dr.woooo posts a long essay, in two parts. The second part can be found here.
"The Perverse Perseverance of Sovereignty"
Anthony Burke,
University of Adelaide
1. It's a familiar story: the withering away of the state under globalisation, or if not so much the state, the withering away of a certain idea and formation of sovereignty. A sovereignty that no longer possesses the fullness and power of its Westphalian ideal: a bounded territorial realm in which national authority is absolute, which provides a representative and political principle through which states and their people can manage and control the forces that affect their lives. With the increasing globalisation of capital and trade, the growth of supranational regimes of economic governance such as the WTO, the interventionist zeal of the World Bank and the IMF, and the might and influence of the transnational corporation, sovereignty appears to be a thing of the past - the nostalgic ghost of a world transformed.
2. Such views, with more or less sophistication, are visible across the political continuum. We can recall the Economist's stunning headline of 1986, 'The nation-state is dead', or point to the respected critical scholar of globalisation, Jan Aart Scholte, who maintains that, even while 'the state apparatus survives' and 'is more intrusive in social life than before…the core Westphalian norm of sovereignty is no longer operative'. (Economist 1995/6; Scholte 1999: 21) Even one of the most intriguing and profound discussions of globalisation in recent years, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire, falls prey to this logic. 'The passage to Empire', they write, 'emerges from the twilight of modern sovereignty'. (2000: xii)
