👈🏿 back

Situating New Sovereignties

I’ve been tracking various projects that engage with discussions of sovereignty and its role in the world system. I am interested in how– or whether– some of the projects being conceptualized in autonomous communities and network cultures, are actually any different than the discussions of foreign policy and global priorities we see playing out in mainstream politics. If they are different, how so? Analogously, within autonomous and network cultures there are various projects with aspirational visions of sovereignty. Are we all saying the same thing? Or are there differences in our projects that would be useful to articulate?

This post was motivated by a specific set of readings with notes below; it is not meant to be comprehensive, but rather exploratory: to capture a few different ‘point references,’ with the goal of locating each relative to the others, with the goal of making it possible to identify and engage distinct ideological underpinnings, and develop a better sense of how they overlap and differ.

A small sampling of initiatives in the wild that directly respond (or respnded) to the current Westphalian international system include Panarchy, World B, Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack, Seasteading, the 1729 Network State, Cultu.re, Bitnation, Edgeryders, Embassy Network, the New International Economic Order (1970s). But on some level the entire domain of international policy could also be characterized as a discussion about sovereignty and its role in the world system. The References section below captures notes from two readings that demonstrate the kind of ‘response’ or critical dialog happening in that space.

Based on these, there are three themes that seem to stand out across these projects, though each have significant overlap (I am not sure about the titles but they are functional placeholders):

  • virtual nation states: a claiming or reclaiming of the State form, a redeployment of the State on self-proclaimed terms.
  • unbundled polycentricity: unbundled, polycentric and fundamentally non-universalist projects
  • world order: world systems projects and discussions of “new world orders”. cosmopolitanism, world governments, neoliberalism, globality and globalization.

The overlaps

  • virtual nation-state + unbundled polycentricity
    • decentralization
    • bottom up (declarative) sovereignty
  • unbundled polycentricity + world order
    • non-domination/non-hierarchy
    • a kind of stratification and unbundling
  • world order +virtual nation state
    • use of the state form, enclosure.
    • totalizing/universalisms

What unites and differentiates these projects?

  • one is rooted in a critique, if not rejection, of the hegemony of the state institutional form. the other is rooted in a critique of the tenability of that system—observing that it is being destabilized and decentered by globalization, trade, the internet, and shifting geopolitical powers to such an extent that its ideals become a blind spot.
    • A shared set of coordinates around plurality, polycentricity, multi-polarity. but (again) one through the lens of necessity and pragmatism, the other through opportunity.
  • they all engage with, seek to produce, and operate at the level of self-determination and autonomy. some through enclosure (state building projects), and others through new forms of agency.
    • some actively seek to reproduce independent systems of authority and hierarchy (some don’t seek to but simply fail to critique it or see it as naturalized), and while the others proceed from a normative goal for world order grounded in non-domination and non-hierarchy.
  • a rejection of liberal determinism, but for one project it’s a rejection of the cooption of determinism and the desire for a richer, more diverse and plural world, and for the others it’s more of a materialist observation.
  • the search for stability vs. possibility.

References

The Wilsonian Era (Foreign Affairs)

reference: The End of the Wilsonian Era

The Wilsonian perspective:

  • Woodrow Wilson 1856 - 1924. Wilson advocated these principles but they were not taken on in American policy until after he died.

  • Wilsonian principles: “Self-determination, the rule of law between and within countries, liberal economics, and the protection of human rights: the ‘new world order.’”

  • “Wilson believed that the so-called ordered liberty that characterized the Anglo-American countries had opened a path to permanent prosperity and peace. This belief represents a sort of Anglo-Saxon #Hegelianism and holds that the mix of free markets, free government, and the rule of law that developed in the United Kingdom and the United States is inevitably transforming the rest of the world—and that as this process continues, the world will slowly and for the most part voluntarily converge on the values that made the Anglo-Saxon world as wealthy, attractive, and free as it has become.”
  • “In the early 1990s, leading U.S. foreign policymakers and commentators saw the fall of the Soviet Union through the same deterministic prism: as a signal that the time had come for a truly global and truly liberal world order.”

The current moment, the need to look beyond a Wilsonian approach:

  • “nations of the earth will continue to seek some kind of political order, because they must… But the dream of a universal order… will figure less and less in the work of world leaders.”
  • “the centrifugal forces tearing at the Wilsonian order are so deeply rooted in the nature of the contemporary world that not even the end of the Trump era can revive the Wilsonian project in its most ambitious form.”
  • the days when “American presidents organized their foreign policies around the principles of liberal internationalism, are unlikely to return anytime soon.”
  • “Wilsonianism is only one version of a rules-based world order among many. The Westphalian system, which emerged in Europe after the Thirty Years’ War ended in 1648, and the Congress system, which arose in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century, were both rules-based and even law-based; some of the foundational ideas of international law date from those eras. And the Holy Roman Empire—a transnational collection of territories that stretched from France into modern-day Poland and from Hamburg to Milan—was an international system that foreshadowed the European Union, with highly complex rules governing everything from trade to sovereign inheritance among princely houses.”
  • “The real problem of Wilsonianism is not a naive faith in good intentions but a simplistic view of the historical process, especially when it comes to the impact of technological progress on human social order.”

