Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship

Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship

DEMOCRACY, CITIZENSHIP, AND CONSTITUTIONALISM

Rogers M. Smith and Mary L. Dudziak, Series Editors

A list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship

Edited by

Sigal R. Ben-Porath

and

Rogers M. Smith

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Varieties of sovereignty and citizenship / edited by Sigal R. Ben-Porath and Rogers M. Smith. — 1st ed.

p. cm. — (Democracy, citizenship, and constitutionalism)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4456-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Sovereignty—History—20th century. 2. Sovereignty—History—21st century. 3. Citizenship—History—20th century. 4. Citizenship—History—21st century. 5. Nation-state—History—20th century. 6. Nation-state—History—21st century. I. Ben-Porath, Sigal R. II. Smith, Rogers M.

JC327.V37 2013

Contents

Introduction

Sigal R. Ben-Porath and Rogers M. Smith

I. WAR, SOVEREIGNTY, AND PLURAL CITIZENSHIPS

Chapter 1. Sovereignty Out of Joint

Arjun Chowdhury

Chapter 2. War, Rights, and Contention: Lasswell v. Tilly

Sidney Tarrow

Chapter 3. Subcontracting Sovereignty: The Afterlife of Proxy War

Anna Tsing

Chapter 4. In Conflict: Sovereignty, Identity, Counterinsurgency

Nasser Hussain

II. IMMIGRATION, SOVEREIGNTY, AND PLURAL CITIZENSHIPS

Chapter 5. Citizen Terrorists and the Challenges of Plural Citizenship

Peter H. Schuck

Chapter 6. Immigration, Causality, and Complicity

Michael Blake

Chapter 7. The Missing Link: Rootedness as a Basis for Membership

Ayelet Shachar

III. ON COSMOPOLITAN ALTERNATIVES

Chapter 8. World Government Is Here!

Robert E. Goodin

Chapter 9. If You Need a Friend, Don’t Call a Cosmopolitan

Jeremy Rabkin

Chapter 10. The Physico-Material Bases of Cosmopolitanism

Pheng Cheah

Chapter 11. Citizens of the Earth: Indigenous Cosmopolitanism and the Governance of the Prior

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Chapter 12. The Idea of Global Citizenship

David Miller

Chapter 13. Why Does the State Matter Morally? Political Obligation and Particularity

Anna Stilz

List of Contributors

Notes

Index

Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship

Introduction

SIGAL R. BEN-PORATH AND ROGERS M. SMITH

Many, perhaps most, adults today who were born and educated in advanced industrial societies grew up with a picture of the world that seemed commonsensical and oft en comforting. For them, the world’s territory was divided up among sovereign states, each with its own unique, generally stable body of citizens who received protection from their state and owed it exclusive allegiance. Those states were expected to recognize and respect each other’s sovereignty in ways conducive to peaceful coexistence. While struggles over borders and sovereignty flared up even under these conditions, wars were mostly seen as aberrations to the generally stable state of affairs. One state, one territory, one citizenry with one allegiance—that was the way the world mostly was and should be.

Much post–World War II scholarship in many disciplines endorsed these views. To cite one influential instance: in 1948, Leo Gross, a scholar born in Austria-Hungary who became a prominent international law authority at Tufts University, argued that the 1648 Peace of Westphalia had initiated a centuries-long struggle to establish something resembling world unity on the basis of states exercising untrammeled sovereignty over certain territories and subordinated to no earthly authority. Gross contended that the Westphalian hope was, as the Spanish legal scholastic Francisco Suárez had argued, for each sovereign state to constitute a perfect community in itself, consisting of its own members, while still recognizing itself as a member of the universal society of the human race.¹ A world so ordered might through peaceful coexistence promote the flourishing of all humanity—a hope that Gross used to persuade those of his time to invest substantially in the new United Nations.²

Yet though the world may have come closer to that system of peacefully coexisting, fully sovereign nation-states in the quarter-century following the end of World War II than in most of human history, in retrospect it was clear that the peace was then still only a partial achievement. Wars between states never ceased nor did transnational violence conducted by nonstate actors. Even the passport, the great modern symbol of national membership in and global protection by a sovereign nation-state, came into near-universal use only in the late nineteenth and especially the early twentieth century.³ And today, although in percentage terms the numbers remain small, increasing numbers of persons, rich and poor, either are entitled to hold more than one national passport or are living in the territories of states that do not provide them with passports. Some hold other forms of authorization to reside in those territories, but some lack any legal documentation at all.

