Sovereignty is now understood as one of the most important but elusive
political concepts. It seems to have recently experienced significant changes
due to the end of the Cold War and drawn great attention from academics
as well as practitioners who analyze the transformation of international
and domestic societies. However, this essay claims that numerous discussions
on the nature of sovereignty that ignore its historical aspects have not
fully explored problems it contains. In order to examine the concept of
state sovereignty more historically and systematically, the essay adopts
the argument of Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, in which he accounted for the three stages of
the mode of knowledge or episteme in
the Western civilization, namely, Renaissance, the Classical age and the modern
age. By introducing his explanation of the characteristics of each episteme, the essay carefully identifies
the transformation of ideas of sovereignty in the West. It first shows that the
main feature of the episteme of
Renaissance, analogy, was predominant in Jean Bodin's theory of sovereignty.
Then the essay identifies the episteme
of the Classical age defined in terms of its specific emphasis upon order by
focusing on the theory of sovereignty by Thomas Hobbes among others. The
appearance of 'man' symbolizes the episteme
of the modern age. The essay argues that the understanding of 'man' in the
modern age naturally leads to the necessity of the nation-state as the vital
element of self-realization of 'man'. It examines the idea of sovereignty
mainly in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and G.W.F. Hegel who represent the modern episteme in the history of the idea of sovereignty.By conceptually demarcating
the historical transformation of the idea of sovereignty, the essay claims
that some presuppositions about sovereignty that are historically and culturally
insensitive like the myth of the Peace of Westphalia as the origin of the
universal modern nation-states system are misleading. The nation-states
system does not have such a long history. It is a more recent creature
that was created in the modern age, namely, in the end of the eighteenth
century. Furthermore, it is not a culturally neutral concept. The fact
that non-Western countries have accepted the principle of sovereignty does
not change the fact that it originated in the Western knowledge. The recent
change in the concept of state sovereignty should therefore be understood
as a result of the change in the episteme of modernity.
