Twilight of the idols, liquid society and post-sovereignty
In
the last decades, post-sovereignism has made its way as a turning point in the anti-establishment
aftermath following the proclamation of sociological theories, such as that of
the so-called liquid society, hoping for the creation of a utopian “Universal
Human Nation.” Is it occurring a re-edition of the Nietzschean “twilight of the idols[1],” intended
as a synonym of the failures of an over-institutionalization that is drifting apart
from direct representation?
The
usefulness of the concept of Sovereignty has often come under academic
scrutiny.
Sovereignty
is an evolving concept that had its roots in the notion of the Westphalian State,
characterized by a clearly defined territory governed by a fully empowered
authority.
While
Bodin interpreted sovereignty as
the absolute, perpetual and permanent power of the sovereign, coming from
divine origins, that authorizes him even to break the rules of his predecessors,
from Rousseau onwards, it was intended as the expression of the will
of the people that legitimizes the sovereign to exert his unlimited power on
the base of a “social contract.”[LS1]
Later authors, such as Grotius and De Vattel, believed that natural
law is the origin of modern Europe and international law. De Vattel, in The
Law of Nations declared that international law is the law of sovereignty
and that a conceived international legal system is an optic of externalization of
full national powers. De Vattel was
inspired by the Dutch Grotius,
author of De jure belli ac pacis,
one the most famous theorists of the natural law doctrine that was extended to
the international legal order. In a global context marked by the religious wars
after the Reform, which brought into international relations all the bitterness
of religious hate, and in consideration of economic factors, such as colonial
expansion, trade development, and exploitation of discovered territories,
Grotius founded the legitimacy of international legislation in the natural order,
intending natural laws as a dictation of a just reason that would lead to the
observance of international agreements by virtue of good will (pacta sunt
servanda), even justifying a just war (bellum iustum) in the event that these rules were breached.
While,
generally speaking, the nationalism of the past was outward looking, the
present nationalism is inward looking, a bastion against global networking.
Beyond
these general philosophical hints, what is happening within States today and
what is intended as Sovereignism, Populism, or the combination of the two
notions?
The
sovereignism motto is “taking back control” over territory, with a flair for
boundaries obsession, and in Europe it is characterized by so-called Euro-scepticism,
ranging from the demand for soft reforms to a hard opposition to European institutions,
emphasizing the importance of Nation-States. New sovereignists propose
a redistribution of power in a populist critique of representative democracies,
both politically and economically, aiming to regain full State control over ruling
in order to protect people's well-being. They debate the dyscrasia between semantics
and political structures.
While new sovereignism’s
main claims concern the representative system and territorial boundaries, populists are more centered on people,
as “they were first” (i.e., USA Trump, Italian Five Stars, Austrian Kurtz, Hungarian
Orbάn), legitimizing authoritarian forms of government. Populists claim an exclusive (anti-system, anti-state,
anti-intellectual, anti-party) nationalism. It is an ideology that considers
society as divided into two groups: the people and the élites (“us” and “them”),
and demonizes globalization for its direct threats to existential security, propending
to economic protectionism, political chauvinism, and isolationism.
Bringing
the two concepts together, populist
sovereignism means respatializing
power. This joint concept opposes the people to both élites and
foreigners and is taking over current populist movements and parties, organized
around Sovereignist goals. Populist sovereignty
supersedes the divide between right and left wings, as shown by the Five Stars
Movement in Italy or Le Pen’s far-right
Rassemblement National in France, even though some remarkable differences still remain in place. For right-wing populists (reigning for
about thirty years in Switzerland and having significant experience also in the
Netherlands) a re-territorialization and zero-sum perception of the sovereignty
of the Nation-State is the main ideological task to a accomplish, while the left-wing
supports a transnational redefinition of re-empowered demos.
Quoting Bauman,
in this post-modern liquid society, a digital techno-liquid generation is looming, epitomized by the coming technocracy that seems to fill
the gap between institutions and people for a more direct democracy. This
concept has been conveyed also by populists and has been proposed as techno-populism, whose workhorse, in
the words of Abhram Lincoln, is a new “government of people, by people, for
people,”[LS2]
achievable by modern communication technologies. Techno-populism and
technocracy have a common ground: considering technology
as a framework and not as a tool[2].
