Sovereignty & the Responsibility to Protect: A New History

LUKE GLANVILLE is a fellow in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University. He is coeditor of several books, including Protecting the Displaced and The Responsibility to Protect and International Law.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2014 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07689-8   (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07692-8   (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07708-6   (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/9780226077086.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Glanville, Luke.

Sovereignty and the responsibility to protect : a new history / Luke Glanville.

       pages.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-07689-8 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-226-07692-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-07708-6 (e-book)

1. Sovereignty.   2. Protectorates.   3. Government accountability.   I. Title.

JC327.G55 2014

320.1'5—dc23

2013009157

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

SOVEREIGNTY AND THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT

A New History

LUKE GLANVILLE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

FOR MUM AND DAD

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Social Construction of Sovereign Responsibilities

2. Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe

3. The Rise of Popular Sovereignty

4. Sovereignty and the Non-European World

5. Sovereignty after the Second World War

6. The Rise of the Responsibility to Protect

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book was first suggested to me by Alex Bellamy at the University of Queensland in early 2006. Alex was an extraordinary supervisor and is now a generous colleague and friend at Griffith University. He has been tireless in his enthusiasm for the project, reading and rereading each part of the book many times over and graciously lending his expansive knowledge, gentle criticism, and wise counsel whenever I have needed it. Richard Devetak was the perfect second supervisor. I have frequently relied upon his profound understanding of the theoretical and historical material covered in the book and his ability to articulate what steps might be taken to make my arguments more persuasive. I am deeply grateful for the wisdom and generosity of both Alex and Richard.

At various stages of the project, Frazer Egerton, Aidan Hehir, Jason Ralph, and Jennifer Welsh have read drafts of the entire manuscript. Many thanks go to them for thoughtful comments, criticisms, and insights that have enabled me to produce a stronger argument and a more polished work. Thanks also go to Shannon Brincat, Tim Dunne, Jess Gifkins, Seb Kaempf, Andrew Phillips, Richard Shapcott, Sarah Teitt, Ryan Walter, and Martin Weber, who each offered helpful comments and suggestions on various parts of the project during my time at the University of Queensland, and also to Sara Davies, Hunjoon Kim, Andrew O’Neil, Haig Patapan, Jason Sharman, Pat Weller, and Wes Widmaier, who have each engaged closely with the project during my time at Griffith. Jason Sharman in particular has devoted many hours to reading and commenting on key parts of the manuscript and helping me find the right publisher for the book. Special thanks go to Mark Chou, with whom I shared an office at the University of Queensland, for many enjoyable pizza lunches, shared discoveries about academic publishing, and arguments about punctuation over the last seven years.

I wish also to acknowledge the invaluable support provided by the team at the University at Chicago Press who have guided this book to publication. I am grateful to David Pervin for supporting the project and for his sage advice about how to make my argument more persuasive and more accessible. I am also grateful to Christie Henry and Shenyun Wu for their commitment to the project and their work in readying it for publication. Thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers who engaged with the manuscript at length and whose constructive criticisms enabled me to produce a better book.

Some of the arguments in this book have been published in earlier form elsewhere. Various chapters draw on material from The Antecedents of ‘Sovereignty as Responsibility,’ European Journal of International Relations 17, no. 2 (2011), 233–55; Darfur and the Responsibilities of Sovereignty, International Journal of Human Rights 15, no. 3 (2011), 462–80; Intervention in Libya: From Sovereign Consent to Regional Consent, International Studies Perspectives 14 (forthcoming); and The Myth of ‘Traditional’ Sovereignty, International Studies Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2013), 79–90. I am grateful to the publishers for permission to use this material.

My deep gratitude goes to Mum, Dad, Mark, Erin, Sarah, and Dave for their unconditional love, support, and prayers. I particularly want to thank Dad for yet again reading over every word of my work with his trusty red pen in hand, and also my little nieces, Milly, Mahla, and Indi, for what I took to be their willingness to do some proofreading of their own if only they had learned to read.

Finally, I want to thank my delightful wife, Clare, for willingly moving away from family and friends to be with me in Brisbane, for tolerating my stresses and odd work habits, for listening to my rants about Hobbes and my musings on the responsibility to protect, and for encouraging and prayerfully supporting me throughout the last seven years.

