Thinking about sovereignty
Henry Farrell of George Washington University has an interesting post this morning on the GWU political science blog, The Monkey Cage, Contracting Sovereignty.The ideas add some depth to the usual superficial definition that I operated with in my classes. The ideas might well be worth some time for discussion or student writing.
"Renowned macroeconomist Paul Romer [will]... help start up a new institute dedicated to changing how we think about sovereignty, so as to make it easier both for countries to borrow rule-sets from each other, and perhaps to allow other countries to actively administer parts of their own territory...
"Romer suggests that we rethink sovereignty (respect borders, but maybe create new systems of administrative control); rethink citizenship (allowing perhaps for voice without residency as well as residency without voice); and rethink scale (instead of focusing on nations, focus on new cities.)...
"This is not only not as strange as it sounds, but actually has some considerable empirical precedent... Sovereignty is not the single unitary phenomenon that it is often taken for, but instead a 'a bundle of rights and obligations that are dynamically exchanged and transferred between states.' Cooley and Spruyt pay particular attention to the politics of military bases, which are (if you think about it at all) an obvious example of incomplete contracting that modifies territorial sovereignty in very interesting ways..."
Check it out. The Cooley and Spruyt book that Farrell cites might make good vacation reading if you're tired of mysteries or romances.
posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:58 AM
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