The story of sovereignty. Now sovereignty is a very complex issue which affects a whole lot of stuff that's going on on planet Earth. So we're going to look at it in some detail here, kind of backtrack it into history and play it forward to see how it's changed radically in several different places right on up into the modern era. Let's just start with the basics.
What the hell is it? I've been jumping up and down and screaming and yelling sovereignty and state sovereignty and sovereignty of a state like a thousand times already in this lecture series. What is it then? It's actually quite simple on paper. Sovereignty is the quality of having supreme independent authority over a territory.
Ultimate authority over a place. That means no other power or individual or government or entity anywhere else on the planet can supersede the actions of the rulers or ruling body of that sovereign state. In other words, The king's law of this sovereign state is the law of the land.
The emperor's decree is the final say on the matter in that place. A government's actions in its own country cannot be overruled by anyone or any other entity outside of the country. Ultimate power over the peoples and the territory of that state.
Now, how can you prove that? I mean, I could claim that I'm a sovereign state. You can too. Do it for fun. You could carve out a piece of territory, I'll say this room, and I could add some peoples in, mostly ladies, and I could invite in some friends of mine to be a military, and we could form a government between us, and maybe hold elections, and I would be the president, and we could make a flag, and print money, and have an economy.
You could do everything that a state does. But how could you prove, really, to the eyes of the world that you had sovereignty? Ultimate power and authority over this territory.
That's easy. You only got to be able to do one thing. Kill your own citizens. Oh! Aha!
Wow! That sounds radical! Why would I make such an extreme statement?
Precisely because it is extreme. If you can do the most extreme thing to the peoples in your territory and get away with it, internationally, legally, with no repercussions from any higher authority, then indeed you are a sovereign state. In our example here, what would happen if I killed someone here in my little room territory?
Could I get away with it? Am I a sovereign state? Obviously not. The state government above me and the federal government above them would say, No, you don't have ultimate authority.
We have ultimate authority over you. You can't kill your own citizens, but keeping the same example, could the US government kill its own citizens? Sure, it does every day all the time.
Capital punishment, you've heard of that? Putting people to death? It happens all the time. And when the US government kills its own citizens, what happens?
What's the international outcry from the rest of the... Nothing. Nobody can say anything because the US is the sovereign entity in this scenario.
They are the ultimate rulers of that state and the peoples in it. Now, I know you're thinking, Ah, he's using an easy example. Capital punishment. Lots of countries have that.
That doesn't count. Okay, let me make it real extreme for you. Let's not talk about people on death row. Let's pretend the US government decides to drop a nuclear weapon on New Jersey. Oh, I know.
I'm Many of us might laugh, but that would be pretty terrible for millions of people in New Jersey that would die. Now whether the US did it on purpose or as an accident, what would the international response be to that? The international response if the US government nuked millions of its own citizens.
What would Russia do? Again, they might laugh. What would the Chinese do?
What would Australia do? What would Brazil do? What would France do?
Well, okay, that's a bad example. The French would surrender. But the answer is they would do nothing.
There would be outcry. People would say that's travesty. What are you doing? US, you're crazy.
But they would do nothing else. They're not going to invade. They're not going to do anything because they can't because the US is the sovereign holder of this territory.
Now, it's such a horrific act, maybe other countries should do something, but they won't and here's why. Because this is a reciprocity. reciprocity thing. All these sovereign states of the world respect the authority over those other territories of those sovereign holders. So China says, Ah, well, we think that's bad, but it's your people, it's your territory, you're the ultimate power in there.
We're going to respect your right to nuke your own citizens because we expect reciprocity. We expect you to respect our right to do the same. Same thing to our citizens if we want to.
You get it? Reciprocity. Everybody recognizes and respects other sovereign states ability to do whatever they want to to the peoples within their own territory.
That's the ultimate test killing your own citizens. You can do that. You got it.
Now, how did it get to be this way? How did this whole sovereignty thing start up? As referenced earlier, This state sovereignty concept is kind of new in the broad historical sweep of things.
It's really a product only of the last three or four or five hundred years tops, and it's mostly a European phenomenon that kind of spread out to the rest of the world. For most of history, monarchs ruled the day. That's kings and queens and dukes and emperors and all those folks.
And these were individuals, individual people, who were bestowed with the ultimate sovereign power over their peoples or over their little stretch of turf. Usually this sovereign power was reinforced by a blessing from God almighty who chose, in all of the infinite wisdom, chose this family or that family or this other family to lead the way for the poor bastard commoner uneducated class of idiots. Now That's one way God blessed you or even by obtaining a holy relic that you have the holy crown or the holy scepter or a holy sword.
