INTERNATIONAL LAW

Doctrine of Sovereignty of States in the International Legal in Relation to the Pursuit of International Peace and Security a Complex Affair

Doctrine of Sovereignty of States in the International Legal in Relation to the Pursuit of International Peace and Security a Complex Affair

Sovereignty in the context of international law

As the names of the philosophers already mentioned suggest, sovereignty is a Western political concept. In the less-developed world, the concept has taken hold and is still functioning much as it did in the Renaissance: as a way to resolve competition for power among entities within a state. In the developed Western world, however, the concept is now functioning less within a state and more among states. In this larger context, sovereignty allows states, however they might be governed, to exercise the highest, the final, and the most all-encompassing power over their internal affairs without interference from other entities. The United Nations (UN) charter, for example, in Article 2, paragraphs 1 and 7, establishes this concept of sovereignty as a basic assumption for the conduct of international affairs in the post-World War II period.

Already implicit in that charter, however, is a complication that undercuts this concept of sovereignty: The charter recognizes the right of the global community to act under certain circumstances for example, if human rights are being violated. That concern was important in the post-Holocaust environment in which the charter was written, and that concern has incrementally increased in the decades since. Joining it has been a concern for the common resources of air and water as well as the presumably common frontier of space. If the supposed sovereign state is violating human rights or fouling the commons, the international community should be able to act in some manner to overrule that state's internal decisions. Is, then, the international community or some international organization such as the UN sovereign? Most would say no, for UN edicts can be ignored by the state. Of course, the renegade state then tempts the UN to enforce its position militarily. Such action, however, would not be viewed as an affront to the state's sovereignty but, rather, an extraordinary response to a sovereign state's affront to internationally recognized standards of conduct that transcend sovereignty(Held, 1989).

International law has long wrestled with the conflicting idea of sovereignty and the need to deal with the many matters that either do not stay neatly situated within a state's boundaries or require international intervention on moral grounds. Commerce, of course, was the primary example of boundary-crossing activity after the Renaissance. Initially, those involved could be clearly associated with one sovereign state or another, thereby providing international law as a starting point. Today, the globalization of commercial activities has created an environment in which the individual players are not necessarily under a single sovereign state's jurisdiction but are transnational. Under whose authority are they? Or do they possess power that transcends and perhaps surpasses that of the individual state? If so, perhaps these corporations, as well as other international entities, might ...