Sovereignty: Who has the last word, and whether it can be shared (2026)

In 1576, with France split by religious civil war, Jean Bodin published a book about the state and put one idea at its centre. 1

He called it sovereignty, "the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth". 2

Absolute, in his sense, meant not bound by statute: not by the laws of his predecessors, not by his own laws, and not requiring the consent of his subjects. 3

It did not mean unbound by everything. Bodin held the sovereign bound by divine law, natural law, and the fundamental laws that fixed who succeeded whom. 3

That is the distinction most later disputes turn on, and ordinary usage drops it first.

The modern core is one phrase: supreme authority within a territory. 1

Three parts sit inside it. Authority rather than force — "the right to command and correlatively the right to be obeyed", as R. P. Wolff put it. 1

Supremacy over every authority beneath it. And territory as the principle of membership, which is why a sovereign state's borders need not follow any nation's. 1

One word, four claims

Stephen Krasner separated four things people mean by the word, and the separation is the most useful instrument available for it. 3

The claim	What it asserts	What defeats it
Domestic sovereignty	An authority inside the state actually controls what happens there. 3	A government that cannot police its territory or collect its taxes.
Interdependence sovereignty	The state controls movement across its own borders. 3	A bloc that sets movement rules, or a border nobody can police.
International legal sovereignty	Other states recognise it as a state. 3	Non-recognition, or a rival government recognised instead.
Westphalian sovereignty	No outside authority stands above the domestic one. 3	A treaty body, a court, or an occupier that can overrule it.

The four vary independently, and Krasner's point is that they are not affected by one another. 3

So a state can be recognised by every government on earth and control nothing inside its own borders. Another can control everything and be recognised by nobody.

Once the rows are separated, most confused arguments become clear ones. A complaint about "sovereignty" is nearly always a complaint about one row, made in the vocabulary of all four.

The sovereign Bodin bound

Bodin's problem was order without licence. F. H. Hinsley described the feat: to establish "a necessarily unrestricted ruling power" while distinguishing it from "an absolutism that was free to disregard all laws and regulations". 1

His answer founded the sovereign's authority in the political society itself, and left natural and divine law standing above it. 1

The quieter half of the definition carries more weight. Power granted for a term is held in trust, and its holder is "but trustees and custodians of that power until such time as it pleases the people or the prince to take it back". 2

A ruler who must be renewed is therefore not sovereign. The body that can renew or revoke him is. 2

Daniel Lee's study of Bodin argues that this is what modern readers miss. Bodin's sovereign is a normative authority bound by natural law, the law of nations and its own contracts, not an early version of a commander who may do as he likes. 1

Hobbes makes the sovereign artificial

Hobbes kept the supremacy and changed the justification. Sovereignty would rest not on a well-ordered hierarchy but on an authorisation. 1

Every man, he wrote, says to every man: "I authorise and give up my right of governing myself, to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner." 4

What results is "that great LEVIATHAN", or, "to speak more reverently", "that Mortall God". 4

The move turns obedience into authorship. The sovereign acts in the person of every subject, so his acts are theirs, which is why Hobbes thought protest against the instituted sovereign unjust rather than merely unwise. 4

That is a stronger claim than Bodin's, and a stranger one. It does not say the sovereign is wise or lawful. It says there is no one left over who could be wronged.

Why Hobbes thought division was suicide

The twenty-ninth chapter of Leviathan lists the doctrines that dissolve a commonwealth. The sixth is "that the sovereign power may be divided". 4

"For what is it to divide the power of a commonwealth, but to dissolve it; for powers divided mutually destroy each other." 4

The argument is not that mixed government is inefficient. It is that a disagreement between two final authorities has no final authority to settle it. 3

England was his evidence. Had the opinion not been received that these powers were divided between the King, the Lords and the House of Commons, "the people had never been divided, and fallen into this Civill Warre". 4

On that reading, the balanced constitution was a cause of the war rather than a description of the settlement.

The people take the last word, and lose the use of it

Rousseau moved the holder of sovereignty from a person to a body. "Sovereignty, being nothing less than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated," he wrote. 5

He refused representation on the same ground. The sovereign "cannot be represented except by himself: the power indeed may be transmitted, but not the will". 5

The consequence is severe. "The moment a people allows itself to be represented, it is no longer free: it no longer exists." 5

Rousseau saw the cost himself and could not see a way around it. The sovereign keeps the exercise of its rights, he wrote, only if the city is very small. 5

The version that governs most states today is the one the Stanford Encyclopedia calls the most commonly legitimate: the people ruling through a body of law. 1

That is a real answer and a partial retreat. It puts the last word in a constitution, which lets courts and procedures speak for the people between elections.

