Sovereignty Games

This book offers an in-depth examination of the strategic use of State sovereignty in contemporary European and international affairs and the consequences of this for authority relations in Europe and beyond. It suggests a new approach to the study of State sovereignty, proposing to understand the use of sovereignty as games where States are becoming more instrumental in their claims to sovereignty and skilled in adapting it to the challenges that they face

This book examines how sovereignty works in the context of European integration and postcolonialism. Focusing on a group of micro-polities associated with the European Union, it offers a new understanding of international relations in the context of modern sovereignty. This book offers a systematic and comparative analysis of the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs), the EU and the four affected Member States: UK, France, the Netherlands and Denmark. Contributors explore how states and state-like entities play ‘sovereignty games’ to understand how a group of postcolonial entities may strategically use their ambiguous status in relation to sovereignty. The book examines why former colonies are seeking greater room to manoeuvre on their own, whilst simultaneously developing a close relationship to the supranational EU. Methodologically sophisticated, this interdisciplinary volume combines interviews, participant observation, textual, legal and institutional analysis for a new theoretical approach to understanding the strategic possibilities and subjectivity of non-sovereign entities in international politics. Bringing together research on European integration and postcolonial theory, European Integration and Postcolonial Sovereignty Games will be of interest to students and scholars of International Relations, EU studies, Postcolonial studies, International Law and Political Theory.

Greenland views itself as being on the way to sovereignty. This image – and the tensions involved in it – structure the triangular relation between the EU, Greenland and Denmark. The central Other of Greenland has for a couple of centuries been Denmark, the colonial overlord. The national identity discourses of Greenland and Denmark both idealize national homogeneity. A central condition for a continuation of Rigsfællesskabet, the 'community of the realm' including Greenland and Denmark, is the idea that Greenland still needs external assistance in its development towards independence - and that this idea can be formulated in a way which does not infantilize Greenland metaphorically. As part of the postcolonial diversification of Greenland's dependency, the bilateral relation between Denmark and Greenland has gradually been opened up to involve 'other others'. Meanwhile, a discourse prognosticates that climate change is opening up the Arctic to minerals extraction and commerce. In these circumstances, the triangular relation with the EU is played out as a series of rhetorical and practical 'sovereignty games', in Nuuk, Copenhagen and Brussels. Particularly, a number of strategies are employed to minimize the apparent role of Denmark for the Greenlandic relations to the EU. The book approaches these changes in national identity discourse and practical foreign policy in five analytical steps: The core concepts organizing Danish and Greenlandic identity are identified in discourse analyses. Political debates are read as political identity negotiations. The practical diplomatic management of clashing identity discourses is uncovered via qualitative interviews with key actors (politicians, diplomats, and civil servants from Greenland, Denmark and the EU). Legal texts are approached as the 'frozen' outcome of rhetorical and practical sovereignty games. Finally, the book develops scenarios for the future and concludes by pointing out how the continuation of the community of the realm may have a better chance if conceived as an 'ever looser union'. One way for Denmark of facilitating this image would be to employ its diplomacy in the service of diversifying Greenland's dependence - following the example set in relation to the EU.

This book explores the interplay between sovereignty, politics and law through different conceptualizations of sovereignty. Despite developments such as European integration, globalization, and state failure, sovereignty proves to be a resilient institution in contemporary international politics. This book investigates both the continuity and change of sovereignty through an examination of the different ways it is understood; sovereignty as an institution, as identity; as a (language) game; and as subjectivity. In this illuminating book, Aalberts examines sovereign statehood as a political-legal concept, an institutional product of modern international society, and seeks an interdisciplinary approach that combines international relations and international law. This book traces the consequences of this origin for the conceptualization of sovereign statehood in modern academic discourse, drawing on key jurisprudence and international treaties, and provides a new framework to consider the international significance of sovereignty. As an innovative approach to a critical institution, Constructing Sovereignty between Politics and Law will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, international relations theory and international law.

The Oxford Handbook of Danish Politics provides the most comprehensive and thorough English language book on Danish politics ever written. It features chapters by 50 leading experts who have contributed extensively to the field they write about. Why is Denmark an interesting topic for a Handbook? In some respects, Danish political institutions and political life are very similar to that of other small, North European countries such as the other Scandinavian countries and Netherland. However, in other respects, Danish politics is interesting in its own right. For instance, Denmark has a world record in minority governments. According to standard scholarly knowledge, this should result in unstable governments and a bad economy. This is not the case, however, since Denmark has a rather stable political system and a strong and robust economy among the strongest in Europe. How? The Danes have continued reservations towards the EU despite close to 50 years of EC/EU membership, and the Danes rejected the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Still, the EU issue is handled in ways that do not call for large political battles. How? A third example is that Denmark used to be known as a tolerant and liberal society; its Jews were almost all saved during German occupation during WWII, Denmark was the first country to free pornography, and the first country to formally register same-sex couples. Yet recent Danish politics has also been associated with xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiments. Why?

The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories is an essay collection made up of two sections; in the first, a group of anglophone and francophone scholars examines the roots, effects and implications of the major social upheaval that shook Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion in February and March of 2009. They clearly demonstrate the critical role played by community activism, art and media to combat politico-economic policies that generate (un)employment, labor exploitation, and unattended health risks, all made secondary to the supremacy of profit. In the second section, additional scholars provide in-depth analyses of the ways in which an insistence on capital accumulation and centralization instantiated broad hierarchies of market-driven profit, capital accumulation, and economic exploitation upon a range of populations and territories in the wider non-sovereign and nominally sovereign Caribbean from Haiti to the Dutch Antilles to Puerto Rico, reinforcing the racialized patterns of socioeconomic exclusion and privatization long imposed by France on its former colonial territories.

This volume uses the concept of ‘norms’ to initiate a long overdue conversation between the constructivist and postcolonial scholarships on how to appraise the ordering processes of international politics. Drawing together insights from a broad range of scholars, it evaluates what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘-ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’ offering ex-centred, post-Eurocentric sites for practices of situated critique. Through in-depth engagements with the norms constructivist scholarship, the contributors expose the theoretical, epistemological and practical erasures that have been implicitly effected by the uncritical adoption of ‘norms’ as the dominant lens for analysing the ideational dynamics of international politics. They show how these are often the very erasures that sustained the workings of colonisation in the first place, whose uneven power relations are thereby further sustained by the study of international politics. The volume makes the case for shifting from a static analysis of ‘norms’ to a dynamic and deeply historical understanding of the drawing of the initial line between the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’ that served to exclude from focus the 'strange' and the unfamiliar that were necessarily brought into play in the encounters between the West and the rest of the world. A timely intervention, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, international relations theory and postcolonial scholarship.

This book examines sovereignty issues in Aotearoa. Articles One and Two of the Treaty of Waitangi are explored and there is a breakdown of attitudes to the Treaty from various positions within New Zealand society. Peter Cleave presents a linguistic analysis of the texts of the Treaty and shows the lines of power and sovereignty as they have evolved over the last 150 years. The book looks forward, also, to the ways in which the Treaty might be read in the development of New Zealand's race relations and in future interpretations of the Treaty.