In 1648, after thirty years of war that killed approximately eight million people—roughly one-third of the population of the German lands—the European powers signed the Peace of Westphalia, ending the last of the great wars of religion. The treaties established a principle that has governed international relations ever since: each ruler held supreme authority within his own territory, and no external power—neither emperor nor pope—had the right to intervene in a state’s internal affairs. This principle, subsequently refined and expanded, became sovereignty: the legal and political foundation on which the entire modern state system rests.
The concept appears straightforward: states are the supreme authorities within their borders, equal to one another under international law, and entitled to manage their own affairs without outside interference. In practice, sovereignty has always been contested, conditional, and unevenly applied. Great powers routinely violate the sovereignty of weaker states while fiercely defending their own. International institutions chip away at sovereignty through trade rules, human rights obligations, and environmental regulations. Humanitarian interventions override sovereignty in the name of higher principles. And Globalization—the flow of capital, information, people, and diseases across borders—erodes the state’s capacity to control what happens within its territory regardless of legal rights. Understanding sovereignty is essential because the gap between the principle and its practice explains much of the tension in contemporary international politics.
Origins¶
Before Westphalia¶
The concept of sovereignty had no place in the medieval political order. Authority in medieval Europe was dispersed, overlapping, and hierarchical. The Pope claimed spiritual authority over all Christendom. The Holy Roman Emperor claimed temporal authority over much of Central Europe. Feudal lords owed allegiance to multiple superiors. Cities, guilds, and religious orders exercised autonomous authority within their domains. No clear boundary separated “internal” from “external” affairs, and no entity held unchallenged supremacy within a defined territory.
This arrangement was destroyed by the Reformation. Martin Luther’s challenge to papal authority in 1517 shattered religious unity and produced a century of devastating conflict as Catholic and Protestant rulers fought to impose their confessions on each other’s territories. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648)—which began as a religious conflict in Bohemia and escalated into a general European war—demonstrated that the medieval order could no longer maintain peace.
The Peace of Westphalia¶
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) established the principles that would define the modern state system:
Territorial supremacy: Each ruler held supreme authority within his territory. The principle cuius regio, eius religio (“whose realm, his religion”) settled the religious question by giving each prince the right to determine the confession of his state. External powers could not intervene to protect co-religionists in another ruler’s territory.
Legal equality: States were formally equal regardless of size or power. The Duchy of Württemberg, in principle, held the same sovereign rights as the Kingdom of France. This legal fiction was never fully descriptive of reality—great powers always exercised more influence than small states—but it established a norm that persists in international law today, embodied in the UN General Assembly’s one-state-one-vote principle.
Non-intervention: No state had the right to interfere in another state’s internal affairs. This principle was directed specifically at the Habsburg emperor and the papacy, whose claims to universal authority had justified interventions across Europe. It marked the triumph of the territorial state over the medieval concept of universal Christendom.
These principles did not create sovereignty overnight. The concept evolved over the following centuries, shaped by philosophers like Jean Bodin (who first articulated the concept of sovereignty as indivisible supreme authority), Thomas Hobbes (who grounded it in the social contract), and Carl Schmitt (who defined sovereignty as the power to decide the exception—the authority to suspend normal law in an emergency). The practical experience of European power politics continued to refine these ideas.
Internal and External Sovereignty¶
Internal Sovereignty¶
Internal sovereignty refers to the state’s supreme authority within its own territory—its monopoly on legitimate violence, its power to make and enforce laws, and its claim to the allegiance of persons within its borders. Max Weber’s famous definition of the state as the entity that “successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” captures this dimension.
Internal sovereignty implies that no authority within the state is superior to the government. Churches, corporations, regional authorities, and civil society organizations exist by the state’s permission and under its laws. When internal sovereignty breaks down—when armed groups challenge the state’s monopoly on violence, when regional authorities refuse to enforce national law, when the government cannot provide basic security—the state is said to have “failed.” Somalia after 1991, Afghanistan under the Taliban’s insurgency, and Syria during its civil war represent varying degrees of sovereignty collapse.
External Sovereignty¶
External sovereignty refers to the state’s independence from outside authority and its recognition by other states as a legitimate member of the international system. A state is externally sovereign when other states acknowledge its right to govern its territory without interference and treat it as a legal equal in diplomatic relations.