Brisbane

November 2012

INTRODUCTION

On March 17, 2011, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1973 authorizing the use of all necessary measures to protect civilians from attacks by the Libyan regime of Muammar Gadhafi. The resolution invoked the responsibility to protect, a principle that holds that sovereign states are responsible and accountable both to their own people and to the international society of states for the protection of their populations. Member states had unanimously endorsed this principle at the UN World Summit in 2005. The agreement negotiated at the summit declares, Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, and it further establishes that the international community, through the United Nations, is prepared to take collective action to protect populations should national authorities fail to do so.¹ In adopting Resolution 1973 authorizing intervention in Libya, international society was said to be enforcing the responsibilities of sovereignty.

This book argues that the idea that sovereignty entails a responsibility to protect has deep historical roots. Present-day concepts of sovereignty as responsibility and the responsibility to protect are too often framed as radical departures from what is alleged to be the traditional meaning of sovereignty. The story that is repeatedly told is that sovereign states have always enjoyed unfettered rights to autonomous self-government and freedom from external interference and intervention. The notion that a state’s enjoyment of these rights should be conditional upon their fulfilling certain responsibilities is considered to be a profound revision of the rules of sovereignty, and in some important senses it is. However, far from being a new idea, the notion that sovereigns have responsibilities for the protection of their populations is one with a long and rich history.

The purpose of this book is to examine the antecedents of the notion that sovereignty entails a responsibility to protect. I pose the questions, what is the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility and how has it developed over time? The answer I advance is that sovereign authority has been understood to involve varied and evolving responsibilities since it was first articulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I argue that responsibilities have almost always been found at the heart of both the justification for sovereign authority and the construction of its meaning and content. Such a reading of history offers a correction to the conventional narrative of sovereignty in the field of international relations. In doing so, it serves to reframe present-day ethical debate about the rights and responsibilities of sovereign states, which too often proceeds from a flawed understanding of the past. And it also clarifies the real significance of recent developments in international consensus on the notion that sovereigns have a responsibility to protect their populations.

In this introduction, I briefly outline the conventional story of sovereignty and offer some initial reasons for thinking it to be mistaken. I then note an expanding body of scholarship that has laid the conceptual foundations for rethinking sovereignty and subjecting it to historical inquiry. Finally, I sketch the argument that I will make and anticipate its key implications.

THE CONVENTIONAL STORY OF SOVEREIGNTY

The conventional story of sovereignty told in the discipline of international relations tells us that sovereignty was established sometime around the seventeenth century (at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, according to many accounts), and for several centuries, its meaning did not change. During this time, sovereignty meant that states had a right to govern themselves however they chose, free from outside interference or intervention. It entailed the absence of responsibility or accountability. This is commonly referred to as the traditional meaning of sovereignty. In recent years, the tale goes, the indefeasible rights that sovereigns have traditionally enjoyed have for the first time been challenged by the demands of human rights and notions of sovereign responsibilities.

This conventional story is examined in greater detail in chapter 1. For now, it suffices to observe that the story is pervasive. It is repeatedly told in international relations textbooks that uncritically accept the Westphalian myth and describe the recent collapse of the centuries-old principle that what a state does within its own boundaries is its own business.² The story is similarly embraced by both advocates and critics of the responsibility to protect principle. Advocates cast the notion that sovereigns have a responsibility to protect their populations as a recent and welcome alternative to the idea that state sovereignty is a licence to kill, which is said to have prevailed since the seventeenth century.³ Critics, on the other hand, lament that the foundational rights of sovereign peoples to autonomous self-government and freedom from external interference are being challenged by new and specious notions of sovereign accountability.⁴ Significantly, as chapter 1 explains, the conventional story is also promoted by leading representatives of a range of schools of international relations theory who treat the traditional right of states to autonomy and noninterference as the timeless, objective, and logically deducible essence of sovereignty. As we will see, even Stephen Krasner, who famously observes that this Westphalian model of sovereignty has been repeatedly breached and compromised since the seventeenth century, proceeds on the assumption that sovereignty has always been defined in these terms. The acceptance of the conventional story has a powerful impact on the study of international relations. Intentionally or otherwise, rights to autonomy and nonintervention are reified as fundamental to sovereignty. These rights are cast as perennial attributes of sovereignty that are only now for the first time being challenged by historically contingent responsibilities. The notion that sovereignty entails responsibilities is framed as a radical, new, and perhaps either dangerous or welcome challenge to sovereignty’s traditional meaning.

