A central theme in international relations scholarship following the Cold War was the apparent erosion of state sovereignty arising from globalization's integrative effects and the proliferation of international institutions, norms, and networks.Footnote 1 More recently, however, sovereignty seems to have staged a comeback. It was a cornerstone of Donald Trump's bid for the US presidency and a rallying cry of the “take back control” campaign for Britain's withdrawal from the European Union (EU). China, Russia, and other countries have restricted foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and limited access to the Internet, also to “protect” sovereignty.Footnote 2 Poland and Hungary's leaders invoked the principle against EU policies on migrants.Footnote 3 Governments around the world are building border barriers at an accelerating rate.Footnote 4
Many observers interpret these trends as a resurgence of Westphalian sovereignty, typically defined as the exclusive entitlement of state authorities to govern a bounded territory and the recognition of this right by other actors.Footnote 5 As Eric Posner proclaims, “Westphalia has returned.”Footnote 6 This interpretation is partly correct, but it is incomplete—misleadingly so. Non-Westphalian understandings of sovereignty have also experienced a resurgence in recent years. Some portray sovereignty as the power of leaders to act outside the constraints of formal rules in both domestic and international politics, or extralegal sovereignty. Others characterize sovereign power as the quasi-mystical connection between a people and their leader, or organic sovereignty. Both of these meanings predate the Peace of Westphalia of 1648—the putative genesis of modern sovereignty—and have been sustained and reshaped by generations of political thinkers.
Strikingly, these concepts have recently gained prominence in the foreign-policy discourses of Russia, China, and the United States, a development with important implications for both scholars and practitioners of international affairs. Sovereignty encapsulates the “constitutional” norms of international politics, including shared understandings about the attributes of legitimate statehood and the boundaries of their rightful behavior.Footnote 7 Changes in these understandings consequently enable and constrain different types of state conduct.Footnote 8 However, contrary to the Westphalian model, which emphasizes states’ legal equality and the principle of noninterference in their domestic affairs, the extralegal and organic versions of sovereignty offer few constraints on state action. If anything, they appear to license powerful states to dominate others.
This article has four main parts, each of which contributes to international relations scholarship. First, I elucidate the extralegal and organic models, which scholars have tended to overlook or dismiss as archaic precursors or as failed competitors of modern sovereignty. I trace these models’ main features and intellectual evolution from long before 1648 to the present, showing how they persisted and evolved in the shadow of Westphalianism.
Second, much of the scholarship on the development of international norms has focused on the role of nonstate actors and small- and medium-sized states as norm “entrepreneurs,” or promoters of new norms. However, there are good reasons to expect major powers to behave as norm entrepreneurs, and specifically to promote sovereignty norms that align with—and thus help to legitimize—their own policies and behavior. I also explain why major powers might opt to revive older sovereignty norms rather than concoct new ones. Established conceptions of sovereignty, even those in partial abeyance, are more likely to resonate with other states and domestic populations than novel, unfamiliar formulations.
Next I analyze leadership discourses in Russia, China, and the US—three of the world's most powerful countries—between 2000 and 2019. Although Westphalianism remains the dominant depiction of sovereignty, organic and extralegal versions have gained prominence in all three countries over this period. The “return” of sovereignty, in other words, has included the revival of older understandings of the concept.
Finally, I consider the implications of these findings. International relations scholars have tended to assume that sovereignty moderates power politics—by establishing rights that both strong and weak states can assert, including the right of noninterference in their domestic affairs—but this is true only of the Westphalian version. Extralegal and organic sovereignty effectively turn Westphalianism on its head: the power of an extralegal “sovereign” leader is primordial, supreme, and free of legal and conventional restraints; and an organically “sovereign” state derives its power from the whole force of the society, united by belief in its own cultural and civilizational superiority. The revival of extralegal and organic sovereignty in the official discourse of three major powers should therefore be a matter of concern.
New and Old Sovereignties
Academic interest in sovereignty spiked after the Cold War, when globalization processes—including the growth of transnational markets and flows of goods, capital, technology, people, and ideas across borders—seemed to be eroding states’ abilities both to govern internally and to respond to transnational problems.Footnote 9 As one observer put it, “frameworks of political regulatory relations and activities, shaped and formed by an overarching cosmopolitan legal framework,” appeared to have “stripped away from the idea of fixed borders and territories governed by states alone.”Footnote 10 The EU, in particular, had grown into a “highly developed system for mutual interference” in the domestic affairs of each member state, “right down to beer and sausages.”Footnote 11 Global norms also seemed to be gaining “precedence in certain domains over norms of sovereignty.”Footnote 12 United Nations (UN) Secretary General Kofi Annan, for example, wrote in 1999 about a “developing international norm in favor of intervention to protect civilians from wholesale slaughter,” necessitating changes to “traditional notions of sovereignty.”Footnote 13 To many, the world seemed to be entering a post-Westphalian era.Footnote 14
Yet in some quarters resistance was mounting to the globalization of liberal norms and the perceived erosion of national control. Russian authorities, in particular, came to view transnational human-rights and democracy NGOs as fifth columnists, bent on instigating democratic “color revolutions” in nearby Georgia and Ukraine and undermining the sovereignty of Russia itself.Footnote 15 Both Russia and China also bridled at what they saw as liberal interventionism, particularly following the 2011 military operation in Libya. The UN Security Council, invoking Annan's “responsibility to protect,” had authorized the use of force to safeguard “civilians and civilian-populated areas” threatened by the forces of Libyan leader Muammar Qadaffi.Footnote 16 Although Russia and China abstained in this Security Council vote, they later complained bitterly that intervening forces led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had overstepped their mandate by effectively overthrowing Qadaffi. Thereafter they, along with several developing countries, reverted to a stricter interpretation of the Westphalian nonintervention principle in international forums, blocking Security Council action in Syria, for example.Footnote 17
More surprising was the growing popular backlash against globalization in liberal democracies that had long championed international integration, most notably the United States and some European countries.Footnote 18 Populists there sought, among other things, to reassert state control over transnational flows and external forces through a variety of means, including “economic nationalism and an embrace of protectionism, political chauvinism, isolationism, reassertion of strict border controls, reversal of previous international commitments, and an expansive range of discriminatory measures” against outsiders.Footnote 19 Calls to strengthen sovereignty sometimes made for strange bedfellows: left-wing critics of globalized capitalism and right-wing opponents of immigration and global governance.Footnote 20 The rise of Western populism thus seemed to give the Westphalian state “an unlikely new lease on life.”Footnote 21
The combination of these two, seemingly contradictory developments—illiberal states resisting perceived encroachments by globalized liberalism, and Western populist movements and leaders wishing to “take back control” of national policy—created a diffuse yet influential Westphalian constituency. It also lent support to those scholars and commentators who argued that Westphalian sovereignty was “back” and liberal globalism was in retreat.Footnote 22 Their assessment was not wrong. Border controls were increasing, restrictions on the free flow of information across borders were growing, and protectionist trade policies were mounting.Footnote 23 But this interpretation oversimplified Westphalianism and ignored the possible resurgence of other understandings of sovereignty, as we shall see.
Historicizing Sovereignty
Like many foundation myths, the story of Westphalian sovereignty has been distorted and idealized.Footnote 24 It tends to portray the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War in Europe, as the watershed between the political arrangements of the medieval era (crisscrossing feudal relationships in an overarching “Christian commonwealth”) and the emergence of the modern states system (with centralized, territorially bounded structures of political organization with exclusive authority inside their own borders).Footnote 25 However, the Westphalian model crystallized gradually over hundreds of years. The principle of nonintervention, for example, found clear expression only late in the eighteenth century.Footnote 26
Other understandings of sovereignty also emerged in the centuries after 1648. Ideas of popular and national sovereignty flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and have co-existed and interacted with Westphalianism since then. The leaders of the American Revolution were among those who believed that popular sovereignty—governing authority deriving from the consent of the people—justified their quest for independence, or Westphalian statehood. Notions of national sovereignty—the right of national groups to govern themselves—also prompted colonies to claim their own states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which incidentally helped spread the Westphalian model to most of the world.
