The state is a sign without a referent. Most international relations theorists argue otherwise. They suggest that the state has a referent, and this referent is “sovereignty.” But, as this study suggests, sovereignty also requires a referent. Various referents have been proposed throughout history, the most powerful of which have been god and the people. Whether regulated by the law of nature or the law of equivalence, an exchange of sovereign authority presumably takes place between god and a monarch or the people within a state and their political representatives. In these ways, states acting in international affairs may “refer” to one or another sovereign foundation as the source of their sovereignty and legitimacy.

As argued in the Foucauldian analyses of interventions by the Concert of Europe, Wilson Administration, and Reagan-Bush Administrations, to guarantee terms of reference one must first produce them. Sovereign foundations are produced as signifieds in order to make representational projects possible, in order to allow sovereignty and the state to refer to some original source of truth. This is a fundamental way in which power and knowledge function in a logic of representation.

From a Foucauldian perspective, the story these interventions tell is one of how disciplinary power is involved in the production of sovereign foundations. Foucault's three modalities of punishment – the mark, the sign, and the trace – correspond to the intervention practices undertaken by the Concert of Europe, the Wilson Administration and the Reagan-Bush Administrations respectively. Each intervening power was constituted as one community of judgment about the true meanings of sovereignty and intervention and the true location of sovereign authority.