External sovereignty requires recognition. Taiwan governs 23.5 million people, maintains armed forces, conducts elections, and exercises effective control over its territory—yet only a handful of states recognize its sovereignty because China insists it is a Chinese province. Palestine has been recognized by over 140 states but lacks effective control over much of its claimed territory. Kosovo declared independence in 2008 and is recognized by over 100 states but not by Russia, China, or several EU members. These cases illustrate that sovereignty is not merely a matter of fact (effective control) but also of politics (international recognition).
Challenges to Sovereignty¶
Humanitarian Intervention and R2P¶
The most direct challenge to sovereignty comes from the doctrine that states forfeit their right to non-intervention when they commit mass atrocities against their own populations. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P), adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005, holds that sovereignty is not an absolute shield but a conditional privilege: states have a responsibility to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. When they manifestly fail to do so, the international community has a responsibility to act—including, as a last resort, through military intervention authorized by the UN Security Council.
R2P was invoked to justify NATO’s intervention in Libya in 2011, which prevented an imminent massacre in Benghazi but escalated into regime change—an outcome that Russia and China viewed as a violation of the doctrine’s limits. The Libya precedent made both powers far more resistant to subsequent R2P invocations, most notably regarding Syria, where the Security Council was paralyzed by Russian and Chinese vetoes while hundreds of thousands died.
The tension is unresolvable. Absolute sovereignty permits tyranny—a government can massacre its own people while the world watches, bound by the principle of non-interference. But humanitarian intervention, once legitimized, can be abused by powerful states to pursue geopolitical objectives under moral cover. The United States invoked humanitarian justifications in Kosovo (1999) and Libya (2011); Russia invoked the protection of Russian speakers in Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014, 2022). The same principle that justifies protecting the innocent can rationalize imperial aggression.
Globalization and Economic Sovereignty¶
The free flow of capital, goods, services, and information across borders has eroded states’ capacity to control their own economies:
Trade agreements under the World Trade Organization constrain states’ ability to set tariffs, subsidize industries, and regulate imports. Investment treaties allow corporations to sue governments for policies that reduce the value of their investments. Financial markets can punish states that pursue policies investors dislike—capital flight can crash a currency faster than any military attack.
2008 financial crisis demonstrated the limits of economic sovereignty: decisions made by American mortgage lenders and Wall Street banks devastated economies from Iceland to Greece. No state consented to the crisis; none could prevent it unilaterally. The pandemic similarly showed that in an interconnected world, a virus originating in one country quickly becomes every country’s problem.
China’s response to these pressures has been to reassert economic sovereignty through digital sovereignty, data localization, and the development of parallel financial infrastructure (CIPS, the digital yuan) designed to reduce dependence on the American-dominated global financial system. De-dollarization efforts by BRICS nations reflect the same impulse—the desire to regain sovereign control over economic policy that globalization has eroded.
The European Experiment¶
The European Union represents the most ambitious voluntary pooling of sovereignty in history. EU member states have transferred significant authority to supranational institutions: the European Commission proposes legislation, the European Court of Justice overrides national courts, and the European Central Bank sets monetary policy for eurozone members. In areas from agriculture to competition policy, from environmental regulation to data protection, EU law takes precedence over national law.
This arrangement has generated a persistent backlash from those who see it as an illegitimate transfer of sovereignty from democratic national governments to unaccountable Brussels bureaucrats. Brexit—the United Kingdom’s 2016 vote to leave the EU—was driven substantially by the demand to “take back control,” an explicitly sovereignty-based argument. Similar movements in other EU countries, from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to France’s National Rally, frame their opposition to European integration in terms of national sovereignty.
The EU thus embodies the central paradox of sovereignty in the modern world: states gain influence by pooling sovereignty (a single EU member has more negotiating power as part of a bloc of 450 million people than alone) but lose the autonomy that sovereignty was supposed to guarantee.
Cyber and Information Sovereignty¶
The digital revolution has created entirely new sovereignty challenges. Cyberattacks launched from one country can disable critical infrastructure in another—power grids, financial systems, electoral processes—without crossing a physical border. State-sponsored hackers operate in a domain where sovereignty’s territorial basis offers little protection.