Obstacles to the “Wilsonian project”

  • ” the return of ideology-fueled geopolitics.” … other nations instead “[s]eeing Wilsonianism as a cover for American and, to some degree, EU ambitions,”
  • “anti-Wilsonian coalitions” “raises the risks and costs for Wilsonian powers to intervene in conflicts beyond their own borders.” and “membership of countries such as China and Russia in international institutions makes it more difficult for those institutions to operate in support of Wilsonian norms.”
  • technology makes politics “more turbulent and polarized.”
    • makes “the victory of populist and antiestablishment candidates… more likely… also makes it harder for national leaders to pursue… compromises.”
    • wilsonians have a false belief that “technological progress will make the world more governable and politics more rational.” “although new technologies often contribute to the spread of liberal ideas and practices, they can also undermine democratic systems and aid authoritarian regimes.”
  • all of this “destabilizing international life in other ways that make it harder for rules-based international institutions to cope”
  • “the belief in convergence can no longer be sustained. Today, China, India, Russia, and Turkey all seem less likely to converge on liberal democracy than they did in 1990.”
  • “Wilsonianism is a particularly European solution to a particularly European set of problems…” (conflict between small states)
  • “In human history as a whole, enduring civilizational states seem more typical than the European pattern of rivalry among peer states.”
    • India
    • Ottoman and Persian empires
  • “Postcolonial and non-Western states often joined international institutions as a way to recover and enhance their sovereignty, not to surrender it, and their chief interest in international law was to protect weak states from strong ones, not to limit the power of national leaders to consolidate their authority.”
  • challenge of democracy in wilsonian times:
    • “Wilson lived in an era when democratic governance faced problems that many feared were insurmountable. The Industrial Revolution had divided American society, creating unprecedented levels of inequality. Titanic corporations and trusts had acquired immense political power and were quite selfishly exploiting that power to resist all challenges to their economic interests.”
    • “The progressives’ answer to this problem was to support the creation of an apolitical expert class of managers and administrators.”
  • “the international order will increasingly be shaped by states that are on diverging paths… global institutions will have to accommodate a much wider range of views and values than they have in the past.”
    • “Institutions such as NATO, the UN, and the World Trade Organization may well survive … but they will be less able and perhaps less willing to fulfill even their original purposes,”
  • “Non-Wilsonian orders have existed both in Europe and in other parts of the world in the past, and the nations of the world will likely need to draw on these examples as they seek to cobble together some kind of framework for stability and, if possible, peace under contemporary conditions.”
    • (in my opinion, not just other parts of the world but other strata of thought.)
  • many leaders “believe not only that a Wilsonian foreign policy is a good and useful thing for the United States but also that it is the only path to peace and security and even to the survival of civilization and humanity.”
    • due to their deep belief they will fight for these approaches will will actually exacerbate the issue.

Hybrid Security Alliances in the Middle East

reference: Hybrid Security Governance and the Search for the State in the Middle East

Hybrid security arrangements at the state-system-level demonstrate ways in which the Westphalian model is more of an idealized fiction than a formal reality; an always-already-post-Westphalian model.

  • “new hybrid forms of security governance, which merged and intermingled state and non-state coercive power”
  • “state security forces coexist with a host of armed non-state actors”
  • not just competing but in some cases “pro-government militias supplementing, and sometimes replacing, armies that had suffered from desertion and poor combat performance.”
  • “combine[d] formal and informal policing and adjudication; familiar patronage-based recruitment and promotion along with increasingly pervasive monetized opportunities in the gray economy; and a mix of centralized and decentralized modes of control over the means and uses of coercion.”
  • “defies orthodox conflict resolution approaches of “fixing” failed states and marginalizing armed non-state actors”
  • “makes government decision-makers less relevant in the actual contest for power in a country’s periphery,” and “open up the potential for new arrays of power and responsibility.”
  • “State-building has long been the favored policy prescription for dealing with weak and failed states…” however “militias and warlords are often more valuable partners” and large states “may see non-state actors as cheap options for dealing with recurrent but distant security problems.”
  • “Hybrid security arrangements offer alternatives to state-centered orthodoxies. States may not disappear, but their role will be increasingly symbolic — even figurative.”

Deudney’s “World Systems” perspective

reference: Space Expansionism and Planetary Geopolitics (podcast)

  • Deudney’s focus is on “world political theory” and “global order.”
  • “I’m making arguments in this space book but also in my work on nuclear weapons and the environment that we are in a situation now because of transformations in technology - all this empowerment that has occurred - where both hierarchy and anarchy are incompatible with security and political freedom. And so the project is to figure out how to exit the anarchy that we have without creating a world state as a hierarchy, but instead to generate a kind of republican union that would take us out of anarchy and provide authoritative capacities to regulate these various super-technologies without empowering a center that would be all powerful and oppressive.”

Other references

  • “An Open World,” which explores the ways in which the world order is no longer uni-polar with America at the center, and openness is a theme characterizing much of geopolitics. The book looks at how that will and should affect alliances, domestic politics and global institutions.
  • “Worldmaking after Empire,” which discusses African decolonization and the New International Economic Order’s efforts to introduce welfare and redistribution at the global level.