THE OXFORD COMPANION TO POLITICS OF THE WORLD Editor in Chief Joe1 Krieger Editors William A. Joseph Miles Kahler Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja Barbara B. Stallings Margaret Weir Consulting Editor James A. Paul New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1993 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1993 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Oxford companion to politics of the world / Joel Krieger, editor in chief; William Joseph . . . let al.], editors; James A. Paul, consulting editor. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-505934-4 1. Political science-Encyclopedias. 2. World politicsEncyclopedias. I. Krieger, Joel, 1951JA61.095 1993 320' .03-dc20 92-25043 CIP Printing (last digit): 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper SOVEREIGNTY 851 nomic integration. For example, at the 1991 summit ~n of tbe state. According to most influential of the "Organization of African Unity (OAU) Afrilines of interpretation, sovereign states remain the can leaders signed a treaty committing the continent primary political actors in international society, alto the establishment of the African Economic Comthough in a condition of relative decline as compared munity (AEC), to be achieved in stages over the next to international instit.l!!i9ns, transnational corporate d . \ three decades. Among current Third World ecoand financial actQfs, and l;Qnsnational citizens' as-. ~ nomic integration associations are the Economic ~ciations. To varying extents, these ODnstate actors I~ Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the are controlled by sovereign states, and cannot be *Southern African Development Co-ordination properly regarded as completely independent actors. Conference (SADCC), the Preferential Trade Area For instance, only sovereign states are eligible to for Eastern and Southern African States (PTA), the become full members of the UN and most other Maghreb Union, the *Association of Southeast Asian important international organizations. Nations (ASEAN), the "South Asian Association for In origins and evolution, sovereignty is definitely Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the Gulf Coopera Western concept, and was not shared by other ation Council (GCC), the Latin American Integraregions until this century. (Certain non-Western partion Association (LAIA), and the Caribbean Com- .allels do exist, however.) In contemporary discusmunity (CARICOM). sion, the concept of sovereignty is accepted as an indispensable term in both academic and diplomatic It deserves reiterating that regardless of the clear and widespread commitment among Third World discussions of political life throughout the world. Its countries to integrate their economies and to pursue importance is confirmed in Marxist, realist, and other aspects of South-South cooperation, major liberal political discourse, but the tan~e of usage varies wigely, reflecting differences in "ideology and obstacles have to be confronted. Increasing ecopolitical priorities. nomic differentiation within the Third World is making questionable some of the central assumpThe very centrality of sovereignty ensures it~­ tions underlying South-South cooperation. It is be- .tested character. In each setting, meanings are atcoming clear, for example, that the trade of the tributed to sovereignty that -.accord with the intermore industrialized Third World countries (the Reg!eter's prokft. There is little neutral ground wh~ public of Korea, Singapore, Brazil) with the majority it comes to sovereignty. It is possible, of course, to throw one's weight of primarily agricultural and mineral-extracting developing economies is often as unequal as the Northbehind a particular definition or to obscure the South trade it is replacing. The heyday of Southdifficulty of providing a definition that is at once South commitment may also have passed. There clear and authoritative. Surely, some definitions are appears to be a resigned but growing sentiment more influential than others, and to some extent, among many Southern states that in the current era there exists a mainstream tradition with a distinof global economic and political realignments, inguished roster of adherents. This lineage can be creasing protectionist pressures, and European and traced to the classical works of Machiavelli, Bodin, North American economic integration, continued .J:::!Q£bes,~e, Rousseau, and ~m, and was *dependency on the North is to be preferred to the carried forward by such thinkers as Max *Weber, danger of becoming totally marginalized in the Hans Morgenthall,_Bertrand deJouv~!1al, F~H. Hinevolving world economic and political order. ~y, and(tIedley~espitethis corpus of distin(See also AFRICAN REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS; guished scholarship, sovereignty has a history of INTERNATIONAL DEBT; LATIN AMERICAN REGIONAL cQ.nceptual migration. Early usage, perhaps most ORGANIZATIONS; NORTH-SOUTH RELATIONS; PRO- prominently in .lean Bodin's great work, Six Books TECTION; TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER.) o1.a Commonwealth (l5?