Madison says it can be divided

Madison's answer to Hobbes was a design, defended in the thirty-ninth Federalist. The constitution, he wrote, "is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both". 6

Each state ratified "as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act". 6

Authority was therefore divided by level and by function, on purpose, and the division was claimed as a safeguard rather than admitted as a defect. 6

Europe is the live test of that answer. Member states are sovereign over defence and not sovereign over currency, trade and much social policy, which they administer with EU bodies under EU law. 1

The union "pools" those powers into a supranational institution, which is the neatest working example of sovereignty as a bundle that can be unbundled. 1

Britain's 2016 referendum was fought as a demand to take powers back. What it recovered was authority over the pooled competences, not release from external rules as such. 1

The exception shows where the last word is

Carl Schmitt asked the question from the other end. "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception," opens Political Theology (1922). 1

That is a test rather than a definition. Read the constitution in ordinary times and you learn who governs; read the emergency and you learn who is sovereign. 1

Schmitt drew the conclusion he wanted. Liberal constitutionalism, he thought, could not contain the power struggle that politics is. 1

The argument cannot be separated from its author's politics. Schmitt held Weimar's constitutionalism in contempt and, in the 1930s, "fervently supported the National Socialist regime". 1

The diagnostic outlives the author. Emergency powers are where formal allocations are tested, and a constitution that cannot name who may suspend it is not thereby protected.

Roland Paris has traced a return of pre-Westphalian ideas of sovereignty, "extralegal" and "organic" versions that reject legal equality and non-interference, in Russia, China and the United States. 1

Westphalia is mostly a story we tell

1648 is taught as the moment sovereignty became a system. The treaties do not say so: nothing in the settlement prescribes a sovereign states system, or even the state as the reigning legitimate unit. 1

Osiander, Krasner, Teschke, Nexon and others have argued the founding-moment story should be discarded, noting that hierarchy and outside authority persisted long after the peace. 1

The system's actual global reach came much later, with the end of the European empires, when the state became "the only form of polity ever to cover the entire land surface of the globe". 1

The correction changes who the norm belongs to. Sovereign equality is article 2(1) of the UN Charter; article 2(4) forbids force against "the territorial integrity or political independence of any state"; article 2(7) bars UN intervention in domestic matters. 7

Decolonisation gave that norm its most emphatic affirmation, which is what makes the next argument hard. 8

Sovereignty as responsibility

In 1999 Kofi Annan asked the question the Charter could not answer. If humanitarian intervention is "an unacceptable assault on sovereignty", how should the world respond "to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica"? 8

The commission convened to answer him reported in 2001 with a reframing rather than a repeal. 8

"State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself." 8

Where a state is "unwilling or unable" to stop serious harm, "the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect". 8

The report called this a shift "from sovereignty as control to sovereignty as responsibility in both internal functions and external duties", and divided it into three: to prevent, to react, to rebuild. 8

Member states endorsed a version of it at the 2005 World Summit, in language that keeps the state's own responsibility first. 3

Mamdani's objection is not that atrocity is tolerable. It is that the remedy installs a new authority and calls it a duty. 9

R2P, he argues, "bifurcates the international system between sovereign states whose citizens have political rights, and de facto trusteeship territories whose populations are seen as wards in need of external protection". 9

The split is the argument. Some states keep sovereignty and citizenship together; others are governed from outside in the name of protection. 9

"It turns citizens into wards," he writes, and the two vocabularies are not symmetrical: "the language of sovereignty is profoundly political, that of humanitarian intervention is profoundly apolitical, and sometimes even anti-political". 9

He points to the genealogy, since protecting "vulnerable groups" was a standing idiom of colonial expansion.

The commission's own report concedes the other half: "In the era of decolonization, the sovereign equality of states and the correlative norm of non-intervention received its most emphatic affirmation from the newly independent states." 8 9

His alternative is "an internally-driven process of political reform and legal reconciliation, as pioneered in South Africa". 9

Put the two on one dimension and the disagreement is exact. Both want a person protected from her own state. 8 9

One holds that the guarantee must come from outside, because the state is the danger. The other holds that an outside guarantee displaces the only thing that has ever protected anyone: domestic political power that the protected can hold to account. 9

Each remedy is the other side's diagnosis, which is why the argument recurs instead of settling.

Five questions for the next sovereignty claim

Which of the four? Control, border control, recognition and non-subjection are separate claims, and they fail separately. 3
Is the authority final, or only normally final? Ask who can reallocate it: a court, a treaty body, a bloc, a creditor. 1
Who decides the exception? Whatever the constitution says, emergency powers give the answer. 1
If it is loosened, who receives the authority? Pooling, intervention and secession all move power to somebody; name them. 8
Is the "people" a body that can act, or a placeholder? Rousseau's standard is the strict one, and almost no state meets it. 5

The concept lasts because of what it names: the demand that decisions about a place be made there. Stating the demand has never been the difficulty. Every answer to "by whom" creates an authority that someone else must live under.

References

1
SEP, "Sovereignty"
plato.stanford.edu
2
Bodin, *Six Books of the Commonwealth*, Book I ch. 8
cambridge.org
3
Wikipedia, "Sovereignty"
en.wikipedia.org
4
Hobbes, *Leviathan*, ch. 17
gutenberg.org
5
Rousseau, *The Social Contract*, II.1
gutenberg.org
6
Madison, *Federalist* No. 39
avalon.law.yale.edu
7
UN Charter
un.org
8
ICISS, *The Responsibility to Protect*, 2001
walterdorn.net
9
Mamdani, "Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish?", 2010
tandfonline.com