However, even a cursory glance at history casts doubt on the veracity of the conventional story. It is clear, for example, that sovereigns have not always enjoyed the traditional right of nonintervention. This right was not fully articulated until the mid-eighteenth century (in Emmeric de Vattel’s Law of Nations), well after the initial establishment of sovereignty in Europe, and it continued to be challenged by an accepted right of states to wage war until as late as the first half of the twentieth century. Moreover, the notion that sovereignty entails responsibilities is patently not new. Early modern theorists of absolute sovereignty such as Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes wrote of sovereign duties to obey divine and natural laws, including the protection of the safety of the people. Theorists of popular sovereignty and American and French revolutionaries tied the legitimacy of sovereign representatives to a responsibility to secure the rights of man. Major international peace treaties beginning with the Peace of Westphalia have repeatedly bound sovereigns to protect minority rights and, more recently, human rights. States have accepted an obligation to refrain from slave trading since the nineteenth century. It is well known that the theory and practice of humanitarian intervention has its origins well before the end of the Cold War. And numerous scholars have pointed to historical parallels between present-day notions of sovereign responsibilities and the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century concept of a standard of civilization.⁵ It would seem that the history of sovereignty is more complex than the conventional story allows. There is a clear need, therefore, to confront the influential edifice of traditional sovereignty and to investigate the historical development of the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility.

RETHINKING SOVEREIGNTY

Those who subscribe to the conventional story of sovereignty make the mistake of writing the present into the past. They ascribe to sovereignty a traditional meaning, which they suppose has prevailed for several hundred years because that is how sovereignty has been understood in recent decades. To tell a more accurate story of sovereignty and to trace the development of its relationship with responsibility requires a conceptual approach that is sensitive to history.

Despite the widespread assumption that sovereignty has a natural and timeless meaning, there is fortunately a substantial body of literature that does treat sovereignty as something that demands conceptual and historical inquiry. Sovereignty has long been subjected to rigorous theoretical and historical examination by political theorists, international legal theorists, English School scholars, and, more recently, critical theorists and constructivists. The latter two, in particular, have deliberately sought to problematize sovereignty and to highlight its contingent and contested nature.⁶ And constructivists have traced significant shifts in the meaning of sovereignty since it first emerged in early modern Europe.⁷ This literature has not yet adequately examined sovereignty with respect to the notion of responsibility. Yet it has laid firm foundations upon which a history of the development of the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility can be built.⁸ I examine these conceptual foundations more fully and outline my own social constructivist approach to examining and understanding this history in chapter 1.

I suggest in this book that a history of the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility cannot focus solely on the construction of sovereignty in the international realm. As Martin Wight’s classic study of international legitimacy demonstrates, we must understand changes in principles of legitimacy within states if we wish to comprehend shifts in the principles that guide relations between states.⁹ We cannot understand the historical development of the external dimension of sovereignty without giving due consideration to the history of its internal aspect. Sovereigns have historically been understood to be responsible and accountable at different times and in various ways not only externally, to the society of states, but also internally, to the people, and also to God, for the fulfillment of their responsibilities. Failure to fulfill responsibilities owed to international society has in certain circumstances led to international condemnation and even legitimized intervention. Failure to carry out obligations to the people or to God, on the other hand, has at various times been understood to lead to rightful popular resistance or the necessity of answering to God on the day of judgment. These different aspects of sovereign responsibility have historically tended to feed into each other. Of particular importance for the present study, evolutions in domestic conceptions of sovereignty have time and time again gradually fed into international society’s construction of sovereignty. The shift from dynastic to popular sovereignty that was initiated in the American and French Revolutions, for example, had a profound impact on the subsequent construction of the justification, meaning, and responsibilities of sovereignty by the society of states. The historical development of the internal dimension of sovereignty therefore constitutes an important part of the rich history of sovereignty that needs to be traced in conjunction with the external aspect in order to fully understand the development of the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility.

