Design of a Sovereignate

The introductory essay on sovereigncy outlined the concept of a soveregnate — what kind of institution it is, why existing vocabulary is inadequate to name it, and why the world’s small and middle-sized democracies have a structural interest in building something like it. At this point it is still a fantasy of my mind, but I believe it has sufficient strategic potential that it is worth starting to ask some of the harder questions that would need to be tackled to make it a reality: essentially, how would it actually work in practice?

Institutional proposals that look compelling in broad outline often fail when pressed on operational detail, and the failure is usually not theoretical but practical. Key practical questions for a sovereignate lie in the governance mechanisms that determine whether commitments hold under stress, whether power is distributed in ways that members will accept, and whether the enforcement capacity that makes the concept distinctive can be made genuinely operational rather than merely nominal. These are the questions this essay attempts to address.

The Three Domains

The overarching logic of sovereigncy is the ceding of a narrow range of traditionally sovereign rights to a trans-national entity. These are conceptually the minimum powers that need to be ceded to achieve the strategic intent of the system: to protect the citizens from both external and internal threats to their ability to determine how they live their lives.

Four domains have been identified as being within this minimum scope:

• Democratic Compliance: Placing certain executive functions inside the sovereignate to insulate them from potential exploitation by the government.

• Defence: Formal military integration to give the sovereignate the hard power to protect its members.

• Economic and Environmental Security: Acting collectively in the economic and environmental realms to maximise negotiating leverage.

The institutional form of a sovereignate necessarily follows from these functions.

Form of a Sovereignate

The form of a sovereignate should loosely follow that of other trans-national entities: one or more governing bodies responsible for formal architecture and strategic oversight, and an executive responsible for the daily management and execution of its functions.

The governance structure needs to address a number of distinct functions. The first is a mechanism for formal resolution of issues, based on voting in accordance with agreed voting rights principles. This needs to be an Assembly, meeting regularly but infrequently, perhaps annually, with an agenda agreed in advance, and processes to conduct voting on specific resolutions. The second is informal oversight of the operations of the sovereignate – a governance layer to ensure that the executive is running the entity efficiently, compliantly, and ???? [ethically]. This would be more in the form of a Board or Council with a subset of members, meeting more frequently, perhaps monthly, with an agenda, but a more conversational format.

The structure of the Executive itself should align to its functions. It would require an organisational head, in the style of a Secretary-General. It would logically follow that each of the three domains should have a branch head: a legal and governance expert for the democratic compliance domain, a military expert for the defence domain, and an economist for the economic and environmental security domain. It would also require one or more branches for managing its own affairs, the services functions like finance, human resources, and technology.

Compulsion

The place to start is with the element that makes a sovereignate qualitatively different from every supra-national institution that has preceded it: the compulsion right.

Every multilateral institution in the current international architecture suffers from the same structural failure — the absence of any reliable mechanism for ensuring that commitments made at entry are honoured over time. The United Nations Security Council cannot act decisively against its permanent members or their clients. The European Union’s democratic conditionality has been unable to discipline Hungary despite years of effort. NATO has no mechanism for enforcing the democratic standards it nominally requires of members. In each case, the pattern is the same: declarations, processes, negotiations, and, when these fail, accommodation of the breach. The reason is always the same: there is no politically acceptable way to impose a consequence. Defiance is sustainable because the institution cannot, or lacks the willingness and incentives, to compel compliance.

Sovereigncy’s foundational design premise is that compulsion is not one feature among many — it is the feature that gives all other features credibility. The right to intervene, including militarily, in a member state that seriously and demonstrably breaches its membership obligations is the architectural element from which the rest of the institution derives its value. Without it, the democratic effectiveness mechanisms are aspirational. Without it, the economic security commitments are advisory. Without it, the environmental obligations are voluntary by another name. The compulsion right is what converts a club of like-minded states into a genuine collective governance arrangement.

But this immediately raises the hardest design question: what triggers the right, who decides, and how fast? The answers to these questions determine whether the compulsion mechanism is real or ceremonial.

