Recalling the Case for Sovereignty

In the spring of 1994, Louis Henkin, then the president of the American Society for International Law, urged that the word "sovereignty" should be "banished from polite or educated society.1 By the spring of 2004, as the UN security Council grappled with the impending transfer of authority to a new government in Iraq, diplomats could not stop talking about "sovereignty."

Optimists may see the recovery of the word into "polite or educated company" as a sign of progress. Politicians and pundits had learned, after a decade of rhetoric about "global governance" and a "post-sovereign world," that sovereignty was, after all, an indispensable concept.

Yet among the most insistent champions of "full sovereignty" for Iraq in the spring of 2004 were European leaders who were, at the same time, urging European states to yield more of their own sovereign attributes to the European Union.2 And only the year before, such figures as French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder had insisted that the United States could not make war on Iraq without UN approval-which might seem to be a considerable restriction on American sovereignty.3