And many who hold legal membership in the state in which they reside, like the Hmong and the Iraqis who aided foreign armies and the highly educated South Asians employed by foreign firms, nonetheless act primarily as allegiants of, or at least collaborators with, foreign governments that are using force against their state, or multinational corporations that are pursuing global economic, not local objectives. In the twenty-first century, it seems clear that while the nation-state still is a highly significant political entity, capable of exercising military power, securing its borders, enacting economic policies, and conferring memberships at will, its place and role are changing. Many forces are pushing prevailing forms of political community away from that world of singular allegiance to sovereign, independent nation-states and toward new configurations. These may take the form of a panoramic sprawl of multiple, interlaced, subnational, decentralized, federated, and supranational sovereign or semisovereign political communities; plural citizenships; and an even more varied range of new economic, military, cultural, social, and virtual transnational associations. Some scholars and activists depict those as incipient forms of alternative and transnational, even global citizenship, or cosmopolitanism.

In contrast to the idealized picture of a world of stable, independent sovereign states, largely peacefully coexisting, this world can seem one of new possibilities, teeming with promises and dangers. To simplify a bit, modern scholarship can be seen as having gone through two waves of response to these developments. In the 1990s, books and articles began to appear, especially by European scholars, proclaiming that the era of nation-state citizenship was almost over, succumbing to the rise of new forms of effectively transnational membership. Yasemin Soysal may have put the case most sharply in her 1995 book, The Limits of Citizenship, which opened by declaring that a new and more universal concept of citizenship has unfolded in the post-war era, one whose organizing and legitimating principles are based on universal personhood rather than national belonging.⁴ Many scholars of the 1990s, especially David Held and Daniele Archibugi, argued forcefully and enthusiastically that these developments meant that the world had at least the potential to move to desirable forms of cosmopolitan democracy in which national memberships would play greatly lessened roles in federated global democratic systems.⁵ Others, like legal scholar Peter H. Schuck, a contributor to the present volume, expressed far more concern about the devaluation of national citizenships, including American citizenship, but Schuck still agreed initially that trends appeared to be moving in that direction.⁶

Soon, however, these perceptions and the anticipation of the demise of national citizenship met with major scholarly challenges, both empirical and normative. The challenges simultaneously reflected and analyzed anxieties over immigrants that have mounted in modern Europe, the United States, and other immigrant-receiving nations. Schuck, among others, proclaimed a re-evaluation of American citizenship as domestic political groups reasserted the distinctive rights and responsibilities of that status and resisted the rise of post-national citizenship in ways he found partly concerning but partly commendable.⁷ With more evident worries, Linda Bosniak argued influentially that although modern liberal democratic states often sought to be soft, egalitarian and inclusive toward those they recognized as their members, in many cases they were increasingly seeking to be hard and exclusionary toward nonmembers, thus reaffirming their political power.⁸ Elizabeth Cohen has concluded that because modern states require citizenship (require populations that accept those states’ distinctive authority to at least some minimal extent) and populations require the governing institutions that states provide, we remain as an empirical matter far from the end of state-based national citizenships, even if their empirical realities are more complex and shifting than they once seemed to be.⁹ Events like the Arab Spring of 2011 seem to confirm ongoing commitments among citizens in different countries to the preservation of the nation-state, even as they try to struggle against repressive state governments.

On the normative side, many continue to argue for the desirability of national citizenship, as David Miller and Jeremy Rabkin¹⁰ have in their past writings and continue to do in this volume. Moreover, many scholars of economic and cultural globalization who are critical of nationalism have nonetheless expressed at least equal concern about many of the new forms of transnational or cosmopolitan migration and memberships on the grounds that they are proving anything but democratic and egalitarian. Because transnational memberships are oft en held by those highly placed in multinational corporations that are pursuing their economic interests in many locales, abetted by service industries staffed by cheap migrant or local labor, many forms of modern plural and postnational citizenship are seen as reinforcing patterns of economic in e quality and cultural domination. As Aihwa Ong has put it, mobile managers, technocrats, and professionals oft en seek both to circumvent and benefit from different national regimes by selecting different sites for investments, work, and family relocation as part of their trans-Pacific business commute.¹¹ In addition, supranational entities oft en have not fostered practices of governance in their internal organization and in their relationships with various territorial populations that satisfy democratic demands more effectively than the nation-state.