You pull Excalibur from the stone and now you're the king of the Britons. Why? Because you have this sword that God blessed or touched or had something to do with.
And usually these divine blessings were tangibly or physically handed down to these individual rulers by a religious leader, like a pope or a holy priest who crowned the person as the ultimate ruler and leader of the peoples and increasingly of a place. All for the king of the Britons, the Pope touches your crown and therefore you have the power over the Britons. You might have heard of this referred to as the divine right of kings and they actually had something similar to it over in Asia too.
In China they have the mandate of heaven. That is something otherworldly other something has told you that you're in power. Now, It sounds comical in today's world. I still find it hilarious. Why would ultimate power have been based on some so seemingly bizarre as a blessing from some old Catholic dude or pulling a freaking sword from a stone.
Because it's from God! The ultimate power itself, or herself, or himself, or whatever self. If you can claim that ultimate power supports you as the king, there's no higher authority to question. I mean, that's the essence of sovereignty.
If God supports me as the king, Unquestionably, I have ultimate power over the people here. Who's gonna second guess God? And he gave me the sword or the crown or whatever.
I have ultimate power and authority over the peoples and increasingly over this place or territory by divine rule. Now, why do I keep stressing increasingly over a certain place, increasingly over a territory? Because this whole sovereignty concept has also changed radically in the last three or four hundred years.
based mostly on the European experience, where monarchs were in charge, individuals holding the sovereign power over their peoples, Arthur, King of the Britons, right? The French king is ruler of the Franks. This morphs In the last several hundred years into not just the peoples but ruler increasingly over a specific territory And this is because get the Europeans who spent centuries beating the living shit out of each other war after war after war the Britons fighting the French fighting the Germans fighting the Italians fighting the Dutch fighting the Spanish and Increasingly in this little area called Europe.
It's not that big they would increasingly draw lines to form off their little territory and say, okay, we're the Franks over here in France, we draw a line. Germany, don't come over here or there's gonna be trouble. We'll surrender all over your ass.
And this whole concept is now called the nation-state. There you go. We already talked about that too.
The development of the nation-state transformed this kind of power over peoples to power over peoples in this territory a state. But! Hang on! Something else really important happened at the same time in the last 300 years.
There was a shift away from individuals as the holders of sovereignty to the territorial state and the peoples themselves as the ultimate holders of sovereignty. Well, as I just suggested, most of human history has been kings and queens and emperors. People, individuals, got the crown on.
Ding ding ding. I am the holder of the sovereignty over all I see. That was the way it was.
It's morphed into people thinking, This is kind of bizarre. Isn't the sovereignty really for all of us? Don't we in now the state of France, we are the protectors of this territory, we the peoples, alright, have the power over ourselves, so they kind of shifted away from individuals, the idea that a single person holds the sovereignty, to an idea that sovereignty is of the peoples.
And I'm not really talking about democracy per se yet, but we're getting there that peoples are the ultimate possessors of this sovereignty over themselves and they would elect governments of other peoples who are in charge who make the laws and they're going to give the sovereign power to those groups of people to oversee the state. Does that make sense? So a shift from individuals to people.
The Franks holding the power, the sovereign power of France. Now, that's a pretty big shift, a pretty big deal. and the way that the world has pretty much worked for the last couple hundred years mostly because, put it in a historical context, several hundred years ago the Europeans are the ones in charge of planet Earth.
They have colonized most of the planet. They're the richest countries, the most powerful countries, the most powerful navies and armies. So their systems are kind of implanted everywhere else.
They come up with the idea of the nation-state and as sovereignty as of the peoples, not individual, and that idea spreads around the planet which is kind of why it's everywhere in today's world. But whether you were a king, a queen, a duke, a parliament, or a government of a state, one thing is for sure, throughout almost all of human history, the only true way to completely prove that you had sovereignty was defendability. I mean, I can jump up and down and claim anything I want. Maybe I can even get away with killing the people in this room in my little sovereign state. But you could only really prove it on the world stage for most of history if you could defend that right.
In other words, if you had enough ass to back up whatever your mouth was saying. So I could say, hey, I'm a sovereign state and maybe nobody messed with you. Oh, but maybe somebody would invade you. And if you could not repel that invasion, if you could not repel someone coming into your country and messing with you, then you really didn't have to. You didn't have sovereignty, did you?
