Introducing Sovereigncy

For much of the last two centuries, the world has been getting smaller. Not geographically, but politically. The number of sovereign states has tripled since 1945, as empires have dissolved, federations have broken apart, and peoples have claimed the right to govern themselves. There is a name for the underlying principle: subsidiarity — the idea that decisions should be taken at the lowest level of governance at which they can effectively be made. Smaller, more cohesive states can be more responsive to the specific needs and values of their populations. The progressive disaggregation of political power is, on balance, a good thing.

But subsidiarity has a structural limit. There are domains in which scale is not optional — security, environmental governance, economic resilience against coercion. A small democracy cannot deter military aggression alone. It cannot hold a major authoritarian power to account for its trading practices. It cannot solve a global climate problem from within its own borders. For these functions, size matters. For much of the post-war period, smaller powers could paper over this gap by free-riding, in part, on the security and economic stability provided by the rules-based international order: an architecture of institutions, norms, and agreements that held because enough powerful actors found it in their interest to perform as if it were binding.

As discussed in The Unravelling World Order, that order has now ruptured. Not strained, or bent — ruptured. The word belongs to Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, who used it before the assembled leaders at Davos in January 2026 and was immediately proved right by the response it provoked. Drawing on Václav Havel, Carney described the rules-based order as a kind of shared performance — its power coming from the willingness of all parties to behave as though it were binding, its fragility coming from the same source. When major actors stop performing, the illusion cracks. It has cracked.

The consequences fall hardest on those who most depended on the system: not the great powers who wrote its rules and reserved the right to break them, but the smaller and middle-sized democracies that played faithfully by those rules because an orderly world was to their obvious advantage. For them, the rupture is not merely a geopolitical setback. It is a structural exposure.

This essay is about a response to that exposure. I have called the concept a sovereigncy.

Undressing Self-Interest

The actor that most consequentially triggered the rupture is the United States. The “America First” rhetoric of the Make America Great Again movement has an almost sweet naivety about it. The brutal reality is that US Governments have always pursued an America First policy. It is just that Government messaging has had a rhetorical sophistication to it that has allowed America to represent itself to the world a benign, virtuous and magnanimous actor, even as it used its power to craft a world that suited it. Many saw through the façade, but apparently not the MAGA cheerleaders – they seem to have actually believed the rhetoric.

America First as practiced by the Trump administration has caused extensive damage to America’s interests by failing to temper short-term transactional gains with a nuanced appreciation of long-term strategic trade-offs. This has in turn destabilised the global system and done direct economic and social damage.

It has possibly done the world a favour in one sense though. By overtly surfacing and prosecuting this principle, it has made it acceptable to question whether the system as it has existed made sense. I believe that this moment shouldn’t be wasted. There can be advantage in openly stating the truth. Once the truth is in the open, actors can work with the facts: not assumptions, not deceptions, and not convenient misrepresentations. In this case the truth is that countries largely act in their own self-interest. Values do matter, but they matter more when interests and values align.

The key elements of governance that have constituted the world order are the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the processes around the Paris Agreement on Global Warming, the various agencies of the UN, prominent among them in this context, the World Health Organisation (WHO), and various treaties, many of them sitting under the auspices of the UN.

What this system of governance has as its central organising principle is an assumption that nations will act cooperatively. While the organisations are typically constituted through agreements that nations enter into, and the organisations themselves are bound by constitutions and structured processes, there are essentially no enforcement mechanisms that compel nation states to comply with the agreements once they have entered into them. It is a system built entirely on performance.

This isn’t necessarily a fatal flaw and drawing on the dynamics of the market can be instructive here. Firms driven by pure self-interest, expressed in the profit motive, nonetheless engage in constant cooperation. Some would make a counter-argument here that businesses cooperate within a legal framework set by Government to ensure orderly conduct of the market. This is true, but I would make the point that in an unregulated market, firms will reliably tend toward acting collectively to create monopolistic conditions. Self-interest can rationally foster a cooperative system.