Triggering

The standard for triggering must be high enough that it cannot be weaponised by coalition politics against members who are simply unpopular, but defined specifically enough that a government engaged in genuine democratic backsliding cannot simply argue that the threshold has not been met. The right approach is probably a combination of objective criteria — specific, measurable breaches of defined obligations in areas such as judicial independence, electoral administration, and media freedom — and independent adjudication. The latter point is critical. The adjudicating body must be insulated from political pressure, with members appointed for fixed terms, irremovable except through a supermajority of the full membership, and drawn from a pool of jurists whose prior careers have been in genuinely independent legal systems. The model is something like the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, agreed at the point of accession, with no individual member able to withdraw consent unilaterally once admitted.

Decision Making

Any governance structure for a diverse collective of sovereign states must grapple with the problem of relative size. If Nauru and Germany are both members, they cannot reasonably have equal votes on matters of collective military action or economic policy. A weighted voting system — with shares determined by a formula that takes population as the primary input, modified by a minimum floor that ensures even the smallest member retains a meaningful voice — is the appropriate structure. This is more complex than a one-state-one-vote model, but is in itself a necessary democratic criteria, and an essential feature to make decision-making acceptable to larger states, which is the practical test any governance design must pass.

The voting structure has a second dimension, distinct from the question of relative size: a two-tier differentiation between members in full standing and those whose domestic democratic practice falls below an acceptable threshold. Members falling short of democratic best practice — retaining first-past-the-post systems, or some restrictions on political speech, for instance — remain full voting members and face no institutional sanction; the gap to best practice is an aspiration rather than a trigger. Members falling below acceptable democratic practice face modified or suspended voting rights, and are specifically excluded from voting on intervention decisions affecting other members. A government found to be in breach of acceptable democratic standards has no standing to adjudicate breaches by others. This is not a sanction: it is a protection. The risk is that states that fall short of the democratic expectations of the sovereigncy would be exposed to an incentive to protect each other if they were allowed to participate in the decision making process.

This two-tier structure has direct implications for founding membership: a natural Asia-Pacific sovereigncy for instance might include South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore together with the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia, with the latter three beginning as members without full voting rights — participating in and benefiting from the institution’s economic and security arrangements, but subject to graduated democratic conditions until they cross into full standing. Entry without full voting rights is not exclusion; it is a structured pathway to it.

Reactiveness

A supermajority threshold for ordinary decisions is appropriate and important, but the nature of genuine emergencies — military attacks on a member state, sudden escalation of democratic backsliding — requires a different mechanism. A rapid response council, composed of three people — the Secretary-General of the institution, the commander of the collective military force, and the chief legal officer — with authority to act on the basis of two out of three agreement in the first instance, subject to ratification by the wider membership within a defined short window, provides the necessary combination of speed and accountability. The model acknowledges that collective governance cannot always wait for deliberation, while ensuring that unilateral executive action is not available to any individual.

These governance mechanisms derive their force from a further structural requirement that distinguishes a sovereignate from institutions that depend on voluntary compliance: a legal standing condition. A fundamental obligation of accession is the enactment of domestic legislation giving the sovereignate’s decisions legal force within the member state, and imposing on the member’s security services — its military, police, and intelligence apparatus — a clear legal obligation to uphold those decisions. This converts the institution from an external authority that must coerce compliance from outside into a legal principal whose decisions carry enforceable weight within the domestic legal order, with the member state’s own institutions as the first line of enforcement.

The practical consequence is that the legal system of the member state — not the collective military force — is the primary mechanism for addressing a breach of membership obligations. If a member government attempts to manipulate electoral administration or interfere with a corruption prosecution that the sovereignate is conducting, the appropriate first response is legal: injunctions, constitutional challenge, action by domestic security services operating under their statutory obligation to the sovereignate. Military intervention by the sovereignate is available only when legal mechanisms have been exhausted or deliberately disabled. This sequencing is both operationally sound and politically essential. The intervention right is real, but it operates at the end of a layered enforcement structure, not as a first response to a disagreement.