Bauman believed that the post-modern human is a symbol of the
unlimited enlargement of desire and that it doesn’t make sense anymore to talk about sovereignty in the Westphalian
meaning. For example, within the EU, sovereignty is taken into consideration for
the implementation of the competence partition, the principle of subsidiarity,
and the preemption policy. Scholars have so far developed
two main principles: that of pre-emption and that of supremacy, which are two
sides of the same coin[3]
The first doctrine determines to what extent national law may be applied; the
second one, instead, is often debated by Member States that keep on remaking
the importance of national constitutional limits. These two doctrines complement
each other and are vital in the overlapping of legislative spheres. What is
questioned nowadays, mainly by the Euro-sceptic is if the EU could effectively
convey a neoliberalim, could soften economic inequalities and maintain the
promises made at its birth of a place largely providing a real welfare state
and proclaiming income distribution theories.
Coming back to Bauman[4],
all this is happening because today we live in a transnational dimension, not
uniform but multiform, that could be interpreted as “an archipelago of dyasporas” [LS3] where the hobos[LS4] are the products and the main receivers of globalization,
contested by sovereignists. Thus, in his opinion, it would be detrimental to
perch on statist and isolationist positions, and it would be beneficial to
reopen a dialogue and learn to coexist in an irreversibly cosmopolitan,
multicultural and multireligious society. By building walls, in fact, the risk
is to find ourselves in front of a “fortress in the middle of nowhere.” [LS5] Presiding over borders and forbidding the arrival of
foreigners is impossible and counterproductive because it would limit human
evolution and progress.
Similarly
to Bauman’s belief about the postmodern human as a symbol of a disproportionate
enlargement of desire, going beyond eroded nationalism and sovereignism and
leading to an utopian and humanist one-world society, Nietzsche
demonized reason’s trends to systematize and
formulate notions that are just quixotic because they detach us from our senses[LS6] . Facing
the alternative between dismantling or re-proportioning current institutional
assets, starting from both Nietzsche’s and Bauman’s condemnation of
over-structures, distant from the real needs of the individual, this common
feeling of dissatisfaction has been taken by new sovereignists as a reaction
against the pivotal globalist trend, stigmatized as the main source of present
inequalities and injustices. Stemming from individualism, it would be preferable
to find a sense of commonality to deal with this new reality. In fact, toppling
down current institutions is unlikely and would cause an implosion of
unimaginable scale, and thinking about an anarchist solution would be highly
absent-minded. Instead, re-proportioning and reformulating this status quo
would help to overcome the lack of adherence between people’s will and their
representatives. Thus, revamping a perspective of significant reforms of
national and international institutions, without losing sight what is perceived as the closest feeling of individual
self-identity and basic common ground, would avoid further misrepresentation in
the crumbling credibility of the effectiveness of the international legal order
and is what is mostly revendicated at the moment.
Nowadays,
we are going through a new critical epoch characterized by the reshuffling of
the old sovereignist opinions, putting at stake, reframing, and oozing[LS7]
défaillances of current institutional
frameworks.
For
instance, China-USA tensions and
the lack of a tangible reaction by the
EU or the UN system are
paving the way for a second Cold War.
As
a result of the flourishing of new sovereignism, we are witnessing to the
gradual withdrawal of the US from international organizations, such as WTO and
WHO, and the escalation of its geopolitical, economic, military and
technological rivalry with People’s Republic of China, which started to join the main international organizations
about forty years ago. China is a dominant actor in the international
geopolitical scenery, proclaiming the protection of its sovereignty and its right
of self-determination, other than an homeland
domestic jurisdiction, even to justify violations such as political meddling
into its neighboring states, especially Taiwan and Hong Kong, in order not to
be expelled by these organizations or to
avoid further sanctions. Chinese ambition to overstretch its power by its
interventions in the East China Sea has been, in fact, internationally declared
as “completely unlawful” and represents a formal premise of a new Cold War.
In
the US, neither Democrats nor Republicans look kindly to Beijing, and the
Washington choice of political ambiguity is focused on deterring China from its
never hidden ambition of reunification with its neighbors and to avoid the
situation spirals out of control, being both countries aware that a new war on
a global scale would be detrimental.
In
a battle of tit-for-tat countermeasures, such as restrictions on Chinese access
to the US market by the implementation
of sanctions in an outright tariffs war and bans (i.e., Tik Tok), followed by
the closure of consulates and soaring technological competitiveness, these
countries are increasingly distrusting each other in a reciprocal decoupling,
although they are still economically interdependent.