These versions of sovereignty are widely recognized, but scholars of international relations have largely overlooked models pre-dating 1648, the “usual marker of the inception of modern international relations.”Footnote 27 Even those studying earlier understandings of sovereignty have tended to depict them either as archaic precursors or as failed competitors of the Westphalian version. Robert Jackson, for example, describes the demise of dynastic and imperial conceptions of sovereignty.Footnote 28 Hedrick Spruyt recounts how the sovereign territorial state outcompeted feudal forms of political organization as well as city-leagues and city-states.Footnote 29 F.H. Hinsley asserts that “the rise of state forms is a necessary condition of the notion of sovereignty,” effectively defining away pre-Westphalian uses of the term.Footnote 30
Portraying sovereignty as an inherently modern idea has created a blind spot in the study of international relations. Some pre-modern versions did not disappear, even as Westphalianism seemed to triumph. I describe two such versions: extralegal and organic. Recognizing their existence—and persistence—allows us to ask an important question about sovereignty's recent “return”: Are extralegal and organic understandings also experiencing a resurgence alongside Westphalianism—and if so, why?
Extralegal Sovereignty
Extralegal sovereignty refers to a leader's right to act outside the constraints of formal rules. This was the earliest usage, coined in the Roman Empire during the first century CE. Emperors from Augustus onward were considered divine personifications of Rome's power, and therefore above the law.Footnote 31 As the noted third-century jurist Ulpian wrote, “what pleases the Prince has the force of law” and “the Prince is not bound by law.”Footnote 32 This interpretation long survived the Romans. Medieval Europeans, for example, recognized multiple sovereigns: a Christian God who ruled the world; the pope, sovereign over the (Latin) church; the Holy Roman Emperor, supreme monarch of the “republic of Christendom”; and kings in charge of their various realms. In practice, the multiplicity of temporal authorities and the overlapping structures of feudal politics limited these leaders’ individual authority,Footnote 33 but medieval jurists, inspired in part by Ulpian, continued to define sovereignty as the untrammeled power to rule.Footnote 34
As political authority began to recentralize in early-modern European states, Jean Bodin and other sixteenth-century thinkers envisioned sovereignty as centralized authority within a bounded territory—the seeds of Westphalianism. However, scholars today sometimes forget that Bodin retained extralegalism. Drawing on ancient and medieval theorists, he wrote in 1576 that the sovereign possessed “supreme power over citizens and subjects, unrestrained by law.”Footnote 35 Indeed, his conceptualization of centralized, territorially bounded, and essentially unlimited sovereignty laid the theoretical foundations not only for the modern state but also for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century absolutism.Footnote 36
The Enlightenment belief that individuals possessed natural rights eventually challenged this absolutist notion. John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and other eighteenth-century social-contract theorists argued that individual rights were ontologically prior to states: that is, individuals possessing sovereignty collectively delegated it to a governing authority but could revoke this contract if the state violated their natural rights. New doctrines of popular sovereignty and limited government emerged from this thinking, ultimately to dramatic effect, including the American and French revolutions. Still, extralegal theories did not go away, nor did every Enlightenment philosopher emphasize constraints on sovereign power. Like Locke and Kant, Thomas Hobbes imagined autonomous individuals in a state of nature, but his reasoning (and the English Civil War) led him to theorize a Leviathan,Footnote 37 an absolute sovereign “unchecked by rival powers and unlimited by legal or other constraints.”Footnote 38
Hobbes's theory grounded a long line of political writers conceiving of sovereignty as the capacity for decisive and unrestricted executive action. German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) typified its essence as a supreme ruler's discretionary power to act outside the law whenever they deemed it necessary: “Sovereign is he who decides the exception.”Footnote 39 For Schmitt, such “unbridled primordial power” did not transgress sovereignty—it was sovereignty.Footnote 40 It also differed from notions of national “exceptionalism,” or the belief that a nation's uniqueness and moral superiority entitled it to violate international rules.Footnote 41 Schmitt's concept of unlimited discretionary power, by contrast, was intrinsically and exclusively that of the individual sovereign, who sat “above and outside the restraints of the existing legal order.”Footnote 42
Organic Sovereignty
Sovereignty has also referred to the state's “fundamental organic unity.”Footnote 43 Although many cultures have invoked bodily metaphors for polities, European ideas of organic sovereignty grew out of ancient Greek “political naturalism,”Footnote 44 including Plato's depiction of a state as a living being in which different social classes perform distinct yet interdependent functions akin to parts of the human “soul.”Footnote 45 Greek organicism influenced Roman political theorizing and ultimately Christian theology, including St Paul's conception of the church as a mystical organic body (Ecclesia), whose head was Christ.Footnote 46 These ideas informed temporal political thought as well. In the twelfth century, for example, John of Salisbury described a well-organized political community as a “body which is animated,” with the king as head, soldiers and administrative officials as the hands, and peasants as the feet;Footnote 47 in effect, all inhabitants—rulers and ruled—were “essentially one person.”Footnote 48
Enlightenment-era political theory mechanized this metaphysical body politic, reflecting discoveries in physiology and fascination with the human body as a type of machine.Footnote 49 Political society seemed similar to a body, with independent yet interacting parts (in this case, individuals), that was governed by these individuals’ rational decisions rather than by divine fiat.Footnote 50 Hobbes contributed to this intellectual tradition, too, portraying the commonwealth as an “Artificiall Man” created by reasoning individuals, and sovereignty as the “Artificiall Soul, … giving life and motion to the whole body.”Footnote 51
Organic and mechanistic conceptions of the body politic ultimately came together a century later in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like other Enlightenment rationalists, he saw society as a collection of autonomous individuals who set up a social contract to create a government, which in turn allowed them to express their wishes by voting in an assembly and legislating together. This process yielded the society's “general will,” another precursor of the modern concept of popular sovereignty. Yet Rousseau also characterized the general will in a second way: as citizens’ metaphysical common interest, which was distinct from their expressed wishes. In doing so, he reprised the pre-rationalist, organic conception of the body politic.Footnote 52
Organic visions of the state also featured in the late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings of Johann Gottfried Herder and other German Romantics, who argued that culture, language, ethnicity, race, and religion, rather than civic or political criteria, defined membership in the German nation. All authentic nations, they contended, were the product of natural forces and attachments, later termed “blood and soil.” Herder maintained that awareness of a glorified organic past, along with a society's collective will, provided “a definite direction to all the endeavors of its members.”Footnote 53 He contrasted this directedness to the wayward weakness of societies that had “not found themselves” and had to “seek their salvation in foreign nations, serving them, thinking their thoughts; they forget even the times of their glory, of their own proven feats, always desiring, never succeeding, always lingering on the threshold.”Footnote 54 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, drawing from Herder's writings, also conceived of the state and sovereignty in organic terms: “The idealism which constitutes sovereignty is the same characteristic as that in accordance with which the so-called ‘parts’ of an animal organism are not parts, but members, moments in an organic whole, whose isolation and independence spell disease.”Footnote 55
Colored by such notions of organic statehood, this version of sovereignty referred neither to Westphalian rights nor to extralegal leadership, but rather to “the whole power of the state, the whole force belonging to the political association as such, [and] the might and power of the political community.”Footnote 56 In this sense, a fully sovereign state resembled a physically and mentally strong being whose people were united and mindful of their cultural uniqueness and superiority and committed to working together to fulfill their collective destiny.