The Inter-relationship with Tribunacy

The constitutional complications this requirement generates in most member states should be acknowledged directly. In countries where the military’s chain of command runs exclusively through the domestic head of state, or where constitutional doctrine prohibits the delegation of public functions to external bodies, the required legislation may face serious obstacles. Constitutional amendment may be a prerequisite to accession in some cases. This is not a reason to abandon the requirement — without domestic legal standing, the enforcement structure is fictional — but it is a reason to treat accession as a process with genuine legal conditions rather than a political declaration. The depth of commitment implied by meeting those conditions is, from the institution’s perspective, a feature rather than a complication.

The four substantive domains within which these governance mechanisms operate can now be examined in turn.

Democratic Compliance

The domain of democratic compliance addresses a specific and recurring failure mode: the gradual capture by incumbents of the administrative mechanisms that are supposed to check their power. Democratic backsliding in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and a growing list of other states has followed a consistent pattern. It does not typically involve the suspension of elections or the open declaration of authoritarian intent. It involves the appointment of loyalists to judicial bodies, the defunding of independent anti-corruption agencies, the amendment of electoral boundaries, the stripping of broadcasting licences from independent media, and the rewriting of constitutional rules in ways that advantage the governing party while appearing to operate within legal frameworks. Each step is deniable; the cumulative effect is that the checks and balances on which democratic accountability depends have been hollowed out from within.

The sovereigncy response to this is delegation — not the removal of democratic sovereignty, but the transfer of specific and narrow administrative functions from domestic control to a body that operates above domestic political interference. Electoral administration, the prosecution of corruption at the senior level, the appointment of judges to supreme and constitutional courts, and the licensing and regulation of major media organisations would all fall within this delegated domain. Crucially, the sovereignate would perform these functions within the existing law of the member state rather than imposing a legal framework of its own. It runs elections under the member’s electoral law, prosecutes corruption under the member’s criminal law, and makes judicial appointments consistent with the member’s constitutional framework. The domestic government retains all executive, legislative, and policy-making functions; what it loses is the ability to control the referees. This is the targeted cession of sovereignty that paradoxically strengthens democracy — the rulers lose the power to insulate themselves from accountability, which is precisely what genuine democratic governance requires.

This creates a tension that needs to be named honestly. Member states will enter the sovereigncy with legal frameworks that differ — sometimes substantially — from one another, and some of those frameworks will be imperfectly democratic by contemporary standards. A member may retain a majoritarian electoral system, allow restrictions on some categories of political speech, or provide for weighted representation in an upper chamber. Sovereigncy is not intended to standardise these away, because operating within member law means operating within these imperfections. The distinction that matters is between two thresholds: the gap between a member’s practice and democratic best practice, and the gap between a member’s practice and what constitutes acceptable democratic practice. The former is an aspiration — the subject of technical dialogue and progressive improvement. The latter is a trigger for a graduated institutional response, which in most cases will take the form of the voting rights modifications described above, formal censure, or remediation requirements with defined timescales, rather than anything approaching intervention. Intervention is the consequence of genuine and sustained democratic collapse — not of the ordinary imperfections that every democratic system carries.

The scope of this domain connects directly to the Habermasian argument noted elsewhere in this project: democratic legitimacy requires not only that elections occur but that the reasoning behind political decisions is publicly accountable and defensible. An institution that protects the processes through which that accountability operates is, in a meaningful sense, doing more for democracy than one that merely counts votes.

Defence

The domain of collective hard power is both the most straightforward in concept and the most politically difficult in practice. Its primary purpose is the defence of member states from external military aggression or coercive pressure — providing the smaller and middle-sized democracies that constitute sovereigncy’s natural membership with a credible deterrent that none of them could sustain individually.

