anthony Lang and John Williams, eds., Hannah Arendt and International Relations: Readings across the Lines (New York, 2005), 113-178.
75. Bronislaw Malinowski, "War-Past, Present, and Future," in Jesse D. Clarkson and Thomas C. Cochran, eds., War as a Social Institution: The Historian's Perspective (New York, 1941), 30;
76. Laski quoted in Hinsley, Sovereignty, 216;
77. Heinz Eulau, "The Depersonalization of the Concept of Sovereignty," Journal of Politics 4 (1942): 4.
78. Werner Best quoted in Survey of International Affairs, 1939-1946 (London, 1954), 4: 52.
79. Arendt. Origins, 135.
80. Stephan Hobe, "Statehood at the End of the 20th Century: The Model of the 'Open State' - A German Perspective," Austrian Review of International and European Law 2 (1997): 127-154.
81. For a summary of the limitations on German sovereignty before 1991, see Ludolf Herbst, "Wie souverän ist die Bundesrepublik?" in W. Benz, ed., Sieben Fragen an die Bundesrepublik: Vorträge aus dem Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Munich, 1989), 72-90.
82. For an introduction to European institutions, see Neill Nugent, The Government and Politics of the European Union, 4th ed. (Durham, N.C., 1999).
83. See, for example, Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (London, 1992).
84. For a recent summary of the debate, see William Wallace, "Rescue or Retreat? The Nation State in Western Europe, 1945-1993," Political Studies 42 (1994): 57-76,
85. and the essays in T. V. Paul, G. John Ikenberry, and John A. Hall, eds., The Nation-State in Question (Princeton, N.J., 2005).
86. Glyn Morgan, The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration (Princeton, N.J., 2005), makes a strong, but to my mind not totally convincing, case for European statehood.
87. On the changing meaning of territoriality, see Maier, "Consigning." In "Statehood at the End of the 20th Century," Hobe argues that "the closed state model in the sense of closed borders, a population restricted to nationals and a concept of government in the sense of suprema potestas is no longer an adequate definition of statehood."
88. See the essays in Anne Marie Slaughter, Alec Stone Sweet, and Joseph Weiler, eds., The European Court and National Courts: Doctrine and Jurisprudence (Evanston, 111., 1998).
89. Joseph Weiler, The Constitution of Europe: "Do the New Clothes Have an Emperor?" and Other Essays on European Integration (Cambridge, 1999), 8.
90. Anne Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, N.J., 2004), 268.
91. See also Neil MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty: Law, State, and Nation in the European Commonwealth (Oxford, 1999).