£), was almost exclusively devoted to state/society relations, the interual diBeverly May Carl, Economic Integration among Develop!!!ensions of sovereignty. The doctrine of sovereignty ing Nations (New York, 1986). Jerker Carlsson and Timothy M. Shaw, eds., Newly Industrializing Countries and provided a way of locating the ~nter of authority the Political Economy of South-South Relations (New York, in relation to domestic conflict, and, in the end, was 1988). a means to uphold the claims of the state as agaiI1stl HASHIM T. GIBRILL ...rival feudal and ecclesiastical claimants. The state became "~eign" because it generally succeeded SOUTH YEMEN. See YEMEN. in u..l2.holding this final power of d~n, or as later put so ""influentially by ~er, because the state enjoyed a monopoly over the legitimate use of "force, ,SOVEREIGNTY. A concept central to modern political thought, sovereignty's importance is bound Sovereignty in early modern Europe was a secularup with specifying the essential character of the ,gjng terminology that reflected the decline·of unit,gti,torial "state. Sovereignty, a complex and someersalist religious~rity and actively encouraged what contested conception, combines a description belief i t e terr rona su remacy 0 testate. Hobbes exten ed these aspects of sovereignty in ,. of attributes with various emotive concerns for or Leviathan (1651), interpreting sovereignty as a staagainst limitations on the internal and external ~- _$ r 852 SOVEREIGNTY tus, conferring upon the state an absolute prerogative to impose its will via liLw on civil society, an authority derived from a hypothetical social contract that overcame the ravages of life in a state of nature. The people in any society were, in effect, protected by the sovereign against their own aggressive nat~, but in exchange relinquished much of their freedom to obtain the order and serenity of a welladministered civil society. This Hobbesian view of sovereignty was challenged by John Locke, among others. Locke feared much of what Hobbes favored. If human nature was as flawed as Hobbes believed, then it would be a disastrous error to concentrate authority in the state, or in any single place. Locke, although more positive about human nature, was concerned with establishing a government as clear about the limits of its authority as about its extent. It is from Locke, and Montesquieu as well, that we owe ideas about the "separation of the powers of government, notions of checks and balances, and, most of all, the idea that citizens enjoy certain inalienable "rights which, if not upheld, lead finally to a right of *revolution that inheres in the citizenry. For Locke the locus of sovereignty was suspended somewhere between the state and society, a constitutionalist nexus that has become associated with the in:ner nature of legitimate government at the level of the sovereign state. So conceived, sovereignty is compatible with citizen rights and the accountability of government and officialdom, including the head of state. Indeed, some formulations of sovereignty, tracing their lineage to Rousseau, especially those imbued with democratic ideology, go much further. They locate sovereignty in civil society or in the people, giving rise to the terminology of popular sovereignty and an associated enthusiasm for the will of "the people." This line of thinking underlay the radicalism of the French Revolution. At least rhetorically, Abraham Lincoln endorsed such a view of sovereignty when he spoke of government "of the people, by the people, for the people." Whether or not the state is sovereign, or how to construe sovereignty in relation to 3,vil sociery, is no longer an important focus of debate except when it comes to *foreign policy. Domestic controversy about governance has shifted its ground: the key concerns now revolve around the way the state is constituted, especially relations between the center and other administrative units, and the modes by which governing authority is constrained and held to account. In this regard, the idea of sovereignty as such has been generally displaced in political discourse by an emphasis on rights and duties, by arguments about the nature of "democracy, and by discussions of how to maintain political and economic independence in relation to outside forces. One partial exception to this generalization has to do with state building in the non-Western world as a preoccupation in the immediate postcolonial pe- riod. Especially in Africa and the Middle East, the idea of making