The Sovereignty Fallacy

The word sovereignty performs a remarkable rhetorical function in modern political life: it presents itself as a conclusion where it should be the beginning of an argument. Invoke it, and the conversation tends to be over — or rather, it moves from reasoning to assertion. You can disagree with a policy, a treaty, a trading arrangement, an international obligation; but if it can be characterised as a matter of sovereignty, a different kind of weight descends. This is a word that does not merely describe a political principle; it invokes something closer to a moral absolute. It carries the emotional register of patriotism and the legal register of constitutional doctrine, and it borrows freely from both when it needs to. The result is that sovereignty — more than almost any other concept in political life — tends to shut down exactly the kind of critical thinking it most needs to receive. That shutdown is the subject of this essay.

The pattern is consistent across very different political contexts. When Vladimir Putin deflects international criticism of Russia’s domestic governance, the invocation of sovereignty is routine and deliberate: foreign interference, he insists, is the real transgression, and Russia’s sovereign right to manage its own affairs is the principle that closes the argument. When Xi Jinping rejects external comment on conditions in Xinjiang or Tibet, the same move is made with the same confidence. When Brexit’s architects summoned the phrase “taking back control,” they were drawing on the same reservoir of feeling — that sovereignty is self-evidently good, that its assertion requires no further justification, and that anyone questioning it is somehow on the wrong side of something important. These are very different political situations, but they share a common rhetorical architecture: sovereignty as the argument-ender, the trump card that forecloses rather than advances discussion.

The Origins of Sovereignty

Before that architecture can be challenged, it needs to be understood — which means understanding where the principle came from and why it commands the reverence it does.

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War and the Eighty Years War simultaneously, stands as one of the most consequential diplomatic settlements in European history. The Thirty Years War had been, in significant part, a conflict about the right of external powers to interfere in the domestic religious arrangements of other states — which amounted, in the political theology of the seventeenth century, to the right to determine the fundamental character of governance itself. The consequences were catastrophic. The German lands lost somewhere between a quarter and a third of their population through war, famine, and disease over three decades. Whole regions were depopulated. A continent had been torn apart, repeatedly, by the proposition that rulers in one territory had a legitimate right to challenge the internal arrangements of another.

Westphalia’s answer was, in its context, both sensible and hard-won: each sovereign would determine the religious and political character of their own territory, and external interference in those internal arrangements would be treated as a violation rather than a right. The principle of non-interference was not an ideological abstraction; it was a practical response to the demonstrated costs of the alternative. For a Europe in which the technologies of destruction were limited only by geography and political will, this was a meaningful constraint — a framework for coexistence between states with incompatible internal arrangements. The intellectual achievement of Westphalia should not be dismissed. The insight that external interference in domestic governance is dangerous was genuinely important in 1648, and it has not become false. It remains one of the most important considerations in international relations.

But there is a detail in the Westphalian settlement that matters enormously for what followed: it was an agreement between rulers, not between peoples. The sovereignty it established was the sovereignty of monarchs over their territories — the right of the king of France, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the rulers of the Dutch republic, to arrange their internal affairs without external challenge. The citizens of those territories were the subject of this arrangement, not its beneficiaries. The principle of non-interference protected ruling authorities from external accountability; whether it served the interests of the populations those authorities governed was not a question the settlement addressed, or could address. This is not a criticism of Westphalia on its own terms — representative democracy was not the political language of 1648, and judging seventeenth-century diplomats by twenty-first century standards is anachronism. But it is a genealogy that enlightens. The concept of sovereignty was, from its origin, a principle that protected governments from external pressure. The distinction between protecting governments and protecting citizens was invisible in 1648. It is a distinction that is impossible to ignore today.

The Rhetorical Sleight of Hand

Contemporary political discourse almost never makes a distinction it urgently needs to make: between the sovereignty of governments and the sovereignty of citizens. These are not the same thing, and they are not always aligned. Government sovereignty — the legal claim of a state to exclusive authority over its territory, free from external interference — is what international law protects and what politicians invoke when they reach for the word. Citizen sovereignty — the meaningful ability of a population to shape its own collective future, to hold those who govern it accountable, to live free from arbitrary coercion — is what the word sovereignty is routinely invoked to protect, without actually protecting. The gap between these two concepts is where the fallacy lives. And the fallacy is not accidental; it serves a function. Governments and their supporters invoke citizen sovereignty — your right to govern yourself, your national identity, your freedom from foreign interference — to defend arrangements whose primary beneficiary is the government’s own freedom from accountability. The sleight of hand works because the two things are not always in tension. Sometimes what is good for the government genuinely is good for the citizen. When those interests diverge, the language of sovereignty provides the governing elite with a ready-made rhetorical shield that is very difficult to attack without appearing to attack something the citizen values — their identity, their community, their self-determination. This is why the word is so useful, and why it is so frequently abused.