The Return of Sovereignty—But Which Kind?
Extralegal and organic sovereignty are logically distinct: the extralegal locates political power and legitimacy in the leader's inherent qualities, whereas organic locates it in the nature of the society. However, the leader—as part of the organic body politic—may claim to channel the quasi-mystical spirit of the people, while simultaneously asserting extralegal powers in virtue of his or her supremacy as leader. Blending these two understandings of sovereignty creates logical tensions—is the leader bound to society or not? Both conceptions also have commonalities that differentiate them from Westphalianism, which establishes both entitlements and limits on state behavior, such as the principle of nonintervention in domestic affairs, that rest upon shared understandings among states—a social contract of sorts.Footnote 57 By contrast, the “sovereignty” rights of extralegal leaders and organic societies are neither international nor contractual. They are autochthonous and primordial.
Scholars analyzing the recent “return” of sovereignty have tended to take the Westphalian meaning for granted, but what if the older versions have also experienced a resurgence? The question has important implications. Some commentators believe that reaffirming sovereignty will reinforce restraints on state behavior, thus providing a sounder basis for international order. “The world needs a new order grounded not in twentieth-century ideological fault lines and the idea that history would soon reach its end, but in respect for … state sovereignty,” writes Eric Li, because “strong sovereign states are paramount to a functioning international system.”Footnote 58 According to Stephen Walt, embracing sovereignty as the central tenet of US foreign policy could go “a long way toward resolving some of our current tensions with Russia.”Footnote 59 Under this mantle, he writes, “the United States would get out of the business of trying to spread democracy (whether by force or through less coercive means) and would instead adopt a ‘live and let live’ approach toward governments that are different from its own.”Footnote 60 Others disagree, worrying about human rights in such a “neo-Westphalian” world because states might find it easier to mistreat their own people, or because a stronger defense of state autonomy might hinder international cooperation.Footnote 61 Both sides in this debate share a common assumption: Westphalian sovereignty is back.
Importantly, the extralegal and organic versions do not rest on the Westphalian principles of political independence, territorial integrity, and nonintervention. If anything, they offer a license for strong states to dominate others. The power of an extralegal “sovereign” leader is intrinsic, supreme, and free of legal and conventional constraints; and an organically “sovereign” state derives its power from the whole force of a society united by beliefs about its own cultural or civilizational superiority. If these models were to revive, it is far from clear that they would foster restraint.
Norm Retrieval in Theory and Practice
How would we know if extralegal and organic understandings of sovereignty were gaining prominence in international affairs—and why might this be happening? There is an extensive literature on the emergence and development of international norms. According to Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, new norms emerge at the start of their “life cycle” (emergence, development, diffusion, and institutionalization) when norm entrepreneurs seek to “convince a critical mass of states … to embrace [them].”Footnote 62 Success may lead to a “tipping point” and the norm's widespread acceptance as a “prevailing standard of appropriateness” for state behavior.Footnote 63 Scholars in this school, however, rarely explain how to recognize emergent norms before they reach the tipping point, although they imply that such investigations should focus on NGOs and small and medium-sized states—the usual norm entrepreneurs in this literature.Footnote 64
This approach has two limitations. First, it downplays the role of materially powerful states, typically depicting them as objects of campaigns to shift norms, rather than as norm entrepreneurs themselves. As Seva Gunitsky notes, “despite general agreement that great powers ‘matter’ in shaping global norms,” theories of norm evolution “rarely focus on the mechanics of hegemonic power and instead emphasize tactics such as shaming and persuasion by non-state actors.”Footnote 65 However, there are good reasons to expect major powers to perform the role of norm entrepreneur, particularly vis-à-vis sovereignty. Different sovereignty concepts legitimize different types of actors and actions. All other things being equal, the closer a state's policies and behavior align with dominant sovereignty concepts, the easier it is for that state to pursue its objectives with at least the tacit consent of other actors. Conversely, violators are more likely to incur “legitimacy costs” in the form of domestic or international resistance.Footnote 66 Powerful states should therefore have an interest in promoting sovereignty norms that match their legitimacy requirements.
Major powers also possess greater capacities than nongovernmental actors and smaller states to shape international norms, which likely explains why the “constellation of constitutional norms and fundamental institutions” in international politics, including sovereignty, has historically tended to reflect “the perspectives of the dominant actors.”Footnote 67 Westphalianism itself emerged in response to (and as a means of legitimizing) the rising power of territorial states in early-modern Europe. Ever since, criteria for recognizing other polities as sovereign states have reflected major powers’ beliefs about the attributes of legitimate statehood and rightful state action, informed by their own interests and ideological commitments.Footnote 68 In short, to detect leading indicators of an emergent shift in sovereignty norms, we should start with major powers.
Second, the norm evolution literature has tended to focus on the development and diffusion of new norms, without considering how and why major powers might instead seek to revive older ones. What, then, is the logic of norm retrieval, specifically in relation to sovereignty? It may be this: older norms are more likely to resonate with key audiences than novel, less-recognizable formulations. Because sovereignty consists of shared understandings, no state can single-handedly change its content simply by affirming different versions of sovereignty; other states must also embrace them. The same applies to domestic politics: national governments seeking legitimacy in the eyes of their own population must invoke norms that their people recognize and accept. In the language of social-movement theory, representations must “resonate” with “extant interpretive frames.”Footnote 69 Representations with low chances of resonating are therefore of little practical use, which in turn implies that there are limits to the sovereignty claims that states can realistically advance. Sociologist Anne Swidler makes a similar argument in her analysis of culture as a “tool kit” of symbols and shared understandings.Footnote 70 Individuals and groups, she argues, legitimize their behavior by constructing “strategies of action” out of these shared ideas, but the tool kit provides a “limited set of resources out of which individuals and groups construct strategies of action.”Footnote 71 In other words, the repertoire of shared understandings is both enabling and constraining.
States seeking to change the prevailing standards of state behavior by advancing new sovereignty norms face a similar paradox: how to do so in a way that resonates with other states and domestic audiences. One solution is to retrieve older understandings from “deeper” in the tool kit—that is, versions of sovereignty that have established meanings, even if they have been in partial abeyance. Extralegal and organic sovereignty are good examples, long overshadowed by the Westphalian model, but still extant, as we have seen. Retrieving these understandings offers strategic advantages compared to concocting new formulations of sovereignty that key audiences might not even recognize, much less embrace.
How would we recognize norm retrieval happening? Once norms are widely accepted, they tend to be visible in what actors say and do. International legal scholars, for example, scrutinize patterns of state discourse and behavior to distill elements of customary international law. Scholars of international relations similarly judge norms’ “robustness” by examining the extent to which states talk and behave as though they are real.Footnote 72 However, the act of norm retrieval does not presuppose a successful, or robust, outcome; it merely describes an attempt to promote older norms. In the case of extralegal and organic sovereignty, in particular, it involves efforts to present these concepts as legitimate understandings. Frank Schimmelfennig calls this “rhetorical action,” or “the strategic use of norm-based arguments.”Footnote 73 Others note that political actors often use “strategic narratives” in attempts “to construct a shared meaning of the past, present, and future of international politics to shape the behavior of domestic and international actors.”Footnote 74 If norm retrieval is fundamentally a rhetorical act, it should therefore be evident in the discourse of states.
