Conclusion: Myths and Metaphors of Sovereignty

Abstract

This book has focused upon the interplay of power and norms in a variety of contexts relevant to the theory and practice of International Relations today. Whether in the context of the responsibility to protect (RtoP) norm, the application of international law or theorizing around the potential of a world state, the purpose has been to renew a call for recognition of the limitations posed by the presence of a decisionist or de facto sovereign. The purpose has not been to venerate or endorse a highly centralized power that is capable of exercising force to bring an end to extreme political conflicts, but to suggest that any thought on the possibilities for reform of international or global order must come to terms with the ineradicable prospect of crisis and the decision that it calls forth. On the other side of the equation, the point has not been to dismiss outright the value or influence of norms in international political life, but to explain why such norms cannot provide any guarantee of certainty or a promise of peace and security when confronted by a genuine crisis situation. Moreover, attempts to entrench norms that claim to offer protection to people on a global scale through the creative redefinition of sovereign power are liable to reproduce many of the problems that they claim to overcome. As Nicholas Rengger eloquently puts it in the conclusion to his recent book Just War and International Order (2013, p. 175), the problem is that

claims about humanitarian intervention and about preventive war often arise from very understandable, and in many respects very welcome, ethical concerns. But such concerns in themselves should also make us wary. This is because one of the central assumptions of seeing politics as civil (and therefore limited) is that in general terms people cannot be trusted with too much power, and expanding the power of the state — or, indeed, of other agencies as proxies for states — to make war, even for very good reasons, necessarily (and not just contingently) will give them too much power.