SOVEREIGNTY UNDER CHALLENGE

How Governments Respond

The considerable attention that scholars have devoted to “globalization” and “localization” sees them as constraints on a government’s independence of movement, but PBRC finds it also a potential source of opportunity for new initiatives. It is the responses to those challenges, rather than the challenges themselves, that define the meaning of sovereignty in the modern world. In making these responses, governments are redefining sovereignty. PBRC has examined these responses to four sets of relationships:

• economic challenges from multi-national corporations, together with those emanating from the multilateral organizations established to monitor them:
• social movements, especially ethnic or regional demands that threaten separatism and border redefinition and result in changed internal relationships;
• intellectual challenges, which are both more surreptitious and less controllable than the others and which enter public consciousness through channels that governments find hard to monitor or control;
• calls for international standards that require governments to extend their present authority into new areas.

The PBRC studies show that in responding to most of the challenges presented by globalization governments take one of three positions: acceptance, co-optation, or rejection. For some states, the challenges have made it possible to amend existing policies or to take advantage of new opportunities; sometimes in the process they have surrendered some of their “sovereignty” to other authorities; but in rare cases they have asserted a strong position against the challenger. The substantive issues include actions involving official abuses of human rights; transactions that impede the capacity of a government to regulate commerce pre-emptive standards imposed by professional groups that limit the scope of national regulations; tensions between internal cultural values and the international flow of information and intellectual transactions; the movement of financial resources among nations in order to avoid regulations; international charges of abuse made against public officials who were supposedly carrying out authorized duties; and cultural developments that altered conceptions of the state or nation and the independence of its policies.

Available from Transaction Publishers at: www.transactionpub.com