Three questions should guide this investigation. First, when major powers have mentioned sovereignty, what meanings have they attached to the term? Are they Westphalian (sovereignty as territorial integrity, political independence, nonintervention), extra-legal (sovereignty as the primordial power of the leader), or organic (sovereignty as a strong, united society or civilization)—or some combination of all three? Second, do these countries also invoke the extralegal and organic models to describe the “constitutional structures” of international politics, even when they do not explicitly mention sovereignty? Christian Reus-Smit defines constitutional structures as “coherent ensembles of intersubjective beliefs, principles, and norms that perform two functions in ordering international societies: they define what constitutes a legitimate actor, entitled to all the rights and privileges of statehood; and they define the basic parameters of rightful state action.”Footnote 75 The parameters of rightful state action are of particular concern here. When major powers talk about how states can or should behave, do they invoke the principles of Westphalian, extralegal, or organic sovereignty in all but name? Third, based on these assessments, have patterns changed over time? Specifically, have certain meanings become more prominent—that is, invoked more often—relative to the other meanings?
Although norm retrieval is fundamentally discursive, examining major powers’ behavior can help clarify the meaning of their discourses, and perhaps the motivations behind their use. Indeed, analyzing discourses “is not merely the linguistic analysis of texts”;Footnote 76 it also requires considering the “context or environment that produced” them.Footnote 77 Part of this context is what states are doing when they talk about sovereignty. If, as I have posited, major powers have an interest in shaping sovereignty norms to legitimize their actions in the eyes of other states and their own people, we should look for evidence of specific behaviors that they seek to legitimize. A detailed investigation of their motives would require analysis of internal governmental deliberations that is beyond the scope of this study, but shifts in sovereignty discourses coinciding with behavioral changes would offer prima facie evidence of a connection. More generally, considering major powers’ behavior situates their speech within a specific temporal and policy context, which may not be explicit within the discourses themselves.Footnote 78
Are Extralegal and Organic Sovereignty “Back”?
I examine the sovereignty discourses of three of the world's most powerful countries—Russia, China, and the United States—through their leaders’ public statements between 2000 and 2019.Footnote 79 Although their statements represent only a fraction of each state's foreign-policy pronouncements, the three presidents are their countries’ chief diplomats, and their official communications are the most authoritative expressions of government policy. This is particularly true in autocratic Russia and China, whose leaders exercise enormous personal discretion. The American president, by contrast, operates in a system of constitutionally divided powers, where Congress plays a major role on international matters. Nevertheless, the US president retains considerable executive powers over foreign policy and officially speaks for the nation on the world stage.Footnote 80
To analyze the discourse of these leaders, I first searched the record for statements that explicitly referred to sovereignty and considered, in each case, whether they attached Westphalian, extra-legal, or organic meanings.Footnote 81 Second, I examined a selection of their major foreign-policy speeches to capture instances in which they may have invoked the extralegal or organic concepts to describe the parameters of rightful state action, even if they did not explicitly mention the term sovereignty.
Russia
Vladimir Putin has served twice as Russia's president: from late 1999 until 2008 and again from 2012 to the present.Footnote 82 When he first assumed the office, he was still calling for Russia's “integration into the world community” and even promoting cosmopolitan liberalism.Footnote 83 In December 1999, for example, he said his compatriots had accepted “supra-national universal values which are above social, group or ethnic interests,” including “such values as freedom of expression … and other fundamental political rights and human liberties.” He also pointedly rejected “state ideology” because it left “practically no room for intellectual and spiritual freedom, ideological pluralism and freedom of the press, that is, for political freedom.”Footnote 84 At the same time, he stressed a “strong state” as a “source and guarantor of order,” echoing but not yet linking these ideas to sovereignty, which he still depicted in Westphalian terms.
This changed after his 2004 re-election: “It is our values that determine our desire to see Russia's state independence grow and its sovereignty strengthened … [because] our place in the modern world … will only depend on how strong and successful we are,” he told the federal assembly in 2005.Footnote 85 This is an early instance of his describing sovereignty not just as a shield from outside interference, but also as a metaphor for a strong state rooted in shared values—a hint of the organic imagery that would gain prominence in his later sovereignty discourse. Putin's rhetorical shift may have been partly a reaction to Baltic neighbors Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joining NATO in 2004. In a 2007 speech in Munich, he condemned NATO's expansion and accused the US of being the world's “one master, one sovereign,” again in a non-Westphalian sense.Footnote 86 After returning home, he further linked traditional values, national will, state strength, and organic sovereignty: “The spiritual unity of the people and the moral values that unite us”—including “native language” and “unique cultural values”—are “the foundation for strengthening our country's unity and sovereignty.”Footnote 87 He later told the Valdai International Discussion Club that Russia “will either be independent and sovereign or will most likely not exist at all.”Footnote 88
Putin also increasingly spoke of his country as a special civilization with distinctive values and a unique spirituality.Footnote 89 He retrieved the medieval concept of a “Russian World,” which referred both to a transnational ethnic community and to other nationalities living in a Eurasian space extending “far from Russia's geographical borders.”Footnote 90 Although Putin described Russian civilization as multiethnic, its organic character was clear: “Russian people are without a doubt the backbone, the fundament, the cement of the multinational Russian people … a poly-ethnic civilization held together by a Russian cultural core … The[ir] great mission … is to unite and cement this civilization.”Footnote 91 As one observer has noted, the concept of a Russian World “hierarchically elevates ethnic Russians over other (ambiguously conceived) inhabitants of the post-Soviet space, as well as assuming Russian leadership over Eurasian integration.”Footnote 92 Indeed, Putin has sought to establish Eurasian supranational bodies dominated by Russia, but with limited success to date.Footnote 93
Ensuring his nation's sovereignty, Putin has further argued, requires tapping into “Christian values.”Footnote 94 Once again describing sovereignty in organic terms, he has characterized Russia as the last true redoubt of Christendom and explicitly woven religion into his project: “The desire for independence and sovereignty in spiritual, ideological and foreign policy spheres is an integral part of our national character.”Footnote 95 The Russian Orthodox Church, notes one observer, has been a “central pillar and main source of cohesion” in Putin's organic and civilizational vision.Footnote 96 The church has reciprocated, supporting (and thus sanctifying for believers) his foreign military interventions, and championing the link between organic sovereignty, religion, and the civilizational “Russian World.” As its patriarch proclaimed in 2013, “spiritual sovereignty is perhaps the highest degree of asserting the sovereignty of Russia as a unique country-civilization.”Footnote 97
To Putin, achieving full sovereignty also presupposes a powerful presidency, which in practice has meant increasingly extralegal rule. Russia, in his words, “cannot be strong if the President's power is weak.”Footnote 98 He has centralized political power in the Kremlin “to an extent not seen since Stalin,” acquiring “something close to control of most levers of power in Russia, including the national legislature, provincial governments, the media, and even industry.”Footnote 99 Several scholars have noted the affinities with Carl Schmitt's political philosophy, particularly as political power and authority in Moscow have become more personalized, centralized, and extralegal.Footnote 100 Putin, one of them writes, “makes the rules and he alone has the right to ignore them and to dispense the authority to ignore them to others.”Footnote 101 Two other scholars make a similar point: “it is not that Putinism is anti-constitutional, but that it is supra-constitutional, building constant loopholes and states of exceptions in which Putin can find justifications for both expanding his power across Russia's borders and cracking down on supposed security threats within its borders.”Footnote 102 He sees “himself, and only himself, as the guarantor of the system.”Footnote 103
These elements of organic and extralegal sovereignty came together in the writings of the Kremlin's “loyal ideologue,” Vladislav Surkov, who first asserted that Russia has its own unique understanding of “sovereign democracy.”Footnote 104 Its foundation, he argued, is the “centralization [and] concentration of the nation's material, intellectual, and power resources for the purposes of self-preservation and successful development of each citizen in Russia and of Russia in the world.”Footnote 105 At home, a strong, if not authoritarian, leader protects and develops the society—linking extralegalism and organicism. The system projects outward through “the ideology of derzhavnichestvo, of great power status, missionary impulses, imperial designs and Russia's destiny as a unique geopolitical pole.”Footnote 106 Sovereign democracy thus seems to legitimize Putin's increasingly autocratic rule and Russia's organic strength, as well as its claim to global greatness.Footnote 107
Although Putin has not formally endorsed Surkov's doctrine, he has characterized sovereignty in similar terms: “Who will take the lead and who will remain an outsider and inevitably lose his independence will depend not only on the economic potential, but primarily on the will of each nation, on its inner energy … [Ours] must be a sovereign and influential country.”Footnote 108 Other states may have forgotten their national pride and consider sovereignty a “luxury,” said Putin, but for Russia, it is “absolutely necessary for survival … Either we remain a sovereign nation, or we dissolve without a trace and lose our identity.”Footnote 109 Here, he again presents sovereignty as a link between Russia's organic strength—its societal identity and willpower—and its global influence.