the state truly "sovereign" and upholding "sovereign rights" retains relevance as a central project of both governmental and oppositional forces. Sovereignty as a basic idea and ideal in "international relations persists. Implicit in discussions since Machiavelli and Hobbes is the conviction that the state is the ultimate arbiter of its own fate in relation to the outside world. The clash of sovereign wills in international life gives rise to ceaseless conflict, as scarcity in relation to relative power and prestige, as well as with respect to resources and markets, leads to fierce competition among states, giving international relations its zero-sum history and reputation, and accounting for the prominence of "war. Because there is no state beyond the state-no superstate-there is no human agency capable of establishing a shared morality or an effective legal order. Each state is "sovereign" in international society, a law unto itself. By and large, such formulations of sovereignty in international relations have been associated with realist thinking, which tends to regard law, morality, and conscience as irrelevant, or of marginal relevance, to the external conduct of states. Despite the continuing prevalence of *realism as the approach of choice among diplomats and academic specialists, conceptual and policy tensions exist, and are mounting. For several centuries the states system has needed to endow agreements among its sovereign members with reliability. Sovereignty, if carried too far as a guide to behavior, undermined the reliability of mutually beneficial interaction among distinct states, whether the subject matter was diplomacy, tourism, or commerce. *International law arose to regulate such relations among states, and has expanded steadily over time in response to the growing complexity of international life. But an effective international law is not easily reconcilable with con;;ptlOns(;f sovereignty that underlie realist thought about international relations. Realist thinking erodes the authority of treaties as binding obligations of states and casts doubt upon the rules protecting foreign diplomats and citizens. The recent emphasis on the international protection of "human rights is a particular challeng,e to overei ty, implying that a state is not territorially supreme even with respect to the manner in which a government treats persons resident within its boundaries. Such challenges to the conventional understanding of sovereignty arise from both normative and functional pressures. The experience of,Nazi persecution of the Jews and the disclosures about the *Holocaust after World War II generated a Political consensus that the internal relations of state and society were no longer a matter exclusively ) within domestic jurisdiction, but had become a subject of legitimate international concern under certain specified conditions of abuse. This consensus has ---- SOVEREIGNTY been reinforced by the rise of it:!fl.uential grass-root~ and .transnational n(mgovernmental organizations dedicated to the promotion and protection of human righ~. Ong functional level, interdependence anWalizatiOii1ave made it impractical to view the world as consisting of territorial units each exerting supreme authority within its borders, but not elsewhere. T echn~o~ical capacity gives many states the possibility of ~peratjng beyond boundaries, including ..~e. ~n activity has long been a feature of international relations. Protecting ehe.elobal commons against filvjronmental decay is widely acknowledged as taking precedence over a purely territorial conception of authority,'"as is the complementary need to protect the health and well-bei~g of tgritoria! communities against damage from~...tr..aterritorial toxic releases. A second type of conceptual tension is also of recent origin. Sovereignty and sovereign rights are emphasized as a means to protect the weak again1it tQ.e stron.$, yet the notion of sovereignty a~ng the~beyond accountability has been relied upon by the.sssang to impose their will on the weak. The UN Charter illustrates the tension in theory and practice. In Article ~(1) the principle of "s~gn equ.a\ity" is endorsed, and Article 2(7) affirms that even the UN is bound to respect the ''<~tic jurisdicyon" o~s; thus territorial supremacy is privileged over theynforcement of international obligations. Yet the ~harter, especially as combined with UN practice, undertakes to save succeeding generations from the scourgt:.- of. war, to- prom"'ote human rights, and to uphold the principle of "selfdetermination. Recent trends in international relations are contradictory and confusing. All states, including the most powerful, give lip service to ideas of sovereiKn equ..