Democratic Sovereignty

This new book argues that sovereignty, generally defined as the supreme authority in a political community, has a neglected democratic dimension that highlights the expansion of substantive individual rights and freedoms at home and abroad. Offering an historically based assessment of sovereignty that neither reifies the state nor argues sovereignty and the state are eroding under globalizing processes, the book maintains that sovereignty norms have continually changed throughout the history of the sovereign state. Matthew Weinert links international legal developments that restrict and coordinate sovereignty practices with an ethical undercurrent in International Relations, one such example is the creation of the International Criminal Court in 2002. Drawing on seven additional historical case studies, he outlines how campaigns informed by a commitment to the common good, or at the very least by opposition to harmful state policies, can be and have been efficacious in transforming the normative basis of sovereignty. Democratic Sovereignty will be of great interest to students working in the fields of sovereignty, international history, ethics, globalization and international relations.

What would constitute a definitively "green" state? In this important new book, Robyn Eckersley explores what it might take to create a green democratic state as an alternative to the classical liberal democratic state, the indiscriminate growth-dependent welfare state, and the neoliberal market-focused state—seeking, she writes, "to navigate between undisciplined political imagination and pessimistic resignation to the status quo." In recent years, most environmental scholars and environmentalists have characterized the sovereign state as ineffectual and have criticized nations for perpetuating ecological destruction. Going consciously against the grain of much current thinking, this book argues that the state is still the preeminent political institution for addressing environmental problems. States remain the gatekeepers of the global order, and greening the state is a necessary step, Eckersley argues, toward greening domestic and international policy and law. The Green State seeks to connect the moral and practical concerns of the environmental movement with contemporary theories about the state, democracy, and justice. Eckersley's proposed "critical political ecology" expands the boundaries of the moral community to include the natural environment in which the human community is embedded. This is the first book to make the vision of a "good" green state explicit, to explore the obstacles to its achievement, and to suggest practical constitutional and multilateral arrangements that could help transform the liberal democratic state into a postliberal green democratic state. Rethinking the state in light of the principles of ecological democracy ultimately casts it in a new role: that of an ecological steward and facilitator of transboundary democracy rather than a selfish actor jealously protecting its territory.

Liberal democracies are predicated on popular sovereignty - the ideal of government for and by the People. Throughout the developed world indigenous peoples continue to deny legitimacy to otherwise popular governments because their consent has never been sought. Using examples from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA, this book tackles the problem of democratic legitimation from the perspective of indigenous peoples, arguing that having suffered conquest, these people cannot be said to consent until conditions for their consent have been realised. These conditions include constitutional change that recognizes indigenous law as the 'law of the land' - a radical proposal going far beyond the current limits of self-determination.

Although democracy is in principle associated with popular rule, in practice it is best described as rule by elected elites. This form of government is not only wanting from a theoretical point of view, but it also no longer seems to meet the expectations of large segments of the citizenry. This book offers a blueprint for an alternative democratic model, democracy as popular sovereignty. Starting with the idea that the people, generously defined, are sovereign when they rule as equally valuable and fully participating members of a self-governing collectivity, this model tries to describe the constitutional and institutional arrangements necessary to achieve a workable version of this idea in advanced democratic states. This implies among other changes a greater dose of direct democracy, the use of sortition and a different conception of representation. The overall argument developed combines insights, facts, and findings from normative political theory, empirical political science, democracy’s long history as well as from the recent burgeoning literature on participatory and deliberative democracy.

Sovereignty, Democracy, and Global Civil Society explores the growing power of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) by analyzing a microcosm of contemporary global state-society relations at UN World Conferences. The intense interactions between states and NGOs at conferences on the environment, human rights, women's issues, and other topics confirm the emergence of a new transnational democratic sphere of activity. Employing both regional and global case studies, the book charts noticeable growth in the ability of NGOs to build networks among themselves and effect change within UN processes. Using a multidimensional understanding of state sovereignty, the authors find that states use sovereignty to shelter not only material interests but also cultural identity in the face of external pressure. This book is unique in its analysis of NGO activities at the international level as well as the complexity of nation-states' responses to their new companions in global governance.

Democracy is usually conceived as based on self-rule or rule by the people, and it is this which is taken to ground the legitimacy of the democratic form of government. But who constitutes the people? Democratic political theory has a potentially fatal weakness at its core unless it can answer this question satisfactorily. In The Time of Popular Sovereignty, Paulina Ochoa Espejo examines the problems the concept of the people raises for liberal democratic theory, constitutional theory, and critical theory. She argues that to solve these problems, the people cannot be conceived as simply a collection of individuals. Rather, the people should be seen as a series of events, an ongoing process unfolding in time. She then offers a new theory of democratic peoplehood, laying the foundations for a new theory of democratic legitimacy.

Today's unprecedented levels of human migration present urgent challenges to traditional conceptualizations of national identity, nation-state sovereignty, and democratic citizenship. Foreigners are commonly viewed as outsiders whose inclusion within or exclusion from “the people” of the democratic state rests upon whether they benefit or threaten the unity of the nation. Against this instrumentalization of the foreigner, this book traces the historical development of the concepts of sovereignty and foreignness through the thought of philosophers such as Plato, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Derrida, and Benhabib in order to show that foreignness is a structural feature of sovereignty that cannot be purged or assimilated. Understood in this light, foreignness allows for new forms of democratic political unity to be imagined that reject local practices which deprive individuals of political membership solely on the basis of national citizenship. This cosmopolitan model for citizenship provides a novel conceptual framework that simultaneously upholds the legal importance of democratic citizenship for political justice while ceaselessly contesting the exclusionary logic of the nation-state that reserves democratic rights for members of the nation alone.

The question of how to constrain states that commit severe abuses against their own citizens is as persistent as it is vexing. States are imperfect political forms that in theory possess both a monopoly on coercive power and final jurisdictional authority over their territory. These twin elements of sovereignty and authority can be used by state leaders and political representatives in ways that stray significantly from the interests of citizens. In the most extreme cases, when citizens become inconvenient obstacles in the pursuit of the self-serving ambitions of their leaders, state power turns against them. Genocide, torture, displacement, and rape are often the means of choice by which the inconvenient are made to suffer or vanish. In Divided Sovereignty, Carmen Pavel explores new institutional solutions to this abiding problem. She argues that coercive international institutions can stop these abuses and act as an insurance scheme against the possibility of states failing to fulfill their most basic sovereign responsibilities. She thus challenges the longstanding assumption that collective grants of authority from the citizens of a state should be made exclusively for institutions within the borders of that state. Despite worries that international institutions such as the International Criminal Court could undermine domestic democratic control, citizens can divide sovereign authority between state and international institutions consistent with their right of democratic self-governance. Pavel defends universal, principled limits on state authority based on jus cogens norms, a special category of norms in international law that prohibit violations of basic human rights. Against skeptics, she argues that many of the challenges of building an additional layer of institutions can be met if we pay attention to the conditions of institutional success, which require experimentation with different institutional forms, limitations on the scope of authority for coercive international institutions, and an appreciation of the limits of existing knowledge on institutional design. Thoughtfully conceived and forcefully argued, Divided Sovereignty will challenge what we think we know about the relationship between international institutions and the pursuit of the fundamental requirements of justice.