Still, he has simultaneously insisted that other states respect his country's Westphalian sovereignty rights. He has strengthened state control over the Russian public's access to outside information and over foreign NGOs’ activities, which he has depicted as Western subversion aimed at infringing on Russia's sovereignty. He has spoken many times about the principle of nonintervention in domestic affairs as a basis for international order, and defended Russia's use of military force in Syria on the Westphalian grounds that the Bashar al-Assad government requested it, which appears to be true.Footnote 110 In short, he has been a vocal defender of the conventional version of sovereignty.
Nevertheless, older versions have become fixtures of Putin's discourse during his tenure in office, and now appear alongside Westphalian references. Perhaps most strikingly, they have been visible in his justifications of Russia's military incursions in nearby countries, including Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014.Footnote 111 Some observers regarded Putin's annexation of Crimea, in particular, as clear evidence of his hypocrisy. How, they asked, could he champion sovereignty while so brazenly violating it?Footnote 112 In the midst of the crisis, for instance, German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke to Putin and later reported to US President Barack Obama that the Russian leader was “in another world.”Footnote 113 However, while the invasion clearly violated Westphalian sovereignty and international law,Footnote 114 Putin was living his own reality—one that fused organic, civilizational, and extralegal notions with Westphalianism. Crimea and its main city, Sevastopol, he said, “have invaluable civilizational and even sacral importance for Russia,” because it was there that “Grand Prince Vladimir was baptized before bringing Christianity” to the homeland.Footnote 115 This narrative contributed to “an emotionally charged state of exception which transformed the supposed violation of the rights of a vague set of Russian-identified people living in Ukraine into a national catastrophe that blurred the foreign and the domestic.”Footnote 116 Putin's actions, in other words, did not infringe extralegal and organic sovereignty, but expressed it.
China
Like his predecessors, President Xi Jinping of China, who took office in 2012, has consistently talked about sovereignty in Westphalian terms, often in relation to his nation's independence and territorial integrity. But he has also revived venerable ideas of political order—extralegal, hierarchical, organic, and civilizational—that increasingly appear to conflict with the Westphalian elements of his sovereignty discourse.
Westphalianism is relatively new in Chinese political thought, a direct result of the Middle Kingdom's disastrous nineteenth-century encounter with the West. The Treaty of Nanjing of 1842 with Britain—the first of China's “unequal treaties” with European powers—compelled its imperial dynasty to open its ports to foreign opium traders, pay Britain an indemnity, and cede the territory of Hong Kong. As Jeremy Paltiel writes, “The Chinese ‘discovered’ sovereignty just as they effectively ‘lost’ it.”Footnote 117 The dynasty's subsequent collapse in 1911, the nation's descent into civil war, and a brutal invasion by Japan in the 1930s all caused hardships that ordinary citizens have not forgotten. When this “century of humiliation” ended in 1949, the new People's Republic of China was determined to protect its independence and unity. Its “five principles of peaceful coexistence” in international relations—respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, nonaggression, noninterference in internal affairs, equality and cooperation for mutual benefit, and peaceful co-existence—were quintessentially Westphalian and remain a cornerstone of its foreign policy.
Until Xi, modern Chinese leaders had adopted a largely postcolonial approach to international affairs; the country had overcome decades of colonialism and imperialism to emerge as a united, self-governing state “with the need to protect its independence, sovereignty, and self-determination as a main priority.”Footnote 118 This attitude persisted even as China's economic power burgeoned. The architect of the 1980s’ economic liberalization, President Deng Xiaoping, famously warned his compatriots to “hide our capabilities and bid our time” in international affairs.Footnote 119 Xi's immediate predecessor, Hu Jintao, was also “extremely risk-averse” and focused on sustaining domestic economic growth.Footnote 120 By 2012, however, the country's growing power and self-assurance had prompted many Chinese scholars to call for a new foreign policy better suited to a major power.
Some turned to the Confucian concept of “great harmony,” which they contrasted to the Westphalian-Western states system and its “ruinous capitalist competition, rivalries between and among states, and constant confrontation.”Footnote 121 Others invoked the old imperial idea of tianxia, a “system of hierarchical harmony enforced by the preponderance of power and virtue anchored in China.”Footnote 122 In the historical tianxia, the emperor—the divine ruler of “everything under the heavens”—was the focal point in a hub-and-spokes arrangement of neighboring states and vassals that mirrored the hierarchical social structure at home. The “organizing principle of sovereignty” in the Chinese-dominated imperial system was both hierarchical and indivisible: “if one had an equal, it was not sovereign.”Footnote 123 So long as lesser states accepted the imperial center's dominance and offered obeisance and tribute, it would respect their de facto autonomy. None of the scholars who have retrieved tianxia in recent years have called for an imperial system or the rejection of Westphalianism, but some have proposed that tianxia's “transcendent universalism” could provide “a new normative reference point for the international system.”Footnote 124
Xi has not explicitly endorsed neo-tianxia for the international order, but he too has advanced Confucian concepts of governance as “intellectual resources providing solutions to the dilemma of how to think and legitimize a new role for China in the twenty-first century.”Footnote 125 The leitmotif of his presidency has been the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” a subject he first raised two weeks after becoming president. Standing at the National Museum of China before images of people suffering through the “century of humiliation,” he announced his “China Dream,” an initiative to restore the country's greatness.Footnote 126 This has involved, among other things, cultivating a national identity rooted in “memories of past golden eras characterized by Confucian values and a Sino-centric world order.”Footnote 127 By characterizing neighbors as “peripheral countries,” for example, Xi has invoked historical, Confucian conceptions of a China-centered order based on virtuous hierarchy.Footnote 128 When the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) convened a meeting in 2014 to discuss peripheral diplomacy, it stated that realizing “the complete rise of China” included establishing itself as the “defender of a Harmonious Asia-Pacific.”Footnote 129 Xi's China Dream aims to socialize the region's states into a “community of shared destiny”—vital, he insists, to protect “national sovereignty, security and development interests” and to achieve “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”Footnote 130 Others, however, view it as a normative overlay for a Sino-centric regional order.Footnote 131 Elizabeth Economy goes further, arguing that Xi's narrative of national rejuvenation “places the country not only at the centre of the international system but also above it.”Footnote 132
The rise of Xi's peripheral-diplomacy discourse has coincided with more coercive behavior toward China's neighbors and the construction of military installations in areas of contested sovereignty. The CPC has advanced a historical argument—firmly rejected by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016, a judgment that Beijing has disregarded—that “successive Chinese governments have exercised jurisdiction” over most of the South China Sea and that “the Chinese people have long been” its “master.”Footnote 133 This is an ostensibly Westphalian claim, but it also expresses traditional hierarchical conceptions of political order. These “two irreconcilable perspectives”—Westphalian and neo-tianxia—“live today in China's self-conception, in the way it engages with the world, and specifically in its territorial disputes with the Philippines and with other littoral states over ownership of the South China Sea,” writes Howard French.Footnote 134
Others also see elements of neo-tianxia in Xi's massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a string of land- and sea-based infrastructure projects across Asia, Africa, and Europe. The BRI, writes William Callahan, expresses a “new grand strategy, where Beijing aims to use connectivity projects to socialize Asia and Europe into its own preferred [hub-and-spokes] view of global order,” with itself—the “top normative power”—at the core.Footnote 135 Some scholars even depict the BRI as a modern-day adaptation of the nation's “classical ‘tribute system’ … of concentric circles in which the civilized imperial capital at the centre flows out to embrace the periphery, forming a pattern of interdependence, coexistence, and co-prosperity.”Footnote 136
In his speeches, Xi has regularly linked sovereignty to the China Dream and his country's “security and development interests,” describing China as a strong, confident, sovereign state that will achieve its rightful position as a global power—guided by an empowered party and its paramount leader.Footnote 137 This has in turn prompted intense scholarly debates in China. On one hand, “constitutionalist” scholars have called for “enforcing the rights enshrined in the current constitution, guaranteeing judicial independence, and checking the power of the Party.”Footnote 138 On the other hand, “sovereigntists,” including some who explicitly cite Carl Schmitt, “view the powers of the state (guarding against external and internal threats) as the highest political principle, overriding if necessary the powers of the constitution.”Footnote 139 The latter view has been visible in Xi's legal and governing philosophy. He has said many times that the great rejuvenation, including defense of sovereignty, requires even stronger CPC leadership.Footnote 140 He has also centralized power in his own hands. Among other steps, he has appointed himself chair of the CPC's major policy committees—effectively making himself “chairman of everything”Footnote 141—and eliminated presidential term limits so he may perhaps serve for life. While the CPC has long exercised extralegal supremacy over the country's laws and institutions, Xi has increasingly become the party.Footnote 142 For him, realizing China's rejuvenation and full sovereignty seems to require not just a strong state and party, but a supreme leader with de facto extralegal authority.