A good example of this principle in practice is the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a purely voluntary collective that cooperates to manipulate oil prices. It is also an instructive example as it highlights the structural problem: compliance. While OPEC sets quotas on production to keep supply tight, members reliably breech their quotas. The structure is stable largely because Saudi Arabia has the scale and will to manage its own production to keep total output at target levels.

And so it is with all of the international organisation and systems built on cooperation. Virtually everywhere you look there are nations that are selectively complying, completely ignoring, and even outright undermining the undertakings that they signed up to. The system held partly because the US, playing an equivalent role to Saudi Arabia in OPEC, was willing and able to keep the system approximately functional. It has now chosen to no longer play that role.

The Paradox at the Heart of Sovereignty

Before explaining sovereigncy, it is worth asking a prior question: what is sovereignty actually for?

“Sovereignty” — from the Old French souverain, meaning chief or above all others — refers to the supreme authority of a state within its own territory. It is the foundational principle of the modern international order, formalised at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 as a response to decades of devastating religious wars. The principle was simple and, at the time, revolutionary: states do not interfere in each other’s internal affairs.

But consider how sovereignty functions in practice. When China invokes it to resist scrutiny of its treatment of minorities, the argument protects the Chinese government’s freedom to act without external accountability — not the freedom of Chinese citizens to live as they choose. When the European Union has attempted to hold Hungary to its founding democratic commitments — over judicial independence, media freedom, and anti-corruption standards — the Hungarian government has consistently invoked sovereignty to resist. The citizens whose democratic rights are being eroded have no recourse in that framing: sovereignty, as asserted by their government, shields the government from its citizens as much as from outside. Brexit was sold in the United Kingdom on the basis of “taking back control.” The control that was reclaimed was exercised by Westminster, not by the individual citizen whose daily life was, in most respects, made harder.

Sovereignty, in practice, is most reliably a protection for those who govern, not those who are governed. This tension, and the slight of hand that allows it to be used against those it is meant to be for, is discussed in more detail in the essay The Sovereignty Fallacy.

What matters here is that recognising that sovereignty is used primarily to protect rulers over their citizens reframes what looks like a sacrifice. When I argue, as I will, that countries should cede a carefully defined amount of sovereignty to a transnational institution, the instinctive objection is: but we lose control. My response is: control over what, and by whom? If the sovereignty being ceded is the kind that governments use to insulate themselves from accountability — over judicial appointments, electoral administration, anti-corruption mechanisms — then citizens may find their practical freedom increasing, not decreasing. Likewise, if states cede nominal sovereignty by binding themselves to act in a coordinated manner with like-minded countries, their effective sovereignty, their ability to negotiate with external powers from a position of collective strength, grows rather than diminishes. The paradox at the heart of this concept is that yielding a small amount of sovereignty can protect and strengthen the sovereignty that actually matters.

Sovereigncy

“Sovereigncy” is intended to name this arrangement: not sovereignty as a static property that states possess, but as an active system — a structured arrangement for the collective exercise and protection of sovereignty that serves citizens rather than merely governments. The “-cy” suffix (from Latin and Greek, the same root as democracy, diplomacy, and bureaucracy) marks it as a system or arrangement rather than a quality. It is a neologism, but one with coherent etymological logic. When a genuinely new kind of institution is being proposed, a new word is sometimes the honest choice.

The specific institution would be a sovereignate, a transnational entity with the minimum powers necessary to protect the sovereignty of the citizens of its member states from external coercion, and internal subversion of democratic systems. It could be thought of as a virtual continent: a polity bound together not by geography but by shared values, shared obligations, and shared purpose, with a narrow and specific intent – managing issues of state at the level necessary for effective governance.

Compulsion: the Defining Quality

What makes a sovereigncy different from the many multilateral institutions that already exist?

The foundational answer is compulsion.

