Abstract
Imagine that a Member of Parliament of the British House of Commons, a Chinese delegate to the United Nations and an Indian citizen walk into a bar. Before pouring them their drinks, the bartender asks each of them who is sovereign. The British MP replies that it is, of course, Westminster Parliament, able to make or unmake any law whatever. The Chinese delegate says that autonomous states are sovereign under international law, and the Indian claims that it is the people and only the people because they constitute the legal system.
This fictional anecdote fails to make it as a bar joke, since it lacks a punch line. What it hopefully does not fail to do is convey the message that different groups understand very different things when they hear the term “sovereignty” and they mean very different things when they use the term.
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Notes
- 1.
Black’s Law Dictionary (2006), p. 665.
- 2.
Schrijver (1999), p. 78.
- 3.
Troper (2012), p. 351.
- 4.
Geenens (2016), p. 16.
- 5.
Davia (1998), On The Problem Of Normativeness calls these rational reconstructions of the first and second degree respectively. “One may then distinguish basically between rational reconstructions of the first and of the second degree. A “rational reconstruction of the first degree” is dominated by the descriptive impetus, i.e., by the requirement of similarity, which here has to be strictly interpreted as a criterion of material non-creativity. […] A “rational reconstruction of the second degree” is dominated by the prescriptive impetus, i.e., the pursuit of precision and consistency, which here have to be interpreted as even material criteria of creativity.”
- 6.
Spaak (2009), p. 69.
- 7.
Tamanaha (2001), p. 2.
- 8.
- 9.
Troper (2012), p. 351.
- 10.
Cf. Kalyvas (2005), p. 227.
- 11.
See for example art. 20(2) of the German Basic Law.
- 12.
Cf. Winterton (1998).
- 13.
Cf. Sen (2011).
- 14.
Cf. Kalyvas (2005), p. 229.
- 15.
Cf. Dicey (1915), p. 28.
- 16.
Cf. Goldsworthy (1999), p. 14.
- 17.
Goldsworthy (2010), p. 287.
- 18.
Case of the S.S. “Wimbledon” (1923), p. 35.
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Waltermann, A.M. (2019). Preliminaries. In: Reconstructing Sovereignty. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 132. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30004-3_1
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