The Gender of Sovereignty

“Small states often welcome international regimes as barriers to arbitrary abuse of power by the strong. But regimes can be equally valuable to great powers, such as the United States, that want to create, but are unable to dictate, the terms of a stable world environment,” observed Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye in 1985.¹ Recalling key debates in political science will help us make sense of this contemporary contradiction in which the U.S. militarism employed to command the current global economy appears to hark back to political policies of an earlier isolationist nation. In briefly tracing the neorealist and neoliberal debates in political science, I argue that even in their disagreements, the two approaches actually confirm a normative notion of nation-state sovereignty, obscuring the effects of global governance for most of the world’s population. Ultimately, I direct my discussion towards the exploration of feminist political forms that practice alternative notions of sovereignty. Where might we “read” these practices that are rendered illegible within the studies that privilege the normative politics of the western nation-state?

The liberal tradition defines sovereignty as the right of the state to exercise jurisdiction over its citizens, maintain internal order, and defend its territory.² Sovereignty rests on an internal principle, not on the lineage of a dynasty or aristocracy, and in the concept of the nation-state, the political sovereignty of the state is broadened through constitutional enfranchisement and legitimized through a common national culture.³ In principle, civil society integrates national culture, economy, and social order, and the distinction between civil society and the state is crucial to the emergence of the rational public sphere in which citizens speak and debate within the rule of law.⁴ Yet this principle understates the degree to which control over the means of violence has proven to be the defining characteristic of state sovereignty. Indeed, the more effectively a state monopolizes the use of force, the less frequent the state may resort to actual violence. Political science in the United States adopted this liberal definition of sovereignty, and the democratic nation-state has been presumed to be the ideal type, or the model of statehood, for participation in the international interstate system.⁵ The result is that there is an underestimation of the contradictions within the nation-state, on the one hand, and between imperial nation-states and the formerly colonized world, on the other.

With respect to the contradictory inequalities within the nation, the state declares the universal extension of rights to all citizens, yet U.S. history has shown that access to rights has always been unevenly distributed, requiring social movements to call upon the state to establish liberties for subjects who are guaranteed rights in theory. Conceiving the state as grantor of rights, emancipatory and democratizing politics have often struggled to reform the state. For example, workers struggles in the 1940s, and civil rights movements for women and racialized minorities in the 1960s and 70s, are examples of popular efforts to extend equal rights and to make the state accountable for political liberties promised in theory.⁶ When rights have been suspended or curtailed in times of national security—as the rights of Japanese Americans relocated to internment camps during World War II, or the rights of U.S. citizens imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay during the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—struggles for justice on behalf of those denied civil rights have addressed the state. The growth of national industries exacerbated inequalities of property and political representation, and labor movements and trade unions have called upon the state to create certain controls on the “liberties” of factory owners and corporate profits. Of course, tensions between capital and labor have grown exponentially with the neoliberal globalization of the U.S. economy. The internationalization of production not only broke links between domestic producers and domestic labor, but transnational corporate imperatives aimed at reducing labor costs drives corporations to shift production to labor markets in the poorest countries, with the lowest wages and the fewest taxes and regulations.

The focus on the nation-state as the normative political unit also leaves unstudied the historical and structural inequalities between imperial nation-states and the nations of the formerly colonized world, most of which gained independence through decolonization movements in the mid-20th century. During the centuries of European rule, colonial administrations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean extracted profits through imposed forms of economy, politics, religion, language and culture, justifying rule through a “civilizing mission.”⁷ Colonialism included the capture and import of Africans for slave labor on colonial plantations, the destruction of indigenous peoples and brutal suppression of the colonized cultures, and the imposition of European education and social administration. Throughout the nineteenth century, native anti-colonial movements sought to establish self-governing nations independent of their British, French, Dutch and Spanish colonizers.⁸ Anti-colonial movements in most of the former colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean articulated their independence by the mid-20th century by becoming new states on the international stage.

1. Keohane and Nye, Power and Interdependence. Glenview, IL.: Scott, Foresman / Little Brown, 1989, 271. [↩]
2. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689) wrote against the arbitrary rule of the absolute monarch, and asserted that once man accumulated property it would lead to the necessity to found a political society to protect rights to property. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (1762) [The Social Contract], wrote that natural rights are renewed and protected when individuals agree to enter into the social contract founding a political society, organized according to the collective, rather than individual, “general will.” Drawing upon these thinkers and other Enlightenment philosophers, classical liberalism stressed not only human rationality, but the importance of individual property rights, natural rights, the need for constitutional limitations on government, and, especially, freedom of the individual from external restraint. In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill, major British theorist of political liberalism, synthesized the principles of representative government, the protection of civil liberties, and laissez-faire economics that were in force for much of the 19th century. [↩]
3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. [↩]
4. An early crucial formulation of this notion of public reason was Immanuel Kant’s famous 1784 essay, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” [“Beanwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?”] In What is Enlightenment?, James Schmidt, Ed. Berkeley: California, 1996. [↩]
5. Max Weber’s sociology is the origin of the idea of the ideal type, a heuristic proposition against which the difference, variance, or convergence of specific social and historical instances were measured, a comparative mode of study that continues to be influential in most of the modern social sciences, including political science. Weber is well-known for having observed that social behavior in modern western society of the early 20th century had come to be dominated more and more by goal-oriented rationality and instrumental reason, and less and less by traditional values and forms of sociality. This ideal-typical construction of “pure rational action” presumed the individual within the context of modern western industrial society, and measured the different degrees of rationalization as “deviations,” by comparing concrete social instances to this normative regulatory type. Weber, Economy and Society: Volume I. New York: Bedminster Press, 1968 [original pub. 1922]. [↩]
6. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge, 1994. [↩]
7. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914. New York: Pantheon, 1987. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. [↩]
8. On anticolonial nationalisms, see Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral. New York: Monthly Review, 1973; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. Intro. Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: Grove, 1963; Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism; Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World; London: Zed, 1986; P. O. Esedebe, Pan-Africanism: The Idea and the Movement, 1776-1991. Washington, DC: Howard, 1994. [↩]