He has also turned to organic nationalism to rally public support for the China Dream, invoking the country's cultural uniqueness and superiority, its glorious and virtuous imperial past, and a narrative of national strength and historic destiny, together with hints of racial essentialism. In Xi's words: “As long as more than 1.3 billion Chinese people uphold the great spirit of unity, we will definitely forge an unstoppable and invincible force.”Footnote 143 All Chinese—including diaspora communities abroad—are to participate, he has argued, because they have “the blood of the Chinese nation flowing in their veins” and bear “the distinctive brand of the Chinese culture” and “civilization.”Footnote 144 The CPC's United Front Work Department has been tasked with “mobiliz[ing] all the sons and daughters of [ethnic Chinese] to work together for the greater national interests and the realization of the Chinese Dream.”Footnote 145 This discourse represents more than national exceptionalism; it posits an organic, civilizational, transnational “nation.” To one scholar, this represents a form of “racial sovereignty” extending beyond China's borders and even legitimizing Beijing's apparent kidnapping of Chinese nationals (including dual citizens) abroad, “not only as a matter of territorial security but also as a civilizational imperative.”Footnote 146
The United Front's use of diaspora Chinese as “public diplomats” to advocate Beijing's interests in foreign countries has also raised concerns about interference in those countries’ domestic politics.Footnote 147 These activities—and the Chinese government's attempt to mobilize overseas Chinese—strike some observers as a new form of “transnational governance”Footnote 148 that “reconfigur[es] the spatiality of the state” by breaking with “the Westphalian principle of congruence between territory, sovereignty, population and political authority, while introducing new ways of conceptualizing citizenship and national belonging.”Footnote 149
Countries tend to become more assertive as their capabilities grow, but what type of international order and principles of rightful state action does Beijing wish to promote? “In the late nineteenth century,” writes Yongjin Zhang, “imperial China had no option but to accept and accommodate the rules, norms and institutions defined by the invading and alien international society based on the Westphalian model.”Footnote 150 Chinese leaders have long embraced sovereignty as a shield against outside interference and pressures for domestic change, and Xi's explicit references to sovereignty have been more consistently Westphalian than those of Putin, for example. Yet, concluding that Xi's sovereignty discourse remains staunchly Westphalianism would ignore his revival of non-Westphalian conceptions of political order that draw on venerable conceptions of imperial sovereignty from China's past. An Asia defined by relations between “peripheral states” and a Chinese core, a transnational organic civilization that seemingly entitles Beijing to flout Westphalian constraints, and an imperial president who stands above the law and effectively is the law—these are all elements that have merged into the vision of a strong, sovereign China pursuing “national rejuvenation.” Although there has long been a “troubled relationship” between traditional Chinese thinking about international order and the Westphalian principle of sovereign coequality,Footnote 151 these tensions remained largely concealed while China pursued a largely defensive, postcolonial approach to international affairs. Now that the country is grappling to define its role as a major power, they are no longer hidden.
The United States
When US President Donald Trump delivered his first speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2017, he mentioned “sovereignty” no fewer than twenty-one times, leaving many observers puzzled.Footnote 152 “I have no fully graspable idea what he is talking about,” wrote columnist Daniel Henniger in the Wall Street Journal. “The idea of protecting a country's national security and economic interests is easy enough to understand,” but the president “seems to be talking about something more transcendent … a mystical force.”Footnote 153
Henniger's confusion was understandable. Trump was mixing Westphalian with older ideas of sovereignty. On one hand he said the US would “not seek to impose our way of life on anyone” (a nod to political independence and noninterference), and railed against “unaccountable international tribunals and powerful global bureaucracies” (voicing a long-standing American suspicion of external bodies’ impinging on US autonomy).Footnote 154 But he also appeared to use sovereignty as a metaphor for American vitality and power. “Strong, sovereign nations”—a phrase he repeated several times—nurture “strong families and strong values” and “patriots” willing to “sacrifice” and “fight” for the “nations they loved,” thus warding off “decay, domination, and defeat.” Reaffirmed sovereignty would involve “a great awakening of nations” and “the revival of their spirits, their pride, their people, their patriotism.” These were expressions of organic sovereignty.