In light of these developments, during the 2009–2010 academic year, the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism asked a wide range of scholars in different disciplines to reflect on these apparent empirical transformations of the world, away from the absolute sovereignty of independent nation-states and toward the proliferation of varieties of plural citizenship, perhaps the emergence of possible new forms of global allegiance, and to consider the normative implications of these emergent forms of membership and sovereignty. The results of these scholars’ work in many ways both defied and exceeded expectations. They are contained in this volume.

The essays collected here display widespread acceptance that we cannot grasp the empirical realities or the important normative issues today by focusing only on sovereign states and their actions, interests, and aspirations. All the chapter authors accept that a great variety of globalizing forces are realities that we need to take into account—but they draw very different conclusions concerning those realities. We have structured their contributions so that readers can assess the character of recent developments and the substance of the many debates in regard to what may well be the three most crucial issues concerning transformations in the sovereignty of modern nation-states: the changing role of military force within this new landscape of sovereignty; efforts to control and channel immigration across state boundaries; and the development and assessment of forms of cosmopolitan alternatives to nation-states.

If, as the Progressive-era journalist Randolph Bourne provocatively argued, war is the health of the state because states oft en build strength and support in order to fight wars, then questions about the role that wars and warfare play in an era of apparently declining national sovereignty are crucial to assessing the extent and significance of that decline. Issues of immigration are just as fundamental since they implicate foundational conceptions of who belongs to a particular political community and who does not, and since immigration policy debates are now provoking major controversies in many immigrant-receiving and some immigrant-sending states. The concerns for current forms of political affiliation, sovereignty, and allegiance borne of war and migration indicate where we are now in terms of global political structures; but they also prompt consideration of alternatives to the model of a world of sovereign nation-states and the benefits and burdens those alternatives may provide.

In Part I, War, Sovereignty, and Plural Citizenships, international-relations scholar Arjun Chowdhury provides an overview of the current condition of the sovereign-state system that challenges much conventional wisdom. In Sovereignty Out of Joint, Chowdhury disputes those who think that sovereign states are losing capacities they once had to foster international order, and he goes on to disagree both with those who conclude that we must get past relying on nation-states and those who think we must instead strengthen them. Chowdhury argues that the European-based system of contending imperial states never provided real international stability, nor have states been able to do so since the end of the imperial age. Much of the order that the modern era has achieved resulted from the dangers of nuclear weapons, Chowdhury claims, while postcolonial states have oft en been embroiled in civil wars and interstate conflicts that have kept a fully orderly world elusive. Though Chowdhury does not offer a formula for how global politics should be structured in the future, his analysis casts doubt on whether seeking to achieve a world that consists only of strong sovereign states is wise. Instead, state-building efforts, particularly when conducted by foreign governments, may only help keep wars endemic.

If this argument is true, then what are the consequences? In "War, Rights, and Contention: Lasswell v. Tilly, sociologist and political scientist Sidney Tarrow explores this question by assessing evidence and arguments for the contrasting claims of Charles Tilly, who maintained that early modern European states had to extend more expansive rights to many of their citizens in order to win support for their military efforts, and Harold Lasswell, who insisted that modern garrison states" oft en denied rights to many citizens in an effort to achieve military efficiency and secure power. Using T. H. Marshall’s famed framework of civil, political, and social rights, Tarrow concludes that there is some evidence for each of these rival claims, particularly in the long run. While wars are being waged, Lasswell’s worries about denials especially of civil rights and civil liberties are well justified, while the expansion of social rights during and after wars seems to support Tilly’s approach. In an era when concerns about the twenty-first century’s most notorious nonstate international actors—radical Islamic terrorists—are leading many governments to conceive of themselves as in a state of perpetual war, this conclusion provides less than optimistic commentary on the direction in which relations between citizens and states may be headed, even in liberal democratic states.

