The End of Sovereignty (Sean Gonsalves, January 23, 2007, AlterNet)
Sovereignty: The idea that nations can determine the direction of their own development without military intervention from other nations; a concept enshrined in the charter of the United Nations — an imperfect international organization created by the United States after two bloody world wars, leaving even “realist” hawks looking for ways to settle conflicts peacefully. [...]
Literary master E.B. White had a slightly more jaundiced view. “Justice and (international) law do not now operate and will never operate until there is international government.” The problem, as E.B. saw it, “under all the steady throbbing of the engines: sovereignty, sovereignty, sovereignty.”
After truth, the second casualty of the U.S.-led war in Iraq was the meaning of the word sovereignty.
Much confusion here — not least the failure to understand that Realists always favor peace, because they don’t give a rats patootie what sovereigns do to their own people — but some wisdom, both in understanding that the isolationist sovereignty favored by Realists is a dead letter and that sovereignty (in its more nationalist iteration) is the main obstacle to transnationalism abroad.
Of course, it is America that destroyed that original concept of sovereignty, over the past couple centuries, and that was never going to allow world government, both for the same reasons: we require adherence to liberal democratic norms before we’re willing to recognize sovereignty as legitimate.