A NEW STORY OF SOVEREIGNTY

The central claim of this book is that sovereign authority has been understood to involve varied and evolving responsibilities since it was first articulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In defense of this claim, I offer a history of the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility that challenges the conventional account. The story that I put forward is not simply a catalog of examples of the articulation, acceptance, and enforcement of sovereign responsibilities over the past few hundred years. Rather, it is an inquiry into how these responsibilities emerged and evolved and a study of the tensions between these changing responsibilities and the equally socially and historically contingent rights of sovereignty. The scope of responsibilities for which sovereigns have been said to be accountable is quite broad. Today they include responsibilities for environmental protection and global health, prevention of the spread of weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism, adherence to the laws of war, and a range of other international norms and principles.¹⁰ There is a story to be told about the historical development of each of these sovereign responsibilities. I focus primarily on the development of sovereign responsibilities for the protection of populations.

I do not seek to pass normative judgment on the historical development of the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility. I claim neither that the various historical constructions of sovereign responsibilities that I trace ought to be celebrated nor that they should be lamented. I simply seek to explore how the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility has developed over time. However, I do suggest in the book’s conclusion that my new reading of the historical development of the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility has significant implications for the way we ought to frame present-day normative debates about how the rules of sovereignty ought to be constructed, since these debates are too often grounded in a flawed understanding of history.

The broad contours of the historical story that I tell can be summarized thus: From its earliest articulations by political theorists in early modern Europe such as Bodin and Hobbes, sovereignty was conceived to entail responsibilities.¹¹ As I explain in chapter 2, the dominant discourse of absolute sovereignty was characterized not only by forceful defenses of centralized and irresistible rule but also by a sincere concern with opposing the tyrannical use of authority. Central to theories of absolute sovereignty, therefore, was the interdependence of authority and responsibility. The authority of sovereigns was conceived to be limited by various divine, moral, and juridical responsibilities and ideas of mutual obligations between ruler and subject. While sovereigns were not understood to be answerable to the people, they were certainly conceived to be responsible for the people and answerable to God. Moreover, rulers were also understood to be accountable to neighboring princes for the performance of their sovereign responsibilities. Indeed, rather than a right of nonintervention, it was the right to wage war to uphold natural law that was first conceived to be the external corollary of the internal supremacy of the sovereign. Hugo Grotius was one of numerous theorists who justified resorting war to hold to account sovereign princes who violated this law by acting tyrannically and oppressing their own people. It was also in this early modern period that an international society of states began to tentatively emerge. At important moments such as the Peace of Westphalia, mutual recognition of claims to sovereign authority paved the way for the construction of not only rights but enforceable responsibilities of legitimate statehood, including responsibilities for toleration of religious minorities. It was not until the mid-eighteenth century that Vattel clearly articulated for the first time the sovereign right of nonintervention, and yet even he balanced this right with the claim that those sovereign states that were tyrannical and oppressive should be denied its protection.

The notion that the sovereign is responsible for the protection of the people can also be clearly found in ideas about popular sovereignty expressed by theorists such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and by the American and French revolutionaries. As is detailed in chapter 3, the concept of popular sovereignty held that rulers were responsible not only for but to the people for the protection of their safety and security. However, the concept, as it emerged, entailed two potentially conflicting ideas: the right of individuals to liberty and equality and the right of peoples or nations to be self-governing and free from outside interference. While the protection of individual rights was central to both the American and French understanding of popular sovereignty, in the French context in particular the responsibility for the protection of these rights was established in tension with the rights and objectives of the nation-state. After the French Revolution, it was the right of nations to govern themselves, not the rights of the individuals within these nations, that came to dominate the understanding of the sovereignty of the people in Europe. The principle of national self-determination was established as a legitimacy principle by the society of states at the end of the First World War, and it was complemented by tentative rights of nations to nonintervention and noninterference in matters of domestic jurisdiction. However, these emergent rights were held in tension, at least to some degree, with an unsettled doctrine of humanitarian intervention that had developed through the nineteenth century and also a weak minority-rights regime that accorded binding responsibilities to at least some European states. Thus the tensions inherent in the idea of popular sovereignty were transferred to the international level.