In Subcontracting Sovereignty: The Afterlife of Proxy War, anthropologist Anna Tsing examines a further, less noted dimension of modern warfare. In the past half-century, the United States and other major powers have oft en engaged in proxy wars. They have formed alliances with dissident groups in different regions to help them conduct military operations seeking to overthrow their common enemies. Although America’s proxy warriors have oft en hoped to gain power themselves, they have oft en found themselves instead living as refugees in the United States, negotiating multiple citizenship claims. Tsing did field work with Hmong refugees in California who had fought against communists in Southeast Asia, hoping to build Hmong sovereignty. She provides compelling reports of how these dual citizens maintain ways of life bound by memories of wars and commitments to continue to fight, on behalf of both the United States and themselves. That military service includes combat by young Hmong men in Iraq. This service, like other instances of proxy warfare, can be seen as fostering greater inclusiveness in and across modern nation-states, or it can be interpreted as reinforcing global in e quality, violence, and exploitation. In the Hmong case, it is clear that increased transnational interdependency, and the embrace by both the United States and the Hmong of their plural citizenships, have not been part of the achievement of a more pacific and stable world order. Instead, plural citizenship and subcontracted sovereignty have facilitated the perpetuation of war.

Colonial historian and legal scholar Nasser Hussain’s essay, In Conflict: Sovereignty, Identity, Counterinsurgency, finds another military legacy of the imperial state system playing a major role in the modern postcolonial world. The heart of imperial counterinsurgency strategy was the identification of some colonial residents as the people who were to be protected and aided against insurgents, even though the populations in question were profoundly interwoven. To clear-hold-build, as General David Petraeus’s renowned counterinsurgency manual urges, communities and groups must be labeled, oft en separated, and controlled. Those practices can be disturbingly brutal in the course of counterinsurgency military operations; but Hussain’s larger point is that they also may become routinized aspects of the forms of governance provided by the regimes that emerge after military clashes diminish. How far those governing Iraq will feel they can and should move to total control of the population through its compartmentalization into favored citizens and repressed insurgents is central to Iraq politics today and to other societies shaped by the modern principles and practices of counterinsurgency that carry on the contested legacies of Europe’s imperial age.

If the reflections in Part I on war and sovereignty yield few reasons for hope that the decline in the system of independent sovereign states is producing an accompanying decline in militarism, the accounts of the authors included in Part II, Immigration, Sovereignty, and Plural Citizenships, paint a more varied landscape. In Citizen Terrorists and the Challenges of Plural Citizenship, Peter H. Schuck observes that the heightened receptivity to dual citizenship and to immigrants that form part of the liberalism of modern American citizenship policies can leave the nation vulnerable to the terrorist assaults of citizens whose real allegiances are to virulently anti-American causes. Schuck notes that one obvious response, and for many Americans an emotionally satisfying response, would be the denaturalization of foreign-born citizen terrorists, perhaps even of native-born ones. Yet Schuck recognizes that such a power might be wielded in illiberal ways, and he doubts that it would prove an effective deterrent since terrorists place only instrumental value on their American citizenship. He concludes then that the trend toward acceptance of plural citizenship probably will and should continue despite the accompanying risk for citizen terrorists, at least under current circumstances.

In Immigration, Causality, and Complicity, philosopher Michael Blake considers two more general arguments concerning the obligations of modern states to would-be immigrants. As Anna Tsing’s discussion of the Hmong illustrates, some might think a state is responsible for admitting at least some individuals affected by its destructive foreign wars. And when a state is complicit in encouraging and sustaining illegal immigration, many may think it obliged to accord those immigrants legal status. In regard to the first argument, Blake contends that it matters greatly whether the destructive war was also an unjust war. If it was not, then in his view no special obligations arise to accept those affected as fellow residents or citizens. Blake also sees some force in the argument that obligations can arise from complicity, but not quite in the way many others do. He suggests that persuasive arguments for excluding immigrants oft en rest on the need to preserve a coherent, meaningful culture that they might make impossible to sustain. But if the existing culture in fact depends on the labor of undocumented immigrants, it cannot coherently deny them residence; so it should legalize their presence. On both counts, Blake is concerned to ensure that the military and economic interconnections of modern states with outsiders are not turned too quickly into arguments for open borders that might endanger the survival of those states, at least in the forms valued by their members. Like Schuck, however, he nonetheless agrees that under currently prevalent circumstances, arguments for inclusiveness have great force.

