The Three Sovereignties

National sovereignty is a sixteenth-century idea whose invention is normally attributed to Jean Bodin (1576). It was consolidated as a reality at the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 that ended the Thirty Years War. A state system was created at the expense of weakening the power of the Holy Roman empire and the house of Habsburg. Westphalia marked the most decisive shift in the locus of control over citizens from the domination by the Church and empires to domination by nation-states. The diffuseness of the Habsburg empire and the limited territorial concentration of city-states could no longer survive artillery warfare that required larger professionalized armies and navies, capital-intensive supply that demanded centralized, orderly administration, capital accounting and ultimately a rolling national debt (see Chapter 9; Mann 1986:440-55).

At Westphalia, national sovereignty became not only crucial to surviving war, but the key idea for preventing war. National sovereignty became the cornerstone of international law. Nations being sovereign meant that other states were forbidden to make war against them in order to interfere in their internal affairs, especially their religion. Initially, however, this was only a European state system which applied only to Christian states.

A new conception of sovereignty appeared soon after the Peace of Westphalia with calls during England's Puritan Revolution for parliamentary sovereignty. Oliver Cromwell did not deliver this, but it became an incipient reality of the Restoration. From the late seventeenth century, the sovereignty of the crown was progressively eroded in favour of parliamentary sovereignty. It was not until the nineteenth century that parliamentary sovereignty had much international currency beyond England and its colonies. Dicey (1959), following the lead of Blackstone's Commentaries (1978), was the pre-eminent articulator of the English model of the sovereignty of an elected legislature, that spread to more and more former kingdoms, chiefdoms and other despotic regimes from the late nineteenth century. The number of states under the sovereignty of an elected legislature rose in three surges - before the First World War (an increase from eight in 1850 to nineteen in 1914: Mann 1993: 766-7), after the Second World War (Japan, Germany, Italy and some of the states they had conquered) and after 1980 (increasing from twenty-eight in 1981 to fifty-three in 1995) (LeDuc, Niemi & Norris 1996: 9).