~lity, noninterven' on, and resl2~t for interna~aw. Yet tee perience of international relations includes the tl\!me of the strong exerting their will upon the weak,' of repeated interventions, aggressive wars, and of indirect penetration of sovereign territory by way of capital, "diplomacy, propaganda, and culture. Even if a few states can still defend their territory against an invading army, not even the most powerful can protect its people and cities against a devastating surEEise attack by guided ~s, and none can ,control the flow of images an~s that shape human tastes and values. The globalized "presence" of ~na, McDonald's, . use make a mockery of sovereignty as exclusive erritorial control. A few governments do their best insulate their populations from such influences, but t eir efforts are growing less effective and run counter to democratizing demands that are growing more difficult to resist. There have been many attempts in the history of political and legal thought to reconcile these conceptual and operational tensions between sover- 853 eignty as an idea and law as a source of constraint on the behavior of governments. Even...B.QQin, the seminal modern theorist of sovereignty, conditioned his theory of sovereignty on an acceptance of the embedded applicability of natural law to the affairs of .srate. Jurists and others have written about notions of "auto-limitation" as inherent in sovereignty, or that sovereign authority can be flexibly redirected to satisfy state interests. Yet in the end such attempts at reconciliation seem more ingenious than convincing. Doubt persists, and properly. The fundamental claim olsovereigIlty is its emphasis on unrestricted-x .&Qvernmental authority within territorial bouruj~. If such authority exists, then wider obligations of the state are problematic. If such authority is denied, then sovereignty itself seems abridged or qualified. Indeed, if the state no longer is entitled to exercise such authority or fails to do so in practice, then it becomes misleading to retain sovereignty as a d~criptive term. Undoubtedly, sovereignty will continue to be used in the public discourse of international relations for the foreseeable future. It provides diplomats with a hallowed concept by which to carryon political debate, and it represents in a variety of situations the ongoing struggles of a given people for selfdetermination and independence. Nevertheless, its continued use in academic work seems more questionable, except possibly i e setting of describing "contendin notions of verei n ." Interdepen.,dence, and the inter enetr i of domestic and international politics, the moQilit:y and globalization of capital and information, and the rising influence of ttflnsnational social moyem~nts and Qrganizations are among the factors that make it anachronistic to analyze politics~f territorial supremacy contin'u~d to be a generaliz condition or a useful fiction. In particular, sovereignty, With Its stress on the inside/ outside distinction as between domestic and1i1te"rnational society, seems more misleading than illuminating unJer current conditions. If the role of political ideas in academic pursuits is to clarifyJ tendencies and patterns, then the viability of sovereignty as concept and project seems increa~ly dubious. When the polemical function of a concept outweighs its empirical referent, it may be time to consider scuttling the concept itself, or at least severely circumscribing its use. (See also ENVIRONMENTALISM; INFORMATION SOCIETY; INTERNATIONAL SYSTEMS; INTERVENTION; LEGITIMACY; NATIONALISM; TREATY; UNITED NATIONS.) Harold J. Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (New Haven, Conn., 1917). Bertrand de Jouvenal, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good (Chicago, 1957).l:kdJ&y Buill. The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World fYolitics (New York, 1977). Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The str"uggle for Power and Peace, 6th ed., edited and revised by Kenneth W. Thompson (New York, 1985). F. H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 854 SOVIET-AFGHANISTAN WAR U.K., 1986). David Held, Political Theory and the Modern State (Stanford, Calif., 1989). RICHARD FALK SOVIET-AFGHANISTAN WAR. The invasion of *Afghanistan on 27 December 1979 marked the first use of the Soviet Red Army outside the territory of the *Warsaw Treaty Organization (Warsaw Pact countries). For nine years, the "Soviet Union deployed an army of 120,000 men to battle the Afghan resistance, bringing death to more than a million Afghans and forcing more than a third of the population to seek refuge in Iran and Pakistan. Yet it failed to subdue the Afghan people; on 14 April 1988 in Geneva, the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. The withdrawal was completed on 15 February 1989, presaging the end of Soviet "hegemony in Eastern Europe. An assessment of Soviet reasons for invading Afghanistan