The abuse is most visible in its most egregious applications. When the Russian government invokes sovereignty to deflect criticism of its treatment of political opponents, journalists, and minority populations, it is not protecting the freedom of Russian citizens to determine their own collective future. It is protecting the freedom of the Russian government to operate without external accountability. Those are opposite things. Russian citizens living under a system that criminalises political opposition, controls the media, and systematically manipulates elections are not experiencing meaningful sovereignty — they are experiencing its absence. The invocation of state sovereignty in this context is not a defence of their self-determination; it is an instrument of their subjugation. The same analysis applies whenever the Chinese government invokes sovereignty against scrutiny of conditions in Xinjiang. The population whose interests are ostensibly being protected by the sovereignty claim had no meaningful role in shaping the arrangements being shielded from external observation. Sovereignty is the mechanism by which those arrangements are protected from challenge — including challenge that might serve the population’s own interests rather than those of the state that governs them.

The problem extends well beyond the obvious cases of authoritarian governance though. In much of the developing world, the post-colonial settlement delivered formal sovereignty — flags, seats at the United Nations, the legal architecture of independent statehood — without delivering the institutional conditions that make sovereignty meaningful for citizens. Political independence transferred governing authority from colonial administrations to national elites, and in many cases those elites proceeded to build extractive institutions oriented toward the interests of the governing class rather than the broader population. External actors who might have imposed accountability — whether former colonial powers, multilateral development institutions, or neighbouring states — were constrained by sovereignty norms from intervening in domestic governance. The result was a system in which sovereignty protected the governing elite from both internal accountability (through captured institutions) and external accountability (through non-interference norms), while offering the population under that governance very little of what sovereignty is supposed to deliver. This pattern — the conferral of sovereignty on governments that use it to protect themselves from the people they govern — is not a marginal or exceptional phenomenon. It is a structural feature of how sovereignty operates across a significant portion of the world. The extractive dynamics this creates are examined further in a seperate essay; the point here is simply that sovereignty, in these contexts, functions as an obstacle to development rather than a condition for it.

The Brexit case is instructive precisely because it occurred in a mature liberal democracy where this kind of institutional capture is not the primary problem. The case for Brexit was framed explicitly around sovereignty — “taking back control” was its most resonant formulation — and the argument was that British citizens would have more control over their lives if Britain left the European Union. What changed, in practice, was that the British Parliament regained the formal legal position of being the supreme authority in British law, unconstrained by the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. That is a real change in the architecture of government sovereignty. What did not change was the practical ability of British citizens to shape the conditions of their economic lives. The regulatory environment remained largely aligned with EU standards, because cross-border trade requires it. The supply chains, the investment flows, the terms on which British businesses access continental markets: all remained shaped by the decisions of the EU’s 450 million citizens and their governments, over whom British voters now had even less formal influence than before. The argument that was put to the general population — that this change in the legal status of Parliament translated into greater control over their lives — was sophistry. The sovereignty being reclaimed was the sovereignty of government from external institutional constraint. The sovereignty of citizens — the meaningful ability to determine one’s collective future — was largely unaffected, and in some respects diminished. That distinction was never honestly made in the Brexit debate, because making it would have required admitting that the thing on offer was not what was being advertised.

Excuse me waiter – there’s a fly in my sovereignty

The confusion between government sovereignty and citizen sovereignty runs parallel to a second confusion that operates specifically at the level of international relations: the confusion between nominal sovereignty and effective sovereignty. Nominal sovereignty is the legal status — the recognition under international law that a state has exclusive authority over its territory, the seat at the table, the flag at the United Nations. Effective sovereignty is the practical ability to determine your own outcomes in a world of unequal powers. These two things regularly and substantially come apart, and when they do, nominal sovereignty offers little protection.