Legal theorist Ayelet Shachar offers more unequivocal reasons for inclusion of undocumented immigrants. In The Missing Link: Rootedness as a Basis for Membership, she elaborates on the implications of her earlier arguments for giving full legal recognition to a principle she terms jus nexi. Drawing on analogous conceptions of property, Shachar contends that claims to formal civic membership strengthen as persons become more deeply rooted in the social, economic, and political life of a particular community. For children of undocumented aliens, whether born before or after their arrival in a new country, this rootedness is likely soon to become quite pervasive as they grow up, form social networks, and are schooled and eventually employed almost entirely within that society. Shachar’s principle does not demand citizenship at birth upon a nation’s soil although political communities might decide to adopt that policy for different reasons. But it does argue for extending citizenship to millions of long-term resident, undocumented immigrants—in the United States and other immigrant-receiving nations—who have in effect already become members of the economies and societies of those nations.

Shachar’s arguments therefore serve as a bridge to the concerns about the character and desirability of more expansive forms of political association that occupy the authors in Part III, On Cosmopolitan Alternatives. In its opening essay, World Government Is Here! philosopher Robert E. Goodin boldly proclaims that institutions of global governance have been developing over time, at what looks like an accelerating pace. Examples of these institutions include U.N. peacekeeping forces; the World Intellectual Property Organization, which administers international patent agreements; and a variety of courts claiming international jurisdiction. Drawing primarily on U.S. history, Goodin notes that large-scale governing institutions oft en gradually acquire greater authority, and though he does not seek in his essay to advocate for a single world government, he does contend that we are witnessing evolution in that direction without, so far, the dire consequences that opponents of more cosmopolitan arrangements fear.

Political scientist and legal scholar Jeremy Rabkin disagrees sharply. In If You Need a Friend, Don’t Call a Cosmopolitan, Rabkin criticizes efforts to create international laws and institutions devoted to cosmopolitan principles of equality and universalism for reasons that echo in some ways those of left -wing critics of cosmopolitanism. Rabkin is concerned that in many articulations, cosmopolitan principles are far too leveling, treating all kinds of political communities and combatants uniformly, when instead great distinctions should be made. He particularly rejects what he sees as cosmopolitan demands that governments accord full and equal rights to states, groups, and individuals engaged in massive lawless violence. Such misplaced respect, he warns, may enable those who disdain all notions of human rights to prevail in combat over their international law-abiding opponents. Rabkin maintains that it is not only morally appropriate but morally imperative for governments and citizens to act to uphold the honor of their own nations by refraining from committing injustices and by refusing to suffer or accept them. Human experience shows, he insists, that a world of sovereign and honorable nation-states is more likely to be a peaceful and just world than one that seeks to realize any of the cosmopolitan alternatives envisioned so far.

In The Physico-Material Bases of Cosmopolitanism, literary scholar Pheng Cheah raises concerns about both the philosophy and practice of cosmopolitanism. Cheah, too, perceives in the philosophic sources of cosmopolitan politics from Kant through Marx to today a stress on universal human ends. This emphasis justifies global efforts to remake the world to actualize humanity’s potential for free, peaceful, and prosperous self-development. But like Foucault, Cheah sees these cosmopolitan goals as in reality justifying forms of global governmentality that manage populations far more than they empower them and that do so primarily for enhanced global economic productivity. He urges a methodological cosmopolitanism that seeks to track the transnational processes, structures, and practices that reduce people around the world into economically useful entities as a precondition to any effort to consider what arrangements might help them become more fully human.

Anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli highlights a still more unconventional critical perspective on cosmopolitan alternatives in her essay, Citizens of the Earth: Indigenous Cosmopolitanism and the Governance of the Prior. Like some of the other authors, Povinelli probes the Western philosophic roots of cosmopolitan ideals, and she notes that they have long issued in a precept holding that efforts to develop globe-spanning systems of governance must recognize a duty to defer to communities who have prior claims to particular portions of the earth’s surface. But Povinelli calls attention to dangers that lurk in granting this priority to the prior. The long course of human history involves pervasive contestation at different times in almost every locale; so it is hard for any group to establish firmly that it is truly prior. It is also likely that along the way, some claiming to speak for a particular group may have acted in ways that can be interpreted as forfeiting many of their claims to territorial governance. And she argues that in any case, contributors to the growing body of indigenous critical theory conceive of the claims of today’s indigenous peoples in ways that vary sharply from the worldviews of most modern cosmopolitans. Indigenous claims are best seen as concerns to maintain ways of life that intertwine human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, organic and nonorganic entities within distinctive but shared modes of being in the world. These perspectives are in some respects more inclusive than the largely humanity-centered ones espoused by cosmopolitan theorists, for they incorporate concerns for animals, plants, and the earth itself. At the same time, the viewpoints articulated by critical indigenous theory argue strongly against activities that threaten to erase indigenous ways of life in quests to pursue what they see as oft en repressive, cosmopolitan visions.

The final two chapters continue to raise doubts about the desirability of pursuing global citizenship or cosmopolitan political institutions. Each does so from a perspective that is respectful of many cosmopolitan ethical aspirations, but each nonetheless favors efforts to maintain and extend the structure of the modern world as an array of distinct modern, liberal democratic states. Political theorist David Miller has long argued in favor of liberal forms of nationality. In The Idea of Global Citizenship, he adds an insistence that political citizenship involves engagement with others to settle disagreements on terms of reciprocity, with all citizens accountable to all their fellow citizens for the arguments and actions they contribute to collective resolution of their disputes and to the pursuit of both their shared and their distinct interests. Miller argues that political relationships of this valuable type are simply not feasible on a global scale. He views it as both possible and desirable to have ethical concern for all humanity and to act to avoid global harms as much as possible. But he does not think it wise to term such conduct forms global citizenship, for they do not involve the concrete engagements with fellow citizens on terms of reciprocity and accountability that local political citizenship can provide most vividly and that national citizenship can offer, through suitable democratic institutions, for members of a particular national community. According to Miller, we can and should seek to be "globally concerned citizens," but we should remain citizens of particular sovereign nation-states nonetheless.

In Why Does the State Matter Morally? Political Obligation and Particularity, political theorist Anna Stilz argues for a somewhat similar conclusion but on grounds that are more clearly and firmly cosmopolitan. Stilz believes that justice requires us to recognize the natural duties as well as natural rights of all human beings. She contends that in practice, rights and duties cannot be realized without the intermediation of state institutions that protect some and coerce others in appropriate ways. The indeterminacy of human reasoning, however, means that people disagree on what sorts of protection and coercion and what types of institutions are appropriate for these goals. As a result, it is far more likely that effective institutions will be constructed within particular states than on a global scale. Over time, moreover, members of a particular state develop a history of shared endeavors that legitimately fosters special attachments to their fellow citizens and their state—legitimately, that is, so long as the state is on the whole playing its proper role and acting justly when it defines and enforces duties and rights. For Stilz then, more explicitly than for any of our other authors, cosmopolitan, universal conceptions of justice are foundational. Yet like all the writers in this final part, except for Robert Goodin, she concludes that many types of cosmopolitan political arrangements are probably better feared than loved.

If the authors in our first two parts found it difficult to embrace many of the forms of militarism and immigrant exclusion that are features of the current world of still-powerful, though oft en embattled and far from fully sovereign nation-states, the authors in Part III, writing from perspectives right, left, and center, leave us with many doubts about the cosmopolitan options that appear on offer. The results of their reflections do not present us with consensus on how we can best proceed in confronting the challenges and alternatives they delineate. Yet there are common threads: the essays in each section portray nation-states as increasingly accepting forms of plural citizenship but in ways that do not clearly lead in more cosmopolitan directions, at least not clearly desirable ones. Some powerful states are embracing plural citizenships as means of exercising force in further ways rather than limiting militarism. National acceptance of immigrants and plural citizenships are generally means to protect and advance state interests rather than policies that seek to transcend those interests. And despite the lack of normative consensus, there appears to be wider interest in finding ways to adapt national sovereignty than there is support for any clear alternative to a Westphalian world.