Additional clues appeared in a July 2017 speech in Warsaw in which Trump similarly portrayed “sovereign” societies as those united by strong internal bonds of “culture, faith and tradition” and the spirit of “noble sacrifice.”Footnote 155 Later in the year, he urged fellow leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit to uphold their own countries’ sovereignty, adding this curious coda: “For family, for country, for freedom, for history, and for the glory of God, protect your home, defend your home, and love your home today and for all time.”Footnote 156 In subsequent months, he criticized “cynics and critics that try to tear down America” or “denigrate America's incredible heritage, challenge America's sovereignty, and weaken America's pride.”Footnote 157 Here again, sovereignty seemed a synonym for organic strength and—shades of Xi's China Dream—“the great reawakening of the American spirit and of American might.”Footnote 158 He lectured the UN General Assembly again in September 2018: “Let us stand for our people and their nations, forever strong, forever sovereign” and “a culture built on strong families, deep faith and strong independence.”Footnote 159
In addition to invoking organic notions of sovereignty—culture, history, family, and religion—Trump has also equated the concept with “strong borders.” At first glance, this seems quintessentially Westphalian, but his justifications have been largely organic: to keep out Muslims, Mexicans, and immigrants from “shithole” countries.Footnote 160 “We only want to admit those people into our country who share our values, who love our people, and who always will love our people,” he told supporters in 2017.Footnote 161 He has also accused opponents of “encouraging millions of illegal aliens to break our laws, violate our sovereignty, overrun our borders and destroy our nation in so many ways.”Footnote 162 Here again, he equated weakening sovereignty with social and moral erosion. He also pledged to stop “this lawless assault on our dignity, our sovereignty,” and to restore the strength of “one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God.”Footnote 163
This discourse departed starkly from that of Trump's immediate predecessors. During Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama's collective twenty-four years in the White House, they mentioned sovereignty in a total of 278 public speeches and statements, but never as a metaphor for an organic community or a strong state.Footnote 164 Rather, they consistently connected it to the principles of territorial integrity, political independence, or nonintervention—and sometimes explicitly rejected notions of blood-and-soil-type rootedness and a strong organic state. When Bush, for example, insisted on securing US borders as “a basic responsibility of a sovereign nation,” he added, “We are also a nation of immigrants, and we must uphold that tradition, which has strengthened our country in so many ways.”Footnote 165
Some scholars compare Trump's approach to governing with that of Andrew Jackson, the populist president (1829–37) who also propounded nativist, blood-and-soil nationalism and viewed foreign policy principally as a means to promote the “well-being—political, moral, economic—of the folk community.”Footnote 166 However, the analogy is imperfect. Jackson never articulated an anti-Westphalian version of sovereignty, nor recommended it to other states. Nonetheless, the “land-folk nexus” has a long history in US politics.Footnote 167 In the 1880s, for instance, Americans debated Washington's powers to restrict Chinese immigration. The US Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had an “exclusive and absolute” right to exclude aliens to defend the country's sovereign independence from all manner of “foreign aggression and encroachment,” including “vast hordes of … people crowding in upon us,” who possibly threaten “our civilization.”Footnote 168 These ideas have remained hallmarks of far-right US movements, including radical “sovereigntists” and white nationalists who view the border as a “bulwark of a nativist, homogeneous community against incursions from people, ideas, commodities and any other flow from the perceived ‘outside’ that could threaten the identify and welfare of the bounded community.”Footnote 169 Intentionally or not, Trump's ethno-nationalist renderings of sovereignty have resonated strongly with these groups.Footnote 170
In addition to his organicist tendencies, Trump has hinted at extralegalism in both domestic and international politics. As a presidential candidate, he called the Justice Department a “political arm of the White House.”Footnote 171 In office, he denounced and later fired his first attorney-general, apparently for failing to block an investigation of his electoral campaign;Footnote 172 asked the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to end an investigation into a former associate;Footnote 173 encouraged Justice Department officials and at least two foreign governments—Ukraine and China—to investigate or prosecute his political rivals;Footnote 174 and declared a “national emergency” when Congress refused to fund the US-Mexican border wall.Footnote 175 In international affairs, too, Trump has scorned existing agreements and rules. He withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate, the never-ratified Trans-Pacific Partnership on trade, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, the Iran nuclear deal framework, and some UN bodies. He also threatened to pull out of the World Trade Organization and reportedly told his advisers “several times” that he wanted to leave NATO.Footnote 176 Together, these actions suggested “a concerted effort to undermine the rule-of-law institutions of the post-war legal order—whether the United Nations and its human rights mechanisms, the European Union, or global institutions of trade and security.”Footnote 177
Perhaps this is merely an expression of American exceptionalism, but with one notable difference: Trump has personalized this supposed entitlement.Footnote 178 His approach to politics and diplomacy has reflected his 2016 proclamation: “I alone can fix it.”Footnote 179 His officials have sometimes gone to extraordinary lengths to restrain him from issuing “impulsive and dangerous orders” in domestic and foreign policy.Footnote 180 In the words of Gary Cohn, who served as his chief economic advisor in 2016 and 2017: “It's not what we did for the country. It's what we saved him from doing.”Footnote 181 Trump's version of US exceptionalism has not sprung from the uniqueness of America's values, constitution, or special role in the world—as the concept is typically understood.Footnote 182 Rather, he appears to understand it as an expression of his personal will. “I am the chosen one,” he remarked in 2019, invoking messianic imagery to explain his willingness to challenge China's economic policies.Footnote 183 He has also put forward a novel interpretation of the US Constitution—one with no meaningful limits on presidential authority. “I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” he has asserted.Footnote 184 “Like Schmitt,” writes Andrew Kolin, “Trump places the ruler above the law; he rejects the concept of universal law, replacing it with situational law, in which he believes he has the authority to decide in which situations exceptions can be made.”Footnote 185
In other respects, Trump's foreign policy has been less radical than his discourse. Under his leadership, the US renegotiated the North American free trade agreement rather than carrying out his vow to tear it up. He has not abandoned treaty allies in Asia, nor unleashed the “fire and fury” that he had threatened against North Korea. In the Middle East and Afghanistan, his administration has more or less continued the Obama-era policies of limited engagement. To date, he has launched no new wars. By comparison, although George W. Bush consistently spoke in Westphalian terms, he ordered the fateful 2003 invasion of Iraq—an “evident breach” of international law.Footnote 186
Two factors may account for the disparity between Trump's discourse and his actions. First, unlike Presidents Putin and Xi, he operates within a system of constitutionally divided powers. US courts have delayed or blocked some of his actions, including initial versions of an executive order excluding citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries.Footnote 187 Congress has also pressed the White House into taking action in some areas, such as sanctioning Russia for its apparent interference in the 2016 presidential election.Footnote 188 His officials have also reportedly prevented seemingly reckless decisions. Second, Trump may be personally risk averse, particularly vis-à-vis the use of military force. Before becoming president, he repeated criticized the Bush and Obama administrations for “wasting lives and money in Iraq and Afghanistan.”Footnote 189 As president, he declared, “We are not nation building again.”Footnote 190 Indeed, it was his abrupt decision in 2018 to withdraw troops from Syria, rather than escalating involvement, that prompted his first secretary of defense, James Mattis, to resign.Footnote 191
Whatever the explanation, it would be a mistake to dismiss Trump's distinctive sovereignty discourse as “just talk.” His extralegal and organic depictions of sovereignty appear to reflect the popular sentiments that took him to power, including nativist nationalism, antiglobalism, resentment at other countries’ perceived mistreatment of the US, a desire to restore preponderant American global power, and the appeal of a “Schmittian” leader unimpeded by established institutions and rules.Footnote 192 These sentiments may endure beyond his presidency, just as Jacksonian populism outlasted its champion. While some combination of institutional checks and Trump's own fear of foreign quagmires may have restrained him, such constraints might not curb a future president. A conception of sovereignty that normalizes the idea of “a muscular America bending opponents to its will around the world” ultimately invites such behavior.Footnote 193
Trump's discourse also invites such behavior from other “sovereign” states, including many that lack American-style separation of powers and rule of law. Indeed, he has recommended his own version of sovereignty as the basis for a renewed international order. When he addressed the General Assembly in 2017, for example, he called for a world of “strong and independent nations that embrace their sovereignty.”Footnote 194 He also urged the assembled countries to confront Iran, North Korea, and Islamic terrorism, and to put pressure on Cuba and Venezuela. On what basis should they do so? He could have cited any number of reasons, but instead offered, gnomically: “Our respect for sovereignty is also a call to action.”Footnote 195 He seemed to be suggesting that sovereignty itself legitimized the use of coercive force against other states—in violation of their sovereignty.Footnote 196 It was clearly not a Westphalian appeal.
Findings and Implications
The concepts of extralegal and organic sovereignty have become more prominent in the leadership discourses of Russia, China, and the United States in recent years. Observers who maintain that Westphalian sovereignty is “back” are not wrong—all three countries have sought to strengthen national autonomy and control over transnational flows—but they overlook the concurrent revival of non-Westphalian models. This oversight, I have argued, reflects a tendency in international relations scholarship to portray sovereignty as a post-1648 idea and earlier understandings as extinct ancestors or failed competitors. I have described the enduring relevance of older sovereignty ideas, tracing the pre-Westphalian origins of two variants and showing how they subsequently persisted and evolved. I have also highlighted the differences between these ideas and Westphalianism. Each version defines a different basis for rightful state action: the primordial powers of the sovereign leader, the strength of the organic sovereign society, and the international legal rights of the sovereign Westphalian state, including the right to political independence and the concomitant prohibition on interfering in other states’ domestic affairs. By contrast, a leader with primordial powers stands above legal bounds, and the transcendental will of an organic society or civilization does not readily recognize equals. These retrieved concepts offer few constraints on powerful states dominating weaker ones.