The episode of Chinese economic coercion of Australia that began in 2020 illustrates this with uncomfortable precision. Following Australia’s call for an independent international inquiry into the origins of COVID-19, China imposed sweeping trade restrictions on Australian exports: tariffs of over eighty per cent on barley, over two hundred per cent on wine, along with restrictions on coal, copper, timber, beef, and a range of other goods. The costs to Australian exporters were measured in billions of dollars annually. Australia was, throughout this episode, a fully sovereign state in the nominal sense: its laws were made by its parliament, its government was elected by its citizens, its territory was indisputably its own. None of that was challenged or threatened. But its effective sovereignty — its practical ability to pursue an independent foreign policy position without facing severe economic punishment from a trading partner large enough to impose that punishment unilaterally — was severely constrained. The international mechanisms available to address the coercion through the World Trade Organisation were slow, limited, and ultimately inadequate to the scale and speed of what was imposed. Sovereignty as a legal status provided no protection whatsoever against sovereignty as a practical matter being overridden.

The problem of scale — nominal equality coexisting with practical powerlessness — is structural rather than exceptional. In the trade negotiations, climate agreements, and financial regulatory frameworks that shape the conditions of modern economic life, small and medium-sized states have formal sovereign participation. They sit at the table; they have votes; the architecture of multilateral governance treats them as equals in principle. But their ability to determine outcomes is marginal when compared with that of states whose economic or geopolitical weight allows them to set the agenda, define the terms, and walk away from arrangements that do not suit them, without consequence. The Pacific island states whose physical existence is most directly threatened by rising sea levels attend every Conference of the Parties with full sovereign standing. The outcomes of those negotiations are determined by the calculations of large emitters for whom ambition carries a domestic political cost, not by the nations whose coastlines are already disappearing. To describe this situation as one in which sovereign equality is being respected requires a definition of sovereignty that has been emptied of its practical content.

Taking Back Sovereignty

What emerges from this is not a case against the Westphalian insight in its original context. The argument that external interference in domestic governance is dangerous was true in 1648 and has not become false. But the principle has been progressively extended and weaponised in ways that bear little relationship to the problem it was designed to solve. It has been extended by authoritarian governments into a general-purpose shield against accountability for how they treat their own citizens. It has been deployed by governing elites — in wealthy democracies and in fragile post-colonial states alike — to protect their own power from exactly the external pressure that might otherwise constrain it. And it has been rendered hollow by the realities of geopolitical and economic power, which distribute the practical substance of sovereignty very differently from the formal legal status. What remains, for many states and for most citizens, is the word without the thing the word is supposed to name. The assumption embedded in contemporary sovereignty discourse — that defending existing formal sovereignty arrangements is the same as defending the freedom and self-determination of citizens - needs to be called-out.

None of this means the concept should be abandoned. Instead, the word needs to be interrogated rather than merely invoked. If sovereignty genuinely means the ability of citizens to shape their collective future — which is what every political appeal to it implicitly claims — then the question of what institutional arrangements produce that outcome in the world as it actually exists becomes concrete. And the answer, when examined seriously, looks nothing like the sovereignty absolutism that treats any form of shared governance as a betrayal of principle. Genuine citizen sovereignty, in a world of coercive great powers, unequal multilateral negotiations, supply chain vulnerabilities, and environmental impacts that disregard borders, requires a structured pooling of state power that doesn’t exist in the current international order.

That structured pooling has four essential characteristics. It must be grounded in the self-interest of its participants — not in idealism, virtue, or moral duty, but in the cold calculation that collective action produces better outcomes for each party than isolated vulnerability. It must place obligations on the participating governments to respect both the theory and practice of democracy, to ensure that government reflects the will of its citizens. It must have minimum necessary scope — not a world government or a comprehensive supranational authority, but a precisely defined set of functions where a self-selected group of nations acting together produces genuinely superior results, with everything else retained at the national level. And it must have genuine enforceability — not aspirational declarations, not voluntary commitments that dissolve when they become inconvenient, but mechanisms with real consequences for non-compliance, capable of generating the kind of credible commitment that voluntary multilateralism has consistently failed to deliver.

Importantly, in referencing participants, this needs to be very clearly understood as the collective citizenry of a country, not its Government or ruling elite - this is a project for the sovereignty of citizens, not of the rulers. An arrangement with these characteristics would not diminish sovereignty; it would enhance it. It would convert the notional sovereignty that leaves most nations exposed to economic coercion and unable to shape international outcomes into effective sovereignty — the real ability to determine a collective future. It would also protect citizens from the self-interest of the ruling class – circumscribing the elite’s ability to subvert democratic processes through manipulation of the mechanics of democracy. The mechanism by which some sovereignty is formally ceded is, paradoxically, the mechanism by which effective citizen sovereignty is recovered.

I have named this structural concept a Soverigncy, and it is one of the most promising outputs of the “thinking big” philosophy of this project. Exactly what the mechanism looks like in institutional terms requires extensive interrogation, and is examined in detail in Governance for Happiness cluster of essays.