Some readers may, however, reach different conclusions. We trust that in any case, all who read these essays will gain a richer understanding of the issues of political sovereignty and citizenship that are emerging today. This enhanced understanding may prove a valuable resource at a time when, for better and for worse, a world that once seemed familiar is giving way to a world that we are in many ways invited to make anew.

Part I

War, Sovereignty, and Plural Citizenships

Chapter 1

Sovereignty Out of Joint

ARJUN CHOWDHURY

Consensus indicates that we are seeing a crisis of authority as we have understood it in the modern era. The modern territorial nation-state’s writ is challenged by global integration on the one hand and subnational fragmentation on the other. To situate these concerns within a broader historical trajectory, I ask two questions: what is driving the challenging of nation-state sovereignty today, and what is the response to the crisis of authority?

I argue that the crisis of authority is neither new nor anomalous, but is structural to the development of the international system. We can begin by examining two competing understandings of the contemporary crisis—both of which are articulated by contributors to this volume—that identify a perceived decline of the nation-state’s ability to control its territory and provide public goods, most spectacularly in the occasional instances of state failure. Underpinning both understandings is a sense that there is a mismatch between the demand for order and its supply because the state, long the supplier of order, is now incapable of fulfilling that function.

Yet we might dispute this picture. Fundamentally, it assumes that order has historically been the outcome of a system of strong sovereign states. Now that those units are in decline or overtaken by processes of globalization, the prospects for order diminish. While seemingly self-evident, these understandings are flawed. Instead, I pose two arguments. First, the modern state has always been riven by crises: the demand for order and the supply of order have always been mismatched.¹ Second, the process of state formation that has long been the response to crisis has always thrown the system, first the imperial and then the interstate system, into further disorder. That is, the response to the mismatch of demand and supply of order perpetuates that very mismatch.

If the relationship between the state and the system of which it is part has been a mutually destabilizing one, why do extant accounts suggest that the crisis of the state is new’? The reason is what we might call the post festum problem. Marx suggested that much social analysis begins post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before the analyst. Consequently, the objects of inquiry have already acquired the stability of natural self-understood forms of social life," and the analyst is likely to ignore the process through which the object developed.² In the case of the modern state, that process is one of war and almost incessant crisis. But because the ideal-typical European state has successfully emerged, the crises through which it emerged are oft en forgotten. Yet, these crises, as I will discuss at length below, were not periodic misalignments in the balance of power, but were understood and experienced as threats to an entire way of life. However, dire as the crisis seemed, observers stressed that there were potential solutions or ways out. For example, Edmund Husserl suggested that the crisis of European civilization after World War I had two escapes: the downfall of Europe in its estrangement from its own rational sense of life, its fall into hostility towards the spirit and into barbarity; or the rebirth of Europe from the spirit of philosophy through a heroism of reason that overcomes naturalism once and for all.³ These threats of downfall and barbarity were not hyperbole: as Charles Tilly has pointed out, even in Europe, most states did not emerge; they failed.⁴ At the same time, stringent efforts were made to avoid such outcomes.

The idea that the state is currently in crisis is a symptom of "the post festum problem" that, as I see it, creates two analytical problems. First, analysts become likely to overpredict the stability and likelihood of success of a process because they begin with those states that have actually emerged out of a process of war making, like Britain, and ignore those that disappeared through this process, like the German states or Italian city-states before the Risorgimento. That is to say, if we look at the process as it unfolds, we see a greater level of uncertainty and higher probability of failure than if we began with already constituted states as objects of analysis and sought to explain their emergence. Second, looking at the process as it unfolds provides a view into how crises are negotiated and whether they are negotiated successfully. I will focus on this second point in my essay. I will argue that challenges to order from the French Revolution onward have been responded to by calling for the expansion in the power and role of the state. However, this expansion has not necessarily resolved the crisis: in some cases, it preserved the crisis and, in others, exacerbated it. Therefore, we should be wary of current arguments that the expansion or building of nation-states in much of the world will resolve problems of order. Historically, the development of the state has compromised order as oft en as it has provided it.