While notions of sovereign responsibilities were to a significant extent being suppressed by emergent sovereign rights within Europe in these years, the idea that sovereignty entails responsibilities could still be clearly found in the relations between European international society and the non-European world. As I demonstrate in chapter 4, these responsibilities were expressed in justifications for early examples of humanitarian intervention, in the standard of civilization, in the abolition of the slave trade, and in justifications for colonialism. I argue that these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century expressions of responsibility can be rightly understood as germs of present-day notions of sovereignty as responsibility and the responsibility to protect. Yet I also observe that the enduring memory of humiliation and oppression suffered by non-Europeans at the hands of Europeans in this period has sustained their demands for unconditional sovereign rights to self-government and nonintervention and their opposition to notions of sovereign accountability since the Second World War. In the book’s conclusion, I explore how uncritical acceptance of the conventional story of sovereignty has meant that advocates of the responsibility to protect have failed to grapple with the problematic legacy of European imperialism that was so plainly justified according to ideas of sovereign responsibilities.

The supposed traditional rights of sovereign peoples to self-government and freedom from external interference were only for the first time firmly and unambiguously established in international law in the UN Charter in 1945 and were subsequently universalized over the next two decades through the process of decolonization. As I explain in chapter 5, from the moment they were established in the UN Charter, these sovereign rights were held in some tension with an emergent international human-rights regime. However, through the course of the Cold War, the notion of international enforcement of responsibilities for the defense and promotion of human rights for the most part made little headway against a firmly non-interventionist conception of sovereignty. Nevertheless, the individual-rights dimension of popular sovereignty would not be forever held at bay. The sovereignty of the people was justified on individual-rights grounds by eighteenth-century revolutionaries and twentieth-century anticolonialists alike. The development of the idea that sovereignty entails a responsibility to protect in the years since the end of the Cold War represents an attempt to enforce the protection of these individual rights; it is an attempt to resolve the inherent contradictions in the idea of sovereignty.

This most recent conceptualization of sovereign responsibilities, whose development I examine in chapter 6, suggests that, while peoples have a right to govern themselves free from outside interference, this should be conditional on their protection of human rights. When a sovereign state proves unwilling or unable to protect its own population, it yields its sovereign right of nonintervention, and the responsibility to protect passes to the society of states. This indeed represents a new conception of the rules of sovereignty, yet it can also be understood as international society imposing upon sovereign peoples only that which anticolonialists recently declared for themselves and which American and French revolutionaries declared for themselves more than two centuries ago; or international society universalizing only those principles of responsibility it had accepted in relation to the non-European world over one century ago; or indeed international society demanding adherence only to those principles of natural law that were central to the legitimation of sovereignty when it first emerged in early modern Europe.

In short, the notion that sovereignty entails some particular set of responsibilities is not new. Indeed, sovereign rights and sovereign responsibilities have historically been interdependent. The history of sovereignty is in many ways a history of domestic and international demands that the practices of sovereigns be reconciled to the justifications for sovereignty and that the rights of sovereigns be limited by the responsibilities that underpin the legitimation of their authority. The present-day idea that sovereign states are responsible to their populations and to international society for the protection of individual rights does not break with a centuries-old tradition of unaltered and untrammeled sovereign rights. The boundaries of legitimate sovereign action have always been contested, and the idea that states have responsibilities—including a responsibility to protect the safety of individuals—has been an enduring feature of the discussion of legitimate sovereignty since it first emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This book, then, has three key implications, each of which I discuss in the conclusion. First, the reading of history that I offer provides a correction to the conventional story of sovereignty in the discipline of international relations. The idea of responsibility is put in its proper place as an enduring feature of the historical construction of sovereignty that is no more contingent or abstract than are the supposed traditional rights of sovereignty. Second, this disciplinary correction reframes the present-day ethical debate about the rights and responsibilities of sovereignty by confronting the reification of the supposed traditional meaning of sovereignty and refuting the claim that the idea that sovereignty entails responsibilities is a recent and perhaps either a dangerous or welcome challenge to this centuries-old conception. It requires that critics of the responsibility to protect refrain from casting socially and historically contingent sovereign rights as timeless and natural—and therefore beyond question—and it demands that advocates cease blaming a mythical definition of sovereignty for past failures to confront mass atrocities and that they take more adequate account of the problematic legacy of past constructions of sovereign responsibilities. Third, the provision of a more accurate history clarifies the real significance of recent developments in international consensus on the notion that sovereigns have a responsibility to protect their populations. Before developing my new story of sovereignty, however, I must lay some conceptual foundations. That is the task of chapter 1.