will have to await the release of documents from the period, but the impact of the invasion on international and regional relations is clear. Sports were the first casualty of the invasion, as many countries boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics. A more enduring loss was the shattering of the carefully nurtured image of the Soviet Union as the ally of the "Third World in general and the "nonaligned countries in particular. Year after year, the UN General Assembly became the arena where an everlarger number of countries voted for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan. The invasion also deepened the already-existing rift between the Soviet Union and China and paved the way for further rapprochement between China and the United States. Soviet-American relations were severely strained. Allowing the SALT II treaty, which had been signed but not yet ratified, to go into abeyance, President Jimmy "Carter also imposed an embargo on the grain trade with the Soviet Union. President Ronald "Reagan, while lifting the embargo, embarked on an ambitious plan of military buildup and increased U.S. support for forces engaged in regional conflicts against *communism and the Soviet Union. To help the Afghan resistance combat the Soviet army of occupation, the Reagan administration reassessed its priorities in Southwest Asia. The United States had lost is privileged position in Iran following the Islamic revolution of January 1979. Therefore, it turned to Pakistan, treating it as "frontline state" against Soviet expansionism. General Zia of Pakistan, who had seized power in a military coup in 1977, was shored up with substantial economic and military assistance. His country's role in sustaining the Afghan resistance was deemed vital, and the Reagan administration hardly protested Pakistani efforts to pursue the development of "nuclear weapons or the emergence of Pakistan as a major center for drug trafficking. Displeased with the U.S. posture in support of Pakistan, India drew closer to the Soviet Union and refrained from condemning the invasion of nonaligned Afghanistan. Pakistan retained control of the resistance even when financial support from the United States and Saudi Arabia reached massive levels. The increase in aid had come in response to the successes scored in the field by the resistance, particularly after the United States supplied it with Stinger ground-to-air missiles in the summer of 1986. To preempt the Afghan resistance from consolidating control Over certain provinces, becoming a state within a state, the Pakistani regime relied on its intelligence agencies to divide and rule. The strategy, however, backfired. When the Soviets withdrew their troops in 1989, the resistance was unable to offer a unified leadership that could form a credible government. Contrary to U.S. and Pakistani expectations, the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul has been able to maintain a precarious existence by presenting itself as a nationalist force opposing Pakistani designs on Afghanistan. The emergence of Mikhail "'Gorbachev as leader of the Soviet Union in March 1985 and the willingness of the Soviet leadership to end the "Cold War were crucial to the disengagement of the Red Army from Afghanistan. But the UN,played a critical role in diplomatic negotiations, initiated in August 1981 and culminating, after twelve rounds, in the Geneva agreement of April 1988. This agreement, however, did not bring an end to the warin Afghanistan, as the Soviet and U.S. governments were left free to supply their Afghan clients with arms and weapons. Today, Soviet troops are out of Afghanistan, the Soviet empire in Eastern and Central Europe has been dismantled, and the Soviet Union itself has collapsed. But Afghans are still dying. The UN secretary-general has spoken of an international consensus for finding a political solution to the conflict in Afghanistan. WheJ!her this consensus can bring peace to Afghanistan and prosperity to its people remains to be seen. (See also SINO-SOVIET RELATIONS; SOVIET FOREIGN POLICY; STRATEGIC ARMS LIMITATION TREATIES.) Henry Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union (Durham, N.C., 1983). Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (New York, 1986). ASHRAF GHANI SOVIET DISSENT. For nearly two decades, beginning in the mid-1960s, Soviet "human rights activists demanded a dialogue with their own government over the country's growing social, economic, and political problems. Dissent involved a broad range of nonconformist opinion. Nationalists in several republics pressed Soviet officials for cultural autonomy for their peoples. Religious activists wanted freedom to practice their faiths. Many Jews petitioned for the right to emigrate. Human rights activists in Moscow and Leningrad defended all these