The United Nations is the most instructive illustration of what institutions without compulsion look like in practice. Its Security Council was designed to authorise collective responses to threats — but its five permanent members each hold an individual veto. The result is structural impotence: the powers most likely to breach international norms are precisely those capable of blocking any collective response. The world has watched Russia veto resolutions on Ukraine, China shield authoritarian allies from accountability, The US protect Israel from sanction. The UN is not a failure of principle. It is a failure of architecture.

Every institution that resembles the sovereigncy concept shares a version of the same problem. The European Union’s democratic conditionality has proven insufficient to address backsliding in Hungary. NATO’s collective defence commitment contains no mechanism for holding members to the democratic values it nominally upholds. Various democracy promotion frameworks have produced declarations without consequences. In each case, defiance is sustainable because there is no ultimate consequence.

A sovereigncy operates on a different principle. Members agree, as a condition of joining, that the collective has the right to intervene — including by force — in a member state that seriously and demonstrably breaches its obligations. This is not analogous to external military aggression. It is closer to the function that gives the state its defining character: the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, applied to ensure that the rules hold. A state without that monopoly is not a governing entity; a sovereigncy without the power to compel is not a sovereigncy. The compulsion right is not one domain among several — it is the architectural element that gives all other domains their credibility.

Functions of a Sovereignate

Within this architecture, three substantive domains define what a sovereignate does.

The first is democratic compliance: the governance mechanisms that protect democratic function from executive capture — judicial independence, electoral administration, anti-corruption enforcement, media freedom. These are areas of persistent moral hazard, where the temptation to subvert the mechanisms that check power is greatest. Delegating executive authority in these narrow but critical areas to a body insulated from domestic political interference removes that temptation, or at least fundamentally changes its consequences.

The second is collective hard power: a shared military capability that deters external aggression against any member and can respond if deterrence fails. Defence spending is pooled in part, with members receiving credit against their individual defence obligations for contributions to the collective force — a structural incentive to build shared rather than purely national capability. The primary purpose is the protection of members from outside threats. Whether there might be circumstances in which the collective chooses to act beyond its membership is a question the concept does not foreclose, but it is not its central purpose.

The third is economic and environmental security: the collective management of critical supply chains, the coordination of export controls on sensitive technologies, and the pooling of leverage to resist coercion by outside actors and to act collectively in the negotiation of economic and environmental agreements.

The recent history of economic weaponisation — targeted trade restrictions, energy supply manipulation, technology denial — demonstrates that economic interdependence, absent a collective defence mechanism, is a vulnerability as much as a benefit.

The same logic applies in the environmental sphere. The environment does not respect borders, and to mitigate environmental impacts, particularly global warming, requires the capacity to bring leverage to negotiations. This means making meaningful environmental obligations a condition of membership, with collective enforcement behind them — addressing, for members, the free-rider problem that has defeated every voluntary approach to global climate governance. There is a further and significant advantage here: a sovereigncy negotiating as a unified bloc brings structural weight to international climate negotiations that middle and smaller powers individually lack. If a group of countries representing a substantial share of global GDP speaks with one voice on environmental standards, the terms available to them are fundamentally different from those available to each country negotiating alone.

The Form of External Relations

How a Sovereignate should relate to the world beyond its membership is, in some ways, the most philosophically significant question the concept raises.

The traditional foundation of the post-war international economic order was that trade is beneficial regardless of the political system of one’s trading partner — that engagement is better than isolation. This principle produced real development gains. It also financed the build-up of authoritarian capacity in ways that now threaten the system that made their success possible.

As I argue in detail in the discourse essay for this cluster, Governance for Happiness, sovereigncy should operate on a different principle: political system first. Members of stable democracies are, as a consistent body of research shows, more reliable trading partners, more peaceful neighbours, and less likely to use economic relationships as instruments of coercion. It is therefore directly in the interest of a sovereigncy — and of the citizens who live within it — for the world beyond its borders to move toward democratic governance. The economic relationship with non-members would be structured accordingly: not through sudden rupture, but through a progressive economic exclusion — from preferential market access, supply chain integration, and technology partnerships — that makes authoritarian governance increasingly costly for the elites who sustain it, and membership increasingly attractive for governments willing to embrace its obligations.