Collective defence spending is pooled in part: members agree to commit to a defined percentage of their GDP to defence (the specific figure requiring negotiation at the time of founding, but likely in the range of the current NATO target), with spending directed specifically to the collective force receiving a significant discount — perhaps 50% — against this obligation. This structure is more sophisticated than NATO’s blunt spending target: it creates a direct financial incentive for members to build shared rather than purely national capability, gradually shifting the composition of member defence capacity toward interoperability and joint command rather than parallel national forces that may not be designed to work together.

The internal dimension of collective hard power — the right to intervene in a member state — has no precedent in any existing international institution. It is, by design, analogous to the monopoly on legitimate use of force that gives the state its defining character at the domestic level. A state without that monopoly is not a governing entity; an institution that cannot compel compliance is not a governance arrangement. The intervention right exists not because member states are expected to breach their obligations — precisely the opposite is true — but because its existence changes the calculus of defection. A government contemplating the kind of gradual democratic backsliding described above knows, in an sovereigncy framework, that this path ends in collective intervention rather than accommodation. That knowledge changes behaviour before intervention becomes necessary.

The question of nuclear deterrence sits at the edge of what this project is prepared to contemplate at this point. The observation worth making at this stage is that the states most naturally suited to sovereigncy include several that currently operate under the US nuclear umbrella, a protection whose reliability can no longer assumed, and at least two that maintain their own deterrents. A well-governed collective nuclear capability — with authority for use requiring a broad supermajority of the governing council and independent of any single member’s executive — is not an inherently less reassuring arrangement than the current one. But the political sensitivity of this subject is such that it deserves a focussed and exhaustive examination that is beyond the scope of this essay.

Economic and Environmental Security

The domain of economic security operationalises a lesson that the last decade has taught, at considerable cost, to nearly every open economy: economic interdependence, absent a collective protection mechanism, is a vulnerability as much as a benefit. The Hirschman insight — that asymmetric trade dependence creates political leverage, and that leverage is most powerful as market share approaches monopoly — has been validated repeatedly, from China’s targeted campaigns against Australia, South Korea and Japan, through Russia’s energy manipulation of Europe, to the aggressive deployment of US financial system access as a coercive instrument. The remedy is not economic isolation but collective resilience: pooling the economic leverage of members in ways that reduce individual vulnerability and create a credible counterweight to coercion.

The mechanism by which a Sovereignate addresses the external dimension of this — the relationship with non-members — deserves particular attention. The ratcheting economic exclusion structure is designed around a specific finding from behavioural economics: loss aversion is approximately twice as powerful a motivator as equivalent gain. The escalating cost of non-membership — progressive exclusion from preferential market access within the bloc, from supply chain integration with member economies, from technology partnerships, and eventually from financial market access — is structured to exploit this asymmetry. A non-member government weighing accession does not merely consider the positive benefits of joining; it faces an escalating series of losses from remaining outside. The ratchet design means that the longer accession is delayed, the more has been foregone, and the more powerful the incentive to join before the next threshold is crossed. This is not an original observation in the theory of international institutions — preferential trading arrangements have always generated accession pressure — but the explicit and systematic design of the structure around loss aversion is a deliberate innovation.

Within the membership, the economic security domain covers the protection and management of critical supply chains, the coordination of export controls on sensitive technologies, and the creation of collective purchasing and negotiating power in areas where individual members would otherwise be price-takers. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the cost of uncoordinated responses to supply disruption; a sovereignate’s economic security framework is explicitly designed to create the coordination mechanism that the pandemic exposed as missing.

The domain of environmental security addresses the deepest structural failure of existing international climate governance: the free rider problem. Any individual country can calculate that its own emissions reductions will make a negligible difference to global outcomes if major emitters do not follow suit, while it will share in the benefits of others’ reductions regardless of its own contribution. This logic, applied universally, produces the collective inaction that has characterised global climate diplomacy for three decades and has now rendered the Paris 1.5-degree target formally unattainable. Voluntary frameworks, however well-designed, cannot solve this problem. What is needed is a mechanism that changes the incentive structure rather than appealing, in perpetuity, to goodwill that the structure works against producing.