In
a comprehensive view, we can’t forget that the EU economy largely depends on its
exports, and that it would be more likely for them to undertake negotiations
with China than they follow the US leadership.
In
addition to that, the international community keeps on denouncing persistent
and systematic infringements on human rights and fundamental freedoms in China[5]
(i.e., abuses against Uyghur minorities in Tibet and persecutions; a fierce repression
of democratic demonstrations in Hong Kong against Chinese national security laws)
and is stressing the difficulty of turning officially their officially
proclaimed democratic declarations of principles into practice.
In
the succession of these events, what’s the
role of the UN? Is the UN Charter, relating treaties and legislation
just an ambiguous enlisting of rights not implemented in an orthodox way and no
more felt as binding by the people? States
operating under the rule of law are internationally caught in a web of obligations they cannot disregard,
but to what extent they feel to be nowadays bound to them? In order to
make the UN fit-for-purpose
for the challenges presented by the 2030 Agenda, and in the pursuit of its main
functions including the maintenance of international peace and security, many
institutional reforms have been discussed, first and foremost, about the
Security Council. On this subject, it has been claimed a more effective
inclusiveness of developing countries, such as African States that are facing
key topics like water management, poverty eradication and women empowerment,
among others, and are currently sidelined from the main decision-making roundtables,
and the creation of a more flexible membership in order to reform the veto-system,
avoiding by this way a block of the Council activities. Furthermore,
since his election in 2017, Guterres has proposed a UN 2020 reform agenda
focused on a leading role of the Secretary-General[6], including a
revision of the Secretariat architecture, prioritizing the prevention of
conflicts, a more coordinated delivery of UN services at the country level by
UN agencies and programs, forging a people-centered
system, and guaranteeing proper inclusion of women, minorities, and indigenous
groups.
Under these assumptions, it’s clear that the UN has often failed, especially in the last
decades, to prevent wars and to fulfill its peace-keeping and peace-building tasks
and that an overhaul and shaking-up of its legal system seems to be urgent and irrenounceable,
being evident that its de jure
authority is more and more far away from its de facto power.
A shifting balance of power and rapid
globalization of threats—from the economic downturn caused by Covid-19
restrictions and the increase of the public debt in the least developed
countries, to the traffic of drugs and arms sponsored by terrorist groups and
the environmental crisis—challenge the UN to update its anachronistic mindsets.
As a result of these sociological observations and political countermeasures to
contain widespread dissatisfaction and dissent, we could talk today about a post-sovereignty era, referring to a phenomenon
of revitalization of a Sovereignty-based paradigm that can push equal States to
be bound by really legitimized international institutions and by a renewed
international legislation, in the pursuit of an effective mirroring of the will
of people in what has been defined as
the “eternal return” of Sovereignty. In this perspective, significant revisions
are ongoing, aiming at giving a consistent answer to ordinary people that find themselves more and more cut off from the
control rooms of democratic decisions[a8] .
[1] Nietzsche F., Twilights of
the idols, or, How to philosophise with a Hammer,Hackett Publishing
Company, Inc., 1997
[2] De Blasio E., Technopopulism
and direct representation, Taylor & Francis, 2020
[3][3] Schΰtze R., European
Union Law, Cambridge University Press, 2018
[4] Bauman Z., Liquid Modernity,
Cambridge, 2000
[5] http://www.hrw.org/ asia/china-and-tibet
[6] https://www.unmultimedia.org/ tv/unifeed/asset/2524/2524594
[LS1]It is difficult to discern the meaning of this paragraph, as it is
rather wordy and indirect. Perhaps this can be rewritten to present a concise
analysis of the difference between the interpretations of sovereignty.
[LS2]Please include source information for this quote.
[LS3]Please include source information for this quote.
[LS4]Is “hobos” the correct term here? Please confirm.
[LS5]Is this a quote from Bauman’s work? If so, please include source
information.
[LS6]Can this sentence be rephrased for clarity? It is a bit hard to
follow and could be condensed.
[LS7]The term “oozing” dos not seem to fit the context. Please confirm
whether revision is needed here.
[a8]General suggestion: paragraphs normally do not contain just one
sentence. Consider where such paragraphs
in the piece can be merged into other paragraphs.
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