Sovereignty

From Wikinvestor

Sovereignty is the exclusive right to control a government, a country, a people, or oneself. A Sovereign is the supreme lawmaking authority.

Lassa Oppenheim, an authority on international law, has written that "There exists perhaps no conception the meaning of which is more controversial than that of sovereignty. It is an indisputable fact that this conception, from the moment when it was introduced into political science until the present day, has never had a meaning which was universally agreed upon."

An important attribute of sovereignty is its degree of absoluteness. A sovereign power (whether an individual or an assembly such as a parliament) has absolute sovereignty if it has the unlimited right to control everything and every kind of activity in its territory. This means that it is not restricted by a constitution, by the laws of its predecessors, or by custom, and no areas of law or behaviour are reserved as being outside its control; eg. parents are not guaranteed the right to decide some matters in the upbringing of their children independently of the sovereign power, municipalities are not guaranteed freedom from its interference in some local matters, etc. Theorists have diverged over the necessity or desirability of absoluteness. Historically, it is doubtful whether a sovereign power has ever claimed complete absoluteness, let alone had the power to actually enforce it. This last point raises, in passing, the important distinction between de jure and de facto sovereignty. De jure, or legal, sovereignty is the theoretical right to exercise exclusive control over one's subjects. De facto, or actual, sovereignty is concerned with whether control in fact exists. It can be approached in two ways:

       1) Does the governing power have sufficient strength (police, etc.) to compel its subjects to obey it? (If so, a type of de facto sovereignty called coercive sovereignty exists.)

       2) Are the subjects of the governing power in the habit of obeying it?

Another distinction is between external and internal sovereignty. External sovereignty concerns the relationship between a sovereign power and political bodies outside itself, such as other nation states. The central question is, under what conditions do nation states recognise a political entity as having sovereignty over some territory? The following criteria, used by Britain in regarding other powers, are typical:

   "Sovereignty." A government which exercises de facto administrative control over a country and is not subordinate to any other government in that country is a foreign sovereign state. (The Arantzazu Mendi, [1939] A.C. 256)
     	– Strouds Judicial Dictionary

External sovereignty is connected with questions of international law, such as: when, if ever, is intervention by one country onto another's territory permissible?

Internal sovereignty is the relationship between a sovereign power and its own subjects. A central concern is legitimacy: by what right does a political body (or individual) exercise authority over its subjects? Possible answers are, by divine right, by natural right, or — the consentual or contractarian hypothesis — that each of its subjects has actually or tacitly transferred to it that right.