Adessea addresses this through two mechanisms operating simultaneously. The first is internal: environmental obligations — defined, measurable commitments on emissions, land use, biodiversity, and pollution standards — are conditions of membership rather than voluntary targets. Non-compliance triggers the same collective response mechanism as any other breach of membership obligations. A member government that allows domestic political pressure to override its environmental commitments faces the full weight of the institution’s compulsion right, not a disappointed communiqué. The second is external: The sovereignate negotiates as a unified bloc in international environmental forums, bringing the combined economic weight of its members to bear in ways that middle-power states individually cannot. The ability to credibly threaten or impose progressive economic exclusion on non-member countries that fail to meet defined environmental standards gives the collective a leverage point in climate negotiations that has never previously been available to actors short of the United States or China. [What about the EU: it negotiates as a block.]

External Relationships

These four domains do not operate as silos. The most important feature of the sovereigncy design is that they are mutually reinforcing in ways that make the whole considerably more powerful than the sum of its parts. A member that maintains genuine democratic effectiveness is a more reliable partner in collective military action. A member that benefits from economic security protection has stronger incentives to maintain its democratic commitments. A member that participates in environmental mutualisation is already accustomed to the principle that collective governance can impose binding obligations in domains of national policy. Each domain makes the others more credible.

The relationship with existing institutions requires explicit treatment. Sovereigncy is not designed as a replacement for the EU, NATO, or any other existing framework, and considerable practical wisdom is required in navigating the transition between the current institutional landscape and an sovereigncy-incorporating one. EU members could be members of a Sovereignate simultaneously; the two institutions operate across largely complementary rather than competing domains. The EU’s internal market and monetary arrangements are not replicated by sovereigncy; Sovereigncy’s democratic effectiveness mechanisms and compulsion right are precisely what the EU has been unable to develop. The EU’s failure to discipline Hungary illustrates the gap that a sovereigncy fills rather than the redundancy of sovereigncy. NATO presents a more complex relationship: Sovereigncy’s collective hard power domain overlaps with NATO’s collective defence function, but NATO has no democratic conditionality and no mechanism for addressing backsliding within its membership. Over time, the relationship between a sovereignate that included NATO members, and NATO, would need to be negotiated — a NATO membership that predates sovereigncy accession, and that covers overlapping membership, is a political reality to be managed rather than a conceptual problem.

Conclusion

The Biden administration’s Summit for Democracy process is instructive as a near-miss: an attempt to build a club of democracies with preferential treatment that largely failed for two identifiable reasons. First, it was a US initiative wearing the clothes of multilateralism, and the structural problem that the US is simultaneously the convenor, and the member most resistant to external conditionality on its own domestic governance, was never resolved. Second, it had no compelling architectural core — a collection of standalone initiatives without a coherent institutional design. Sovereigncy is explicitly designed to address both failures: it functions without US participation, and its institutional design is coherent precisely because it is grounded in a single architectural principle — that compulsion is the feature from which everything else derives.

The final question is the transition: how does an institution like this come into existence? The honest answer is that this essay is not the place to develop a full theory of the political economy of a sovereignate’s founding, which is a subject for further development. But two observations are relevant. The first is that the founding of major international institutions has historically followed moments of genuine system-level shock — the United Nations from the ashes of the Second World War, the EU from the ruins of European nationalism, the Bretton Woods institutions from the wreckage of the Depression-era trade collapse. The current moment, characterised by the rupture of the rules-based order, the demonstrated unreliability of US leadership, and the accumulating failures of existing multilateral institutions, may constitute exactly the kind of system-level shock that makes previously inconceivable institutional innovation politically possible. The second is that the natural founding membership shares a sufficient combination of strategic exposure, democratic commitment, and institutional capacity to constitute a credible founding coalition without requiring agreement from any single actor whose participation would be structurally incompatible with the concept’s integrity.

The institution described in these pages is ambitious. It is also, in the context of what the world currently requires, and what existing institutions have demonstrably failed to provide, the least ambitious proposal that could plausibly be adequate to the challenge.