CHAPTER ONE

The Social Construction of Sovereign Responsibilities

Sovereignty is a key organizing principle of international society, yet it is notoriously difficult to describe. More than one hundred years ago, Lassa Oppenheim noted, There exists perhaps no conception the meaning of which is more controversial than that of sovereignty. It is an indisputable fact, he continued, that this conception, from the moment when it was introduced into political science until the present day, has never had a meaning which was universally agreed upon.¹ More recently, Michael Fowler and Julie Bunck have observed, The concept of sovereignty has been used not only in different senses by different people, or in different senses at different times, but in different senses by the same person in rapid succession.² As this chapter and, more broadly, this book make clear, it is not a categorical or timeless definition of sovereignty that we seek. Nevertheless, there is a need for adequate tools for talking about sovereignty—for discussing how it is constituted and practiced and for articulating change in its meaning and content.

This chapter lays a conceptual foundation for the examination of the historical development of the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility that follows. I argue that sovereignty is not an objective and unchanging principle but something that demands conceptual and historical inquiry, and I outline a framework for examining the social and historical construction of sovereignty that allows for consideration of the responsibilities assigned to sovereignty in different historical periods. The chapter proceeds in three sections. The first examines how sovereignty has been understood in international relations theory. I demonstrate the pervasiveness of the conventional story of sovereignty, as described in the introduction, before considering the work of theorists who have challenged the assumptions of this story and subjected sovereignty to conceptual and historical scrutiny. I defend a constructivist understanding of sovereignty, which emphasizes its historically contingent and contested nature, against Stephen Krasner’s argument about sovereignty, which acknowledges historical deviations from the conventional story but refuses to allow that the meaning of sovereignty may have changed over time. In the second section, I outline a framework for conceptualizing the social and historical construction of sovereignty that enables us to understand the development of its relationship with notions of responsibility. I suggest that the constructed meaning of sovereignty at a given time can be fruitfully understood through examination of its historically contingent rules. These rules include the requirements that must be satisfied for a claim to sovereign authority to be recognized and the rights and responsibilities that flow from recognition. I consider the nature of these rules and their relationship with each other, emphasizing that they are each constructed rather than given and that they have varied and evolved over time. In the final section, I briefly outline how I will interpret the social construction of sovereignty in the remainder of the book.

SOVEREIGNTY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY

The conventional story of sovereignty commonly told by scholars of international relations ascribes to sovereignty a natural and timeless definition that was supposedly established sometime in the seventeenth century and that remained unchanged for several centuries. In its traditional or Westphalian guise, sovereignty meant that states had an indefeasible right to autonomous self-government, free from outside interference and intervention. Sovereigns were responsible and accountable to none but themselves. In recent years, so the tale goes, this meaning of sovereignty has come under challenge, only for the first time, by the emergence of human-rights norms and notions of sovereign responsibilities.

The conventional story of sovereignty is told and retold in introductory international relations texts. One such text declares, Sovereignty . . . means that the government has the right, at least in principle, to do whatever it wants in its own territory. . . . Sovereignty also means that states are not supposed to interfere in the internal affairs of other states . . . they are not supposed to meddle in the internal politics and decision processes of other states.³ Another speaks of the traditional legal rule of state sovereignty and its corollary—the non-intervention norm prohibiting external interference in the internal affairs of states, which has recently been revised with the emergence of international human-rights law.⁴ The result of this revision is said to have been the collapse of the Westphalian principle that what a state does within its own boundaries is its own business.⁵ A text on human rights in international relations similarly maintains, Prior to 1945, the relation between an individual and a state controlling ‘its’ citizens was a matter for that state alone. The state was sovereign in an almost absolute sense, exercising supreme legal authority within its jurisdiction. It goes on to explain that, because of the emergence of international human rights, by about 2000 . . . reference to the idea of state sovereignty no longer provided an automatic and impenetrable shield against international action on issues once regarded as essentially domestic.⁶