So it was based mostly on raw power. I can defend my sovereignty, therefore I have it. France can defend, Russia can defend, China can defend it.
So you could say whatever you want to, but if you're gonna try to come mess with our sovereignty, we're gonna push you out, thereby proving that we have it. And think about that. Does Switzerland a thousand years ago have sovereignty?
Did the Dutch? I mean, small entities a thousand years ago you can do a lot of talking, but where are you going to go when people come walking into your territory to take over? And that's the one kind of exception to the rule here of defendability as the true test of sovereignty. Is that you could also have a very strong ally. Meaning that, hey, I'm going to use a very specific example, Serbia.
Serbia, not a big place, not a huge country, wasn't 500 years ago, but they had Russia as a very strong ally. Still to this day, by the way. So, Serbia can say, we're a sovereign state, and if Russia says, you know what, you're our buddy, we recognize your sovereignty.
France might say, we don't. Serbia's a punk, we can go invade them anytime we want. Oh, wait a minute, Russia's friends with them? Okay, never mind. I guess we'll recognize too.
You see? So you either defend your sovereignty by force or be an ally or friend of somebody who could defend it for you. That's the way it was for most of history, certainly for most of the last several hundred years.
But, but, but, but, but, sorry I keep saying but, even this has changed significantly in the last 60 years. Mostly due to the rise of international institutions, namely the United Nations. In today's world, Sovereignty is based more on simple recognition than on defendability. Meaning, if you can get enough other sovereign states to recognize your ultimate power over your territory, if you can get enough of them, then you can get into the country club yourself.
Meaning, if me here in this room Could get all the rest of the world to simply recognize that I wouldn't really have to defend myself, would I? If all the rest of the world recognized that I'm clear, they won't mess, right? How do you do that in today's world? Stay with me. How do I get it if I want it for my little territory?
You got to go through the United Nations. Now we're going to talk a lot more about this at a later lecture. A lot more. But know this for now and forever, to become a sovereign state in today's world you simply need to get a resolution passed to the United Nations saying it's so.
Write it down. Pass it on. Everybody signs it. Done!
Just get enough countries to support you, write up the resolution, get it passed to the UN, and BAM! You can be a country too! How do you think dink-ass places like Granada or Palau or Vatican City have done it.
I mean, they couldn't defend themselves just from me on a binge. So yes, it's a recognition thing. We recognize you, recognize us, we recognize you. You're not able to recognize you.
You can be a country too. Now I said you needed a bunch of countries to recognize and a resolution passed to the UN. But let me add one last detail that will explain why some places on the planet will never be sovereign states.
Not today's world. And that is the UN Permanent Security Council. What's that? This is a band, a board, a group of five countries.
Permanent Five, the P5, you'll hear them referred to. The Permanent Five are the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, and France. And this specific five are very important because every resolution Throughout the entire United Nations must pass by this group of five.
It must, every one. And every member of this group has veto power. Oh!
Now maybe things are starting to make sense. Any one of these countries can stop anything from going through the UN including recognition of a sovereign state. No matter if every single country on planet Earth All 192 of them recognize My Little Boyerland. If one of that permanent five vetoes it, then it's dead in the water.
It will not happen, it cannot happen, not by today's rules. Just one of the five vetoes, you ain't got no state. Now, you can see this in today's world. with a few very concrete examples. Namely, Taiwan.
Taiwan is a place a lot of people think is a sovereign state. It's not. China considers Taiwan part of its territory.
China's on the P5. So every time Taiwan applies for sovereign state status, I veto! The Chinese veto it.
Ain't gonna happen, never will happen. Another example, Kosovo, which is now part of sovereign Serbia. Oh, that's right.
Serbia is an ally of Russia. Russia nyet! Vetoes every time Kosovo tries to get sovereign state status.
A bunch of countries on planet Earth actually recognize Kosovo and Taiwan as sovereign, but they can't be official, not in the world, because they can't get through the UN because of that permanent five. One last fun example, Texas. That's right.
What if Texas were to secede from the United States and apply for sovereign state status? Well, the rest of the world would die laughing. Many in America would too.
But the United States, as part of the P5, would BAM! Don't think so, Texas. Get back down south where you belong.
Is the story of sovereignty therefore now done? These are the rules I've now just laid out for you. They're all set up. We're all good to go, right? Wrong!
Nope. The whole issue of sovereignty is back up in the air again in our time. Right now! Because of the events of just the last couple decades and because of one nasty little word which by its mere utterance simply by whispering it can undo sovereignty at any place at any time. That word genocide and we'll get to that next.