Divisible Sovereignty and the Reconstruction of Iraq

Abstract

Seeking to make sense of conflicting views regarding the continued relevance of the notion of sovereignty, this article argues that there is a discrepancy between international norms and practices. This discrepancy is rooted in conflicting understandings of the term sovereignty. By building on the link between sovereignty, the state of emergency, and the dialectic of auctoritas and potestas, this article proposes a new reading of sovereignty based on an understanding taken from Hugo Grotius. The argument formulated posits that the current political impasse in Iraq can only be adequately analysed through the lens of divisible sovereignty, and that such a perspective will aid in judging future developments in Iraq and in forecasting the political success or failure of post-war reconstruction there.

Notes

Rolf Schwarz and Oliver Jütersonke are both at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Avenue de la Paix 11a, 1202 Geneva, Switzerland. Email: [email protected] [email protected]

We would like to thank Peter Haggenmacher for his extensive comments on Hugo Grotius, and Marcelo Kohen, William Bain and the participants of the 2004 Annual Conference of the British International Studies Association in Warwick for constructive suggestions and debate.

EN van Kleffens, ‘Sovereignty in International Law, Five Lectures’, Recueil des Cours (RCADI), 32, 1953, p 128.

See SD Krasner, ‘Pervasive not perverse: semi-sovereigns as the global norm’, Cornell International Law Journal, 30, 1997, pp 651 – 680. His subsequent book, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, adds a fourth meaning of sovereignty, namely interdependence sovereignty, but this usage has no bearing on the present argument.

H Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Book 1, ch 3, para 7.

G Jellinek, Allgemeine Staatslehre (3rd edition), Berlin: Julius Springer, 1922, pp 457 – 458. Authors' translation.

While Grotius did not develop a theory of divisible sovereignty in its own sense, there are several passages in his work which demonstrate that divisions of sovereignty may occur in practice and in theory. Furthermore, Grotius' understanding of sovereignty was not yet that of state sovereignty—this is first found in Emer de Vattel's The Law of Nations—and thus resembles what Krasner has termed ‘domestic sovereignty’. See P Haggenmacher, Grotius et la doctrine de la guerre juste, Paris: Presse Universitaire de France, 1983, p 540.

From an international law perspective, Iraq's sovereignty was of course neither suspended nor did Iraq ever cease to be a sovereign state. Solely the exercise of sovereignty was suspended temporarily. See MG Kohen, ‘L'administration actuelle de l'Irak: vers une nouvelle forme de protectorat?’, in Karine Bannelier, Théodore Christakis, Olivier Corten & Pierre Klein (eds), L'intervention en Irak et le droit international, Paris: Pedone, 2004, pp 299 – 315, at 301. This distinction between the possession and the exercise of sovereignty was interestingly already highlighted by Hugo Grotius when he affirmed that the ‘sovereign power is one thing, the manner of holding it is another’. H Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Book 1, Amsterdam: G Fritsch, 1735, ch 4, para 10.

D Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller in Weimar, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p 5. See also A Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, New York: International Publishers, 1971, pp 3 – 23, 323 – 343.

See, for example, JS Barkin, ‘The evolution of the constitution of sovereignty and the emergence of human rights norms’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 27 (2), 1998, pp 229 – 252; ME Keck & K Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998; and T Bierstecker & C Weber (eds), State Sovereignty as Social Construct, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

E Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p 4.

Others had obviously treated the issue of sovereignty before Bodin. Machiavelli, for example, postulated the absolute sovereignty of the territorial state in relation to its neighbours, but did not discuss the location of sovereign power within the state, nor did he analyse the question from a theoretical legal perspective.

‘Haec ergo summa potestas quod subiectum habeat, videamus…Summa autem illa dicitur, cuius actus alterius iuri non subsunt, ita ut alterius voluntatis humanae arbitrio irriti possint reddi.’ Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Book 1, ch 3, para 7. The English translation is taken from FW Kelsey, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Libri Tres, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925.

‘Verissimum illud, omnia incerta esse simul a iure recessum est.’ Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Prolegomena 22.

H Suganami, ‘Grotius and international equality’, in H Bull et al (eds), Hugo Grotius and International Relations, Oxford: Clarendon, 1990, pp 221 – 240, at p 226. The view that many writers on the law of nations in the formative years of international law did not share Grotius' opinion is brought forward by ED Dickinson, The Equality of States in International Law, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920.

Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Book 2, ch 5, para 23.

Identical hierarchical notions of society led some Confucian cultures to produce hierarchical conceptions of international relations. See Suganami, ‘Grotius and international equality’.

Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Book 1, ch 3, paras 21.2, 21.3.

Ibid, para. 21.10, translation taken from Kelsey, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Libri Tres, p 135.

Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Book 1, ch 3, para 21.11.

R Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p 80 et seq.

RJ Vincent, ‘Grotius, human rights, and intervention’, in Bull et al, Hugo Grotius and International Relations, p 244.

That sovereignty (summa potestas) was seen by Grotius as a right in its own sense, is affirmed by Haggenmacher, Grotius et la doctrine de la guerre juste, p 538, where textual evidence for the acquisition, partition and alienation of this right is given.

