Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in Contemporary World Politics

Abstract

I propose a concept of effective sovereignty to argue that states participate in sovereignty regimes that exhibit distinctive combinations of central state authority and political territoriality. Two basic conclusions, drawing from recent research in political geography and other fields, are that sovereignty is neither inherently territorial nor is it exclusively organized on a state-by-state basis. This matters because so much political energy has been invested in organizing politics in general and democracy in particular in relation to states. Typically, writing about sovereignty regards sovereignty as providing a norm that legitimizes central state authority. Unfortunately, little or no attention is given as to why this should always entail a territorial definition of political authority and to why states are thereby its sole proprietors. The dominant approach continues to privilege the state as the singular font of authority even when a state's sovereignty may be decried as hypocrisy and seen as divisible or issue-specific rather than “real” or absolute. I put forward a model of sovereignty alternative to the dominant one by identifying four “sovereignty regimes” that result from distinctive combinations of central state authority (legitimate despotic power) on the one hand, and degree of political territoriality (the administration of infrastructural power) on the other. By “regime” I mean a system of rule, not merely some sort of international protocol or agreement between putatively equal states. I then examine the general trajectory of the combination of sovereignty regimes from the early nineteenth century to the present. The contemporary geography of currencies (specifically exchange-rate arrangements) serves to empirically illustrate the general argument about sovereignty regimes. Finally, a brief conclusion suggests that the dominant Westphalian model of state sovereignty in political geography and international relations theory, deficient as it has long been for understanding the realities of world politics, is even more inadequate today, not only for its ignoring the hierarchy of states and sources of authority other than states, but also because of its mistaken emphasis on the geographical expression of authority (particularly under the ambiguous sign of “sovereignty”) as invariably and inevitably territorial.

Key Words:

• states
• effective sovereignty
• territoriality
• sovereignty regimes
• dollarization

Notes

1. This is the opposite of the historical situation in the field of geography as a whole where, as Sack (1983, 56) once noted, “conventional spatial analysis has largely ignored territoriality.” Fleeting, if important, exceptions such as Gottmann (1973) only help to prove the rule. More recently, however, particularly under the influence of a certain reading of Foucault and the strange revival of interest in the Nazi philosopher Schmitt, it is as if power cannot be thought of except in terms of territoriality (see, e.g., Hannah 2000 for an example of the former and Barnett 2004 for a critique of the latter), even though, as Allen (2003) persuasively demonstrates, it is Foucault who can provide the best theoretical take-off point for a much richer understanding of the complex spatialities of power and authority.

2. This conflation is not unusual in even the most sophisticated of theoretical arguments. See, for example, Elden (2005, forthcoming).

3. This “regime of sovereignty” is addressed in moral not in political-economic terms by Grovogui's (2002) essay on Africa's relations with Europe.

4. Bobbitt (2002), for example, provides a different periodization based on the outcomes of wars rather than any other criteria such as economic downturns or the complex of political-economic and discursive factors underpinning that of Agnew and Corbridge (1995).

5. A good textbook survey of currencies and exchange-rate regimes is provided by Sachs and Larrain (1993).

6. As of 2001, thirty-nine countries had no independent currency (i.e., relied totally on a foreign currency such as the US$), fifty-one had currency boards or pegged exchange rates, seventeen had exchange rates adjusted by indicators (inflation or exchange-rate targets), thirty-one had managed floats, and forty-seven freely floated (Hochreiter et al., 2002,; 29). The freely floating currencies are the most integrated into the global economy with the most independently powerful financial centers where the US$ serves as the common metric of transactions. The countries with no independent currency obviously use substitute ones. The managed floats signify those states in which state monetary authority (and other elements of authority) is relatively territorial. The countries with currency boards and pegged rates are often either in macroeconomic crisis or in transition toward some other exchange-rate regime. “Network externalities,” the snowball effect of surrounding countries operating with other systems, make these “intermediate” exchange-rate regimes inherently unstable with financial globalization and will push them toward shared currencies (as with central European countries awaiting admission to the Euro after joining the EU in 2004), substitute currencies (no independent currency) or, most likely of all in most cases under present conditions, towards free floating (Bubula and Otker-Robe 2002; Joshi 2003). In other words, only thirty-one countries (plus the U.S.) could claim that they have the main features of “classic” monetary sovereignty. As I later show, the U.S. case is rather more complex than this. In most cases the retreat of central state authority is paralleled by an increasingly complex spatiality of currency flows and regulation. Several recent studies show that a wide range of state economic policy decisions are fundamentally constrained by the type of exchange-rate mechanism and monetary targets that states adopt (e.g., IMF 2000; Dąbrowski 2002; Hochreiter et al. 2002; Joshi 2003).

7. Strangely, in some of the macroeconomics literature monetary sovereignty is associated with a free floating currency (e.g., Dąbrowski 2002). Why giving up control over a currency to the markets should be seen this way perhaps reflects the classical and neoclassical sensibility that a currency should either “stand and deliver” or go to the wall. It certainly seems to have little or nothing to do with the reality of central state authority as indicated by different exchange-rate mechanisms. In the contemporary world it is successful managed floats, as the closest mechanism to fixed rates, that signify a high degree of central state authority in the monetary realm.

8. Recently in Canada a public discussion has erupted over the merits of dollarizing as one way of responding to the imposition of more restrictive border controls between the U.S. and Canada in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in the U.S. of 11 September 2001. Emily Gilbert (2005) has expertly explored the discussion in a recent issue of this journal.

9. A fully convertible currency is convertible by any holder for any purpose. Under current account convertibility, as presently operative in China, holders of the renminbi have the right of conversion for purposes such as trade or travel but not for capital account purposes such as making loans or buying foreign assets. Absence of capital account convertibility requires that national monetary authorities monitor the use of all funds; under full convertibility, as prevails with fully floating and some types of managed exchange rates, this is not necessary.