This is not imposing democracy. It is creating escalating incentives for democratic governance, while leaving the ultimate choice to each government. The logic is not novel — it underpins sanctions regimes applied to authoritarian states today. The innovation is to make it systematic, transparent, and governed by consistent rules rather than the selective judgements of powerful states acting in their own interests.

What would a Sovereignate look like in practice?

Who belongs in such an institution?

First, a structural point: there need not be only one. A sovereigncy could be constituted regionally, among geographically dispersed countries on the basis of closely aligned world views, or eventually as a single global entity. That is ultimately a matter for governments to navigate based on what makes strategic and practical sense. What matters is the design principle, not the specific configuration.

Whatever the configuration, one rule should govern membership: no single member should dominate the institution by population or economic size. A sovereigncy in which one country holds overwhelming weight ceases to function as a genuine collective and becomes, in practice, an extension of that country’s foreign policy. On this basis it is difficult to see how the United States, China, or India could be members of any sovereigncy — not because they are unwelcome in principle, but because their scale is structurally incompatible with the kind of genuine collective governance the concept requires.

Also fundamental to the design is that participating countries need to be effective democracies, or at least willing to embrace the principle and a pathway to its realisation. What this means in practice is addressed later – for the moment the foundational concept is what is important: sovereigncy exists to protect the sovereignty of a collective of citizens, not whoever it is that rules them today.

The natural founding constituency is what international relations scholars call middle powers — Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, New Zealand — countries with significant institutional capacity, genuine democratic commitment, and genuine exposure to the threats sovereigncy is designed to address. But the argument applies with equal, perhaps greater, force to smaller states. A small, well-governed democracy is the fullest expression of subsidiarity — responsive, cohesive, accountable to its people. What smaller states typically lack is security and scale. A sovereigncy provides exactly those missing elements, leaving intact the local self-determination that makes them valuable in the first place. The smallest democracy in the world stands to gain as much from membership as the largest middle power.

Membership criteria should be behavioural, not geographic or civilisational. A sovereignate should be open to any country willing to embrace its obligations, though with one important qualification: a sovereignate as conceived must necessarily possess meaningful military capacity and be capable of acting as guarantor of the recognised borders of its members. This places a clarifying admission criteria on the institution: the sovereignate, as a collective, needs to be satisfied that admission of a member is in its interests. Admitting a member with disputed borders, or otherwise facing a military threat, and which the sovereignate has uncertain capacity to resist, risks embedding a failure mode that could undermine the entire project.

This may seem an exacting standard. What I have argued though is that sovereigncy should not be a project grounded in morality: it does advocate for shared values to be the organising principle, but this is pragmatism and self-interest, not righteousness. Fundamental to the concept is that it should be built on realism – realism about who can be trusted, and realism about the limits of collective action. It is in essence of creature of power and the application of that power - an idealist foundation would create vulnerability whenever that power and the willingness to use it was tested. Values get compromised: self-interest is more predictably resilient.

Beyond the Rules-Based International Order

Each element described here will be explored in greater depth in subsequent essays — the governance structures, the decision-making mechanisms, the relationship to existing institutions like the European Union and NATO. The architecture has depth that a single introduction cannot do justice to.

But the core concept is this: that the world’s small and middle-sized democracies, individually exposed and collectively without a vehicle to act together, could build one — and that in doing so they would not be surrendering sovereignty but recovering the part of it that actually protects their citizens.

The rules-based order has been found wanting. Not because its rules were wrong, but because there was no reliable mechanism for enforcing them, and no institution that held itself to the same standards it asked of others. Sovereigncy is an attempt to do both.