H Grotius, Commentarius in Theses XI, ad thesin 4, translation taken from P Borschberg, ‘Commentarius in Theses XI’: An Early Treatise on Sovereignty, the Just War and the Legitimacy of the Dutch Revolt, Bern: Peter Lang, 1994, p 227.

Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Book 1, ch 3, para 5.7, translation taken from Kelsey, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Libri Tres, pp 100 – 101.

Ibid, ch 4, para 13, translation taken from Kelsey, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Libri Tres, p 158.

These rights were limited to specific circumstances which related (a) to private ownership, where lands were still under pre-social communal ownership and hence available for appropriation, and (b) to public purposes of warfare, in the sense that no recourse to public judicial proceedings was available to correct an injustice.

Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society, pp 146 – 147.

Charter of the United Nations and Statute of the International Court of Justice, San Francisco, 26 June 1945, New York: United Nations, Department of Public Information, 1990.

M Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870 – 1960, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p 176, (emphasis in original).

See T Young, ‘A project to be realized: global liberalism and a new world order’, in E Hovden & E Keene (eds), The Globalization of Liberalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002, pp 173 – 190, at 180.

Ibid, p 184.

C Schmitt, Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996 (first published 1922).

FH Hinsley, Sovereignty, London: CA Watts, 1996, p 1.

H Arendt, ‘What is authority?’ in Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, New York: Penguin, 1987, pp 91 – 141, at 92, emphasis in the original.

Cited in T Mommsen, Römisches Staatsrecht, Vol 3, Part 2, Basle: Schwabe, 1952, p 1034. For the difficulties in deriving a unified definition of auctoritas, see also R Heinze, ‘Auctoritas’, Hermes, 60, 1925, pp 348 – 366; and A Magdelain, Jus Imperium Auctoritas. Etudes de droit romain, Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1990.

Cited in C Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1928, p 75.

W Bain, ‘Unravelling the Gordian Knot: pluralism, solidarism, and the problem of obligation’, paper presented at the Annual Conference of the British International Studies Association, University of Warwick, 20 – 22 December 2004. In the case of mediaeval Christendom, this understanding of a division of allegiance is, on the whole, comparable with the notion of divisible sovereignty proposed in this article.

G Agamben, État d'exception, Paris: Seuil, 2003, p 144.

Kohen, ‘L'administration actuelle de l'Irak’, p 304.

T Dodge, ‘Regime change in Iraq: a step too far in the liberal world order’, paper presented at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva, 9 November 2004.

Further examples of state collapse include Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Congo/Zaire and Albania. See J Milliken & K Krause, ‘State failure, state collapse, and state reconstruction: concepts, lessons and strategies’, Development and Change, 33 (5), 2002, pp 753 – 774, at 754 – 755.

A Meddeb, La Maladie de l'Islam, Paris: Seuil, 2002.

Another example of pre-existing laws limiting the Iraqi Interim Government relates to the territorial administration of Iraq and the boundaries of electoral constituencies in the January elections. This has caused serious discontent, particularly in the Al-Tamim province.

T Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.

T Dodge, ‘A sovereign Iraq?’, Survival, 46 (3), 2004, pp 39 – 58.

C Conetta, ‘The Iraqi election “bait and switch”. Fault poll will not bring peace or US withdrawal’, Project on Defense Alternatives Briefing Report #17, 25 January 2005, p 2.

Indeed, it is the external imposition of emergency rule that is at issue here. Domestic imposition is, after all, a common feature of politics in the Third World and, given developments in the USA, might even become the norm in parts of the first. See, for example, D Singerman, ‘The politics of emergency rule in Egypt’, Current History, 651, 2002, pp 29 – 35, who writes: ‘States of emergency have been the norm in Egypt since World War II’ (p 30).

Z Laïdi, Adieu Bodin? Souveraineté et mondialisation, inaugural lectures for the start of the academic year 2002 – 03, Geneva: Graduate Institute of Development Studies, 2003, p 12.

Krasner, Sovereignty, p 10.

HJ Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, New York: Knopf, 1964, p 325.

JHW Stuckenberg, Sociology: the science of human society, New York: Putnam, 1903. As cited in van Kleffens, Sovereignty in International Law, p 7.

Grotius, Commentarius in Theses XI, ad thesin 4; translation taken from Borschberg, ‘Commentarius in Theses XI’, p 119. It is worth noticing that Grotius does not mention the right to declare war and to conclude peace, as Jean Bodin had done earlier.

GW Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (iciss), The Responsibility to Protect, Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001.

SE Baldwin, ‘The division of sovereignty’, International Law Notes, 3 (26), 1918, pp 57 – 59; and Baldwin, ‘The vesting of sovereignty in a League of Nations’, Yale Law Journal, 28 (3), 1919, pp 209 – 218.

H Shinoda, Re-examining Sovereignty: From Classical Theory to the Global Age, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, p 69.

Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, p 326.

Ibid, p 329.

Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society; and M Ayoob, ‘Humanitarian intervention and state sovereignty’, International Journal of Human Rights, 6 (1), 2002, pp 81 – 102.

On the notion of trusteeships, see W Bain, Between Anarchy and Society: Trusteeship and the Obligations of Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rolf Schwarz

Rolf Schwarz and Oliver Jütersonke are both at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Avenue de la Paix 11a, 1202 Geneva, Switzerland. Email: [email protected] [email protected]