There is nothing new about countries—especially economically and militarily strong ones—claiming special privileges and powers for themselves. Hierarchy is an enduring feature of world politics.Footnote 197 However, most scholarship has portrayed sovereignty as a counterpoint to hierarchy. According to Benedict Kingsbury, for example, it “serves, if very unevenly, as a counter to the vast inequalities that [might] otherwise be expected to feature in the formal structure of the legal system.”Footnote 198 Georg Sørensen formulates it this way: “Irrespective of the substantial differences between sovereign states in economic, political, social, and other respects, sovereignty entails equal membership of the international society of states, with similar rights and obligations.”Footnote 199 David Lake similarly argues that “sovereignty as a norm prohibits relations of authority by one state over another,” which in principle “limits relations of hierarchy,” even though states regularly violate this norm in practice.Footnote 200 A similar assumption underpins the literature on the “special responsibilities” of major powers, or the idea they receive special status in exchange for providing public goods, such as maintaining order.Footnote 201 This “institutionalized functional bargain,” some scholars argue, provides a practical means of “managing collective problems in a world characterized by both formal equality and inequality of material capability.”Footnote 202 Sovereignty, in this view, is the equalizing side of this bargain.
However, extralegal and organic conceptions of sovereignty do not lend themselves to collective responsibilities, or even to self-restraint. They are openly, if not ostentatiously, chauvinist and solipsistic. Contemporary observers who argue that the recent “return” of sovereignty will foster greater restraint in international relations seem to miss this point. Conceiving of sovereignty as an expression of organic nationalism, societal strength, civilizational destiny, or extralegal leadership does not limit hegemonic behavior. Rather, it appears to legitimize it.
To some, this concern may seem exaggerated. Some realist scholars of international relations, for example, argue that norms and institutions have “no independent effect on state behavior” because they are “basically a reflection of the distribution of power” and “self-interested calculations of the great powers.”Footnote 203 Stephen Krasner relates this point to sovereignty: “Outcomes in the international system are determined by rulers whose violation of, or adherence to, international principles or rules is based on calculations of material and ideational interests, not taken-for-granted practices derived from some overarching institutional structures or deeply embedded grammars.”Footnote 204 Krasner also cites numerous violations of Westphalian norms, concluding that they impose few real constraints, even though they may be observed “in talk.”Footnote 205 If, as he suggests, Westphalian norms have little influence on international politics, why worry about the retrieval of these older conceptions?
First, even if we accept these realist propositions, examining how major powers characterize sovereignty can still illuminate their foreign-policy intentions. I explained why states might seek to bring sovereignty norms into conformity with their approaches to domestic and international politics: to do so reduces legitimacy costs. This logic is largely consistent with realist assumptions: international rules and institutions tend to mirror states’ interests and intentions, especially those of the most powerful ones. Although further research is needed to determine why Putin, Xi, and Trump have articulated pre-Westphalian conceptions, my case studies offer prima facie evidence that they all did so in conjunction with policy changes—and at a moment when all three countries, for different reasons, were expressing misgivings about their place in the existing world order.
Second, international orders consist not only of material structures but also of “a web of shared meanings that makes the exercise of authoritative power possible between polities.”Footnote 206 Although Krasner identifies numerous breaches of Westphalian sovereignty norms, most states, including powerful ones, routinely observe them.Footnote 207 Even when they use military force, they typically—and very publicly—invoke international standards, drawing on and articulating “shared values and expectations that other decision makers and other publics in other states also hold.”Footnote 208 Leading realists appear to recognize norms’ constraining effects. John Mearsheimer, for example, writes that “almost all leaders care about legitimacy and thus pay careful attention to well-established norms, as they do not want to be seen by other states as wantonly disregarding rules that enjoy widespread respect and support.”Footnote 209 Henry Kissinger goes a step further: “Calculations of power without a moral dimension will turn every disagreement into a test of strength; ambition will know no resting place; countries will be propelled into unsustainable tours de force of elusive calculations regarding the shifting configuration of power.”Footnote 210 A moral dimension here refers to “a set of commonly accepted rules that define the limits of permissible action.”Footnote 211 If Stephen Walt, another realist, believed that Westphalian sovereignty norms had little impact, why would he call for their reaffirmation?Footnote 212 These scholars appear to acknowledge that norms are both constraining and enabling for states, even if they also contend that material power and interests explain much of international politics.
The retrieval of extralegal and organic sovereignty thus raises serious concerns. Should this trend continue, it would point toward a future of intensifying competition among major powers and their more open domination of others. Already, states have been “weaponizing interdependence,” transforming cooperative arrangements into zero-sum contests for influence.Footnote 213 Taken to its logical conclusion, the reaffirmation of these older sovereignty concepts might legitimize and enable the “unfettered self-assertion of autonomous, xenophobic nation-states.”Footnote 214 Still, this outcome is far from certain. Russia, China, and the US have not abandoned Westphalianism; on the contrary, they remain its vocal champions. Changing conditions—and leaders—might reverse the recent rise of extralegal and organic sovereignty.
A deeper understanding of this phenomenon is essential. Why exactly did the leaders of Russia, China, and the US retrieve older sovereignty ideas—and why at this moment? Have other foreign policy officials in these three countries also employed these discourses? Are other states also articulating these concepts—and what might account for any variation between them? Are these countries “learning” from each other? What does the revival of extralegal and organic sovereignty ultimately mean for world politics, including relations among major powers and their behavior toward other states? If the prognosis is worrisome, as I have suggested, what would it take to reverse this trend? Finally, does the phenomenon of norm retrieval occur in other domains of international affairs and in relation to other types of norms, beyond those of sovereignty?
Conclusion
Much of the post-Cold War scholarship on sovereignty debated whether the world was entering a post-Westphalian era. More recently, observers have noted the apparent reaffirmation of Westphalianism and the efforts of many countries to “reclaim” sovereignty. As we have seen, however, this is an incomplete and ultimately misleading assessment. Other versions of sovereignty, with origins predating the Peace of Westphalia, have also resurged. I have described these concepts’ content and traced their development, addressing a blind spot in international relations scholarship, which has tended to dismiss these ideas as antiquated relics. I have also elaborated the logic of “norm retrieval,” filling a gap in an academic literature that has tended to focus on the development and diffusion of new norms, rather than the revival of older ones. Extralegal and organic concepts of political organization have become increasingly prominent in the foreign-policy discourses of three of the world's most powerful countries and there are risks associated with this trend: it appears to license powerful states to dominate others—paradoxically, in the name of sovereignty.
“We can read the essential character of any era of international relations through its norms of sovereignty,” writes Daniel Philpott.Footnote 215 If so, today's sovereignty discourses may be an early-warning indicator of a more discordant and dangerous future. Worse, they might help to bring it about.
Acknowledgments
I presented drafts of this article at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association in San Francisco, California, in April 2018 and at the Dickey Center International Relations of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in May 2018. My thanks to International Organization's editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, and to Stephen Brooks, Tim Dunne, Alexandra Gheciu, Kal Holsti, Andrew Hurrell, Igor Istomin, Robert Keohane, David Lake, Jeremy Paltiel, Alexander Wendt, William Wohlforth, Christoph Zuercher, and members of the international relations seminar at Dartmouth College for feedback on earlier drafts. I also thank Jessica Becker for her research assistance.