To make this argument, the chapter is structured into four further sections. I first discuss two extant narratives of the current crisis of the nation-state to illuminate what they have in common: namely, that the state is the historical guarantor of order, and its crisis is new and anomalous. Second, contra these narratives, I suggest that the process of state formation has involved at two historical moments a destabilizing relationship between the state and the system of which it is part. Objectively speaking, the modern state developed in Europe through an escalating process of war making and empire. This process compromised first the stability of the imperial system and then the development of states within the interstate system. Third, I examine the subjective aspect of this process: the nineteenth-century European state did not develop in a mechanical fashion, devoid of human agency. Rather, in response to crises of war, revolution, and empire, observers of the time called for the expansion of state power, which did not necessarily resolve the crises; it either preserved them or exacerbated them. I conclude by placing the current crisis of the state in historical context. Essentially, there is nothing necessarily new about the current crisis of the state; in some ways, it is an intensification of historical trends. More important, the ideas that the state is the guarantor of order and that problems of order can be solved by building states are simply a repetition of long-term responses to disorder. And, as in earlier moments, the effort to resolve problems of order by building states creates its own problems.

Two Narratives

Two compelling narratives explicate the contemporary notion that the nation-state is in crisis, and contributors to this volume fall on one side or the other of this debate. First, scholars have argued that the contemporary demand for order exceeds the ability of states to supply it, and the demand for order exceeds national-territorial boundaries to encompass areas of common concern like climate change. In response, a more or less aggregated apparatus of global governance has arisen, taking one of four forms. Global governance can be nested in multilateral organizations that form a shadow global government or the foundations of an embryonic world state,⁵ or a parallel set of networks of civil-society organizations can take on the challenge of providing public goods and representing groups that are normally unrepresented.⁶ Alternatively, governance can pass to a more disaggregated and noncentralized system of capitalist sovereignty.⁷ Finally, rather than a multilateral or capitalist content to governance, it is the most powerful state, the United States, that has taken on an expanded, imperial sovereignty.⁸

The second narrative does not dispute that the demand for order exceeds national-territorial boundaries, but it does contest the empirical rise and the normative desirability of alternative forms of organization. Great powers are unlikely to cede authority to supranational entities, whether multilateral or capitalist in nature, and great power competition will check presumptive empires and limit American primacy. The resolution of transnational problems will be restricted, as it has been in the past, by the formidable collective-action barriers to cooperation between states. State interests may be both preventing resolution of these problems and exacerbating them. Two issues exemplify the problems faced by supranational authority: managing the commons and instituting transnational regulation. As evidenced by tuna fisheries in the Mediterranean, parts of the global commons are facing significant depletion. Ideally, the users of the commons would develop norms to manage their use. However, the separation of fishing fleets by national boundaries inhibits such cooperation and norm development. Rather, users of the commons are divided into competition for shared resources by state borders rather than cooperating to preserve these resources. On a normative level, one might question, as David Miller does, whether the broader global community is an adequately political concept for expanded notions of citizenship.⁹ Given these empirical and normative difficulties, it may make more sense to see states as the primary and most effective guarantors of universal values, and focus activism and resources to strengthen them.¹⁰

Both narratives coincide on the point that there is a mismatch between the demand for order and the supply of it, but they disagree as to whether a new form of authority has, will, or should emerge to resolve it. My concern is not to adjudge the accuracy of either position but to identify two points of overlap. The first overlap is that the mismatch between the demand and supply for order has emerged recently, specifically after the end of the Cold War and the rise ofglobalization. To be sure, authors differ on the reasons behind this change. For those suggesting that America has become an empire to provide order, the proximate cause is the demise of the USSR. Others attribute the change to globalization by either empowering capitalist entities over states or privileging network forms through which nonstate actors can effectively challenge state power. But there is general agreement that, as Arjun Appadurai puts it, the nation-state system is undergoing a profound and transformative crisis.¹¹

The second overlap is that the mismatch is due to a decrease and in some cases a lack in the ability of sovereign states to supply order. Again, there are several separate logics for this decrease. At a formal level, a variety of changes attributed to globalization, such as the rise of network forms that are more nimble than hierarchical bureaucracies, are seen to challenge the writ of states.¹² Empirically speaking, many states are seen to be unable to maintain order.¹³ The historically central actor