Sovereignty

About: Sovereignty is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 25909 publications have been published within this topic receiving 410148 citations.

The Global Economy and the Nation-State

Abstract: Since talk of the globalization of the worlds economy began some 35 years ago, the demise of the nation-state has been widely predicted. Actually, the best and the brightest have been predicting the nation state s demise for 200 years, beginning with Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay "Perpetual Peace/' through Karl Marx in "Withering Away of the State," to Bertrand Russell's speeches in the 1950s and 1960s. The latest such prediction by eminent and serious people appears in a book called The Sovereign Individually Lord William Rees-Mogg, former editor of the London Times and now vice chairman of the BBC, and James Dale Davidson, chairman of Britain's National Tax Payers' Union. Rees-Mogg and Davidson assert that for all but the lowest earners the Internet will make avoiding taxes so easy and risk less that sovereignty will inevitably shift to the individual, leaving the nation-state to die of fiscal starvation.

International Economic Integration

Abstract: International economic integration is one aspect of ‘international economics’ that has been growing in importance in the past four decades or so. It is concerned with the discriminatory removal of all trade impediments between the participating nations and with the establishment of certain elements of cooperation and coordination between them. The latter depends entirely on the actual form that integration takes. Different forms of international integration can be envisaged, and some have actually been implemented: 1. Free trade areas, where the member nations remove all trade impediments among themselves but retain their freedom with regard to the determination of their policies vis-a-vis the outside world (the non-participants): e.g., EFTA and the Latin American Free Trade Area (LAFTA). 2. Customs unions, which are very similar to free trade areas except that member nations must conduct and pursue common external commercial relations; for instance, they must adopt common external tariffs (CETs) on imports from the non-participants, as is the case in the EU; the EU in this particular sense is a customs union, but it is much more than that. 3. Common markets, which are customs unions that also allow for free factor mobility across national member frontiers; i.e. capital, labour and enterprise should move unhindered between the participating countries, as in the example of the East African Community (EAG) and the EU (but again it is far more complex). 4. Complete economic unions, which are common markets that ask for complete unification of monetary and fiscal policies; i.e., a central authority is introduced to exercise control over these matters so that existing member nations effectively become regions of one nation. 5. Complete political integration, where the participants become literally one nation: i.e., the central authority needed in point 4 not only controls monetary and fiscal policies but is also responsible to a central Parliament with the sovereignty of a nation’s government. An example of this is the recent unification of the two Germanies.

Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World

Abstract: Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu New York: Oxford University Press, 2006 226 pp $2800 hbk John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, proclaimed in his "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" in 1996: I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you [Governments of the Industrial World] seek to impose on us You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear Cyberspace does not lie within your borders Barlow's vision of the Internet as separate from the real world appears increasingly off base Indeed, his then-daring declaration of cyberspace independence seems to be somewhat foolhardy now A growing number of governments have taken legal actions against Internet access providers and publishers "using old-fashioned laws, in old-fashioned courts" The notion of the borderless Internet, to the dismay of many cyber-libertarians, is more often tested these days Most significantly, the High Court of Australia held in 2002 that when Internet service provider subscribers in an Australian state read a defamatory statement published online by a US news media, a court of that state can hear a libel action relating to the statement In this light, the Yahoo! case, which involved a French court's order to the US-based Internet portal to ban display of Nazi insignia on its sites, carries far-reaching ramifications for evolving cyberlaw A US federal district court in 2001 held the Yahoo! decision of the French court unenforceable because it violated the First Amendment In 2006, a divided en bane panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the case Nonetheless, it artfully bypassed the substantive question: Does the First Amendment protect US-based Internet service providers against foreign court judgments? To Barlow and his ilk, Who Controls the Internet? offers a sobering reality check on nonchalant rejections of traditional legal tools to resolve regulatory problems that arise from the Internet As its subtitle, Illusions of a Borderless World, indicates, the book, by professor Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School and professor Tim Wu of Columbia Law School, tells "the story of the death of the dream of self-governing cyber-communities that would escape geography forever" The book starts with a fascinating account of the Yahoo case to exemplify the Internet's transformation from resisting territorial law to accommodating it Goldsmith and Wu pay attention to the lives and careers of several key Internet players in envisioning the post-territorial order of the cyberworld Jon Postel, the god of the Internet, and Vint Cerf, "father of the Internet," are among those luminaries whose vision and leadership in the Internet revolution are arrestingly chronicled The book's second part focuses on the government's resurgent role in bordering the presumably borderless Internet Goldsmith and Wu explore geo-identity technology and its impact on the territorial government's assertion of its sovereignty over cybercommunication They examine how national governments can regulate offshore Internet communications through the backdoor, ie, through coercion of local Internet intermediaries China is fleshed out as an "extreme example" of how and why the Internet remains geography dictated In their China chapter, Goldsmith and Wu challenge the West's simplistic assumption that the Internet would make the Chinese government's political controls ineffective sooner or later …

Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power: Agamben and Foucault

Abstract: In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben criticizes Michel Foucault's distinction between 'productive' bio-power and 'deductive' sovereign power, emphasizing that it is not possible to distinguish between these two. In his view, the production of what he calls 'bare life' is the original, although concealed, activity of sovereign power. In this article, Agamben's conclusions are called into question. (1) The notion of 'bare life', distinguished from the 'form of life', belongs exclusively to the order of sovereignty, being incompatible with the modern bio-political notion of life, that is univocal and immanent to itself. In the era of bio-politics, life is already a bios that is only its own zoe ('form-of-life'). (2) Violence is not hidden in the foundation of bio-politics; the 'hidden' foundation of bio-politics is love (agape) and care (cura), 'care for individual life'. (3) Bio-politics is not absolutised in the Third Reich; the only thing that the Third Reich absolutises is the sovereignty of power (Aryan race) and the nakedness of life (the Jews). (4) St Paul's 'messianic revolution' does not endow us with the means of breaking away from the closure of bio-political rationality; on the contrary, Paul's 'messianic revolution' is a historical precondition for the deployment of modern bio-politics. (5) Instead of homo sacer, who is permitted to kill without committing homicide, the paradigmatic figure of the bio-political society can be seen, for example, in the middle-class Swedish social-democrat.

Globalization and Sovereignty

Abstract: Globalization represents the reality that we live in a time when the walls of sovereignty are no protection against the movements of capital, labor, information and ideas—nor can they provide effective protection against harm and damage.1 This declaration by Judge Rosalyn Higgins, the former President of the International Court of Justice, represents the conventional wisdom about the future of global governance. Many view globalization as a reality that will erode or even eliminate the sovereignty of nation-states. The typical account points to at least three ways that globalization has affected sovereignty. First, the rise of international trade and capital markets has interfered with the ability of nation-states to control their domestic economies.2 Second, nation-states have responded by delegating authority to international organizations.3 Third, a “new” international law, generated in part by these organizations, has placed limitations on the independent conduct of domestic policies.4