China and Russia have responded by asserting information sovereignty: the claim that states have the right to control the information environment within their borders. China’s Great Firewall blocks foreign websites and social media platforms. Russia has developed infrastructure for a “sovereign internet” that could be disconnected from the global network. Both countries argue that information sovereignty is a natural extension of territorial sovereignty—that controlling the flow of information within one’s borders is no different from controlling the flow of goods.
Western governments reject this framing, arguing that information sovereignty is a euphemism for censorship and authoritarian control. The disagreement reflects fundamentally different conceptions of what sovereignty means in the digital age—and whether the internet should be governed by universal norms or national borders. As Constructivist scholars would argue, sovereignty is not a fixed concept but one whose meaning is contested and reshaped by the ideas and identities that states bring to it.
Sovereignty and Power¶
The Great Power Exception¶
The most uncomfortable truth about sovereignty is that it has never been equally distributed. The principle of sovereign equality coexists with the reality of power inequality. The UN Security Council’s five permanent members—the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom—hold veto power that effectively exempts them from collective security enforcement. NATO can intervene without Security Council authorization (as it did in Kosovo in 1999). The United States has invaded, bombed, or imposed regime change on numerous countries since 1945—none of which consented to the violation of their sovereignty.
Great powers have always treated sovereignty as a privilege they extend to others, not a constraint that binds themselves. Russia’s annexation of Crimea (2014) and invasion of Ukraine (2022) violated Ukrainian sovereignty in the most fundamental way possible—the seizure of territory by force. The United States’ invasion of Iraq (2003) violated Iraqi sovereignty without UN authorization. China’s construction of military installations on disputed features in the South China Sea violates the sovereignty claims of the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei.
The pattern is consistent across eras and ideologies: sovereignty is invoked by the powerful to protect their prerogatives and ignored by the powerful when it inconveniences their interests. Small states value sovereignty because it is their primary legal protection against great power predation. Great powers value sovereignty selectively—defending their own while reserving the right to violate others’.
Self-Determination and Its Limits¶
The principle of self-determination—the right of peoples to govern themselves—both supports and undermines sovereignty. Self-determination justified Decolonization, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the independence of states from South Sudan to East Timor. But taken to its logical extreme, self-determination threatens the territorial integrity of virtually every existing state, since most contain ethnic, linguistic, or religious minorities that could claim the right to secede.
The international system resolves this tension through inconsistency. Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence (2008) was recognized by Western states but rejected by Russia; Crimea’s referendum to join Russia (2014) was recognized by Moscow but rejected by the West. The difference lies not in principle but in power and geopolitical alignment. Self-determination, like sovereignty itself, is applied selectively.
Contemporary Relevance¶
Sovereignty remains the organizing principle of international relations—and the principle most frequently invoked, contested, and violated. The tension between sovereignty and competing values—human rights, economic efficiency, collective security, environmental protection—generates the central dilemmas of contemporary geopolitics:
Should the international community intervene to stop genocide, even without the target government’s consent? Can Sanctions that devastate a civilian population be reconciled with respect for sovereignty? Does a state’s right to burn fossil fuels within its borders extend to actions that alter the global climate? Can cyberattacks that cause physical damage be treated as violations of sovereignty justifying retaliation?
These questions have no clean answers. Sovereignty provides the framework within which they are debated, but it cannot resolve the underlying tensions between state autonomy and the interconnected reality of the modern world. The Westphalian system endures—no alternative organizing principle has gained comparable acceptance—but it endures under stress, adapted beyond what its 17th-century architects could have imagined to a world they would not recognize.
Sources & Further Reading¶
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The Sovereignty Revolution by Daniel Philpott — A comprehensive intellectual history tracing how the concept of sovereignty evolved from Westphalia through decolonization to the contemporary era of humanitarian intervention and globalization.
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Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy by Stephen D. Krasner — The most influential scholarly critique of sovereignty, demonstrating through historical evidence that the principle has been systematically violated throughout its existence, making it an exercise in “organized hypocrisy.”
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The Responsibility to Protect by Gareth Evans — Written by the former Australian foreign minister who co-chaired the commission that developed R2P, this book presents the strongest case for conditional sovereignty and humanitarian intervention.
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The Anarchical Society by Hedley Bull — The classic statement of the English School approach to international relations, examining how sovereignty, international law, and the Balance of Power combine to create order without government.