tempest addendum

I feel the need to make an addendum to my last blog, because, in my ranting and raving, I neglected to mention that the United States and other countries are currently trying to help the peoples of Myanmar, and that this effort has been negated by the Myanmar government, which is currently blocking any form of aid from reaching the victims of the recent cyclone disaster. Sadly the people of Myanmar are compelled to suffer the seeming injustice of the state because Myanmar is a sovereign nation, whose decisions to allow aid or not are granted bys its exclusive right to self governance. Just as when we go to war, we must fight with the State whether or not we feel the justice of its cause. So the people of Myanmar must suffer and die by the decisions of its leaders.

The current worldview of sovereignty is based on the philosophy first laid out by Enlightenment thinker Rousseau in Of the Social Contract. In constitutional and international law, the concept of a government’s sovereignty means that a government possesses full control over its own affairs within a territorial or geographical area, and not beholden to any other power. Now, to be fair, Rousseau tried very hard to make a distinction between sovereignty and government, for sovereignty is an abstract concept that cannot be represented, and consists, rather as the general will of the populace. A will is not represented: either we have it itself, or it is something else. That is, usually, we focus on the leaders as the sovereign entities of a state, but this, I think, is a misconception.

Why is this important? Because for years we have been trying to figure out what sovereignty means. America has had to deal with these issues more than once, in the formation of the Articles of the Confederation, in the drafting of the Constitution, and in the post civil war era of reconstruction. Why? Because, America is made up of independent sovereign states. James Madison, in the Federalist Papers, said "each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is to be considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others.” And argues the right of any state at any time to secede from the union, without threat of intervention by federal powers. States continually test their powers against federal mandate, against the right to own slaves in the civil war and in modern times with the legalization of homosexual marriage. Alas, in recent times the federal government has of exercised greater and greater authority in determining these questions, and in the process raised questions about the rights of states and sovereignty all over again.

Who is the sovereign? And what does sovereignty mean? In a pluralist country torn by the opposing factions of left and right, how can such things be decided? American legal scholar John Chipman Gray once said ‘The real rulers of a society are undiscoverable.’ But with the real rulers goes sovereignty; and if you cannot find them, sovereignty seems to be beyond the reach of human insight.

Imagine for a moment how sovereignty has changed in our time. Environmental laws, human rights laws, global trade laws, have begun to dissolve the borders between men, but slowly. We must still stand in wonder as countries like Myanmar, whose sovereignty has been ignored or gone unrecognized by countries like the United States, rejects aid on principle, of mistrust, and the fear of its authority being undermined by from countries that have rebuked their sovereignty time and again. And for those who feel powerless in the face of such cruelty, to witness the human suffering of a country’s own people for such principles, it is not unnatural to wonder, when a state is sovereign, beholden to none, who is in charge?

It is not unreasonable to look to a world body like the United Nations for understanding and problem resolution. Presumably, we expect it to be an unbiased organization with the necessary power for enforcement. Yet, sadly, the United Nations has more often been a failure in terms of world peace. Divided internally, the UN has seldom (not counting the World health organization) brought enough countries together to form an alliance to intervene meaningfully in the affairs of world politics. Another option is international courts like The Hague, which probably have greater say in the leverage of sovereignty, but lack the official capacity to enforce their rulings. In short, our idea of sovereignty has begun to change, we have begun to create laws with greater scope and cast a wider net, but lack the methods to enforce them.

I am probably not going to make much headway in understanding the complexities of sovereignty. However, I can't help but feel that it is responsible in part for the suffering of the people of Myanmar and a barrier to peace the world over.