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More than a century ago , James Bryce began his essay on "The Nature of Sovereignty" by admitting that "the reader may feel alarmed at being invited to enter once again that dusty desert of abstractions through which successive generations of political philosophers have thought it necessary to lead their disciples." I wish that I could assure you, as Bryce went on to assure his audience, "that my aim is to avoid the desert altogether, and approach the question from the concrete side." Unfortunately, it seems to me that in order to understand sovereignty we have to examine the relationship between the abstract and the concrete, that is, between sovereign theory and sovereign practice, between sovereignty as a way of thinking and sovereignty as a way of acting. The best I can promise is that I shall try to make our sojourn in the desert as brief as possible.

The issue of sovereignty provides a useful perspective from which to view the history of European politics in the modern era. I am not suggesting that it is the only perspective—there is no one way to tell Europe's story—but that it has some notable advantages over its chief competitor, which is to view the history of European politics as the history of the rise of the state, which usually means the combined histories of a few major Western European states.

It would, of course, be foolish to deny the importance of states in the history of European politics. But the state was and is not history's natural telos. The emergence of states was neither inevitable nor uniform nor irreversible. I hope that by disentangling the history of sovereignty from the history of states and by focusing on sovereignty as a problem, we can avoid the distortions and restrictions that the "rise of the state" narrative imposes on the European past. Undermining this narrative extends our vision of European politics in space and time: geographically, we can move beyond the handful of Western European states whose quite exceptional experience provides both our political vocabulary and our historiographical models; chronologically, we can reconnect the evolution of politics since 1945 with some central themes in European history. If we consider sovereignty as a problem, therefore, we will be able to acknowledge the abiding importance of the state without losing sight of the complex, uneven, and unfinished aspects of state making.

What is the problem of sovereignty? It is, first of all, a problem of definition. Sovereignty is obviously a political concept, but unlike political concepts such as democracy or monarchy, it is not about the location of power (the sovereign, Hobbes wrote, can be "the one or the many"); unlike parliament or bureaucracy, it does not describe institutions that exercise power; and unlike order or justice, it does not define the purposes of power. The concept of sovereignty has to do with the relationship of political power to other forms of authority. Sovereignty assumes, first of all, that political power is distinct from other organizations in the community—religious, familial, economic. Second, sovereignty asserts that this public authority is preeminent and autonomous, that is, superior to institutions within the community and independent from those outside. In theory, the sovereign can be no one's vassal: at home, sovereigns are masters; abroad, they are the equals of other sovereigns.

Although commentators sometimes succeed in making the definition of sovereignty complicated, the concept of sovereignty is deceptively easy to define. The problem of sovereignty resides in the relationship between sovereign theory and practice. To perceive this problem, we must avoid what Quentin Skinner called the "reification of doctrine," that is, the tendency to turn ideas into things, concepts into conditions, norms into descriptions. Overcoming this tendency—and it is especially prevalent in writings about sovereignty—requires that we understand sovereignty as both a doctrine and a set of activities, a way of thinking about politics and a form of political action. As a doctrine, sovereignty is usually regarded as unified and inseparable; as an activity, however, it is plural and divisible. To borrow Inis Claude's vivid distinction, in theory, sovereignty might seem like a "chunk"—that is, a solid, monolithic condition—but in practice it turns out to be a "basket"—that is, a collection of different rights, powers, and aspirations. The problem of sovereignty is the enduring tension between the order and unity promised by sovereign theory and the compromises and negotiations imposed by political practice.

Note: Original annotations were not included in this excerpt.

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