This same story of sovereignty is offered by both advocates and critics of the responsibility to protect. Advocates portray the notion that sovereignty entails a responsibility to protect as a new and welcome alternative to the traditional view that sovereignty meant immunity from outside scrutiny or sanction.⁷ Since the seventeenth century, they suggest, the view had prevailed that state sovereignty is a licence to kill: that it is no one’s business but their own if states murder or forcibly displace large numbers of their own citizens, or allow atrocity crimes to be committed by one group against another on their soil.⁸ It is to be celebrated then, they insist, that sovereignty is no longer sacrosanct⁹ and that the untrammeled rights that sovereigns have traditionally enjoyed are finally being challenged.¹⁰ Critics, on the other hand, lament that the supposedly foundational and traditional rights of sovereign peoples to autonomously govern themselves and to pursue their own conception of the good life, free from outside interference, are now being threatened by new and specious notions of sovereign accountability.¹¹ They warn of the dangers of replacing the traditional view that sovereignty implies non-interference with a redefined concept of sovereignty as responsibility, which implies the right of interference if ‘the community of responsible states’ decides this to be in the interests of protection. Moreover, they argue that such new ideas are incoherent, since a power which is ‘accountable’ to another, external, body clearly lacks sovereign authority.¹²

This conventional story of sovereignty is supported by leading representatives of a range of schools of international relations who assume that the supposed traditional rights of states, particularly the right of non-intervention, represent the timeless essence of sovereignty. English School scholars, for example, have been sensitive to historical developments in the criteria for sovereign recognition, yet they have tended to treat sovereignty itself as a static institution entailing a right of nonintervention. R. J. Vincent, for example, contends that the rule of nonintervention derives from the principle of sovereignty and plainly declares: if sovereignty, then non-intervention; Robert Jackson asserts that the normative logic of sovereignty necessitates that nonintervention is one of its basic norms; and Barry Buzan labels nonintervention a corollary of sovereignty.¹³ Realist scholars have tended to devote little attention to the nature or history of sovereignty, instead treating it as an ahistorical and empirically measurable attribute of statehood.¹⁴ Those realists who have subjected sovereignty to conceptual inquiry have tended to assume that it necessarily entails nonintervention. Hans Morgenthau, for example, ties sovereignty to nonintervention by suggesting that nonintervention is a logical precondition for the existence of a multiple state-system . . . [and it] makes sovereignty as a legal concept possible.¹⁵ Stephen Krasner’s well-known realist argument about sovereignty, an argument that I will consider in more detail shortly, is grounded in a static definition of what he terms Westphalian sovereignty, the fundamental rule of which is that states should refrain from intervening in the internal affairs of other states.¹⁶ Krasner catalogs numerous breaches of this model of sovereignty, suggests that these breaches have been an enduring characteristic of the international environment,¹⁷ and labels this phenomenon organized hypocrisy. Yet he perpetuates the conventional story by proceeding from the assumption that, while often compromised, Westphalian sovereignty has always been defined in terms of a right to freedom from intervention.¹⁸ Finally, even some constructivist theorists, despite their emphasis on the contingent and contested nature of social norms, embrace the supposed traditional definition of sovereignty. Daniel Philpott, for example, grounds his formidable examination of the historical construction of sovereignty in the ahistorical assumption that sovereignty implies immunity from external interference.¹⁹ He then proceeds to repeat the conventional story, arguing that states have enjoyed a right of noninterference since Westphalia and suggesting that this right has only come under challenge with the emerging acceptance of humanitarian intervention in the aftermath of the Cold War.²⁰ He offers the extraordinary claim that in the history of sovereignty one can skip three hundred years without omitting noteworthy change.²¹ In a critique of Krasner’s argument, Philpott takes the supposedly timeless Westphalian model for granted and merely insists that, rather than a case of organized hypocrisy, this traditional understanding of