The nation-state is back in history and historiography. In the 1980s and 1990s, social and cultural historiography tried to escape the confines of a nation-centric political historiography by concentrating first on international comparisons and then on transnational movements and processes.Footnote 1 More recently, however, historians have focused on the state again.Footnote 2 This reorientation is partly due to a surging interest in the history of international relations and institutions, where governments were crucial actors alongside transnational epistemic communities.Footnote 3 Contemporary events have shaped this development too: the state has seemed to return as a unit of political power and analysis, after several decades of economic globalization and transnational institution building, which accelerated in the aftermath of the Cold War. In the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, populist movements from the right and the left called for national responses. And, since 2016, Brexit has shattered formerly dominant narratives of ever-increasing European integration and supranational institution building.
Together with the nation-state, the notion of sovereignty has resurged in political debates. A day after China, Japan, South Korea, and more than a dozen other countries of the ASEAN Free Trade Area signed a large free trade agreement in November 2020, the outgoing US administration highlighted “sovereignty” as the reason to oppose those developments. One senior adviser for strategy, Steve Cortes, criticized Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for calling COVID-19 a chance to reset and address problems globally; using a polemical and problematic epithet to describe COVID-19, Cortes noted on Twitter: “Globalist hacks like Trudeau clearly see the China Virus as an opportunity to diminish sovereignty and embolden multilateral bureaucracies—we in the America First movement believe the virus further necessitates precisely the opposite approach.”Footnote 4 In response to America Firstism and the resulting changes in transatlantic relations, even staunch advocates of multilateralism, such as members of the Christian and Social Democratic coalition under Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany, have explicitly reaffirmed the country's or a “European” sovereignty vis-à-vis the United States.Footnote 5 This sovereignty talk was not just political or economic: in February 2020, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission and former German defense minister, summarized the European Union's new digital strategy as striving for “tech sovereignty” from US-based platforms and retailers like Amazon, Google, and Facebook.Footnote 6 Simultaneously, British Brexiteers invoked domestic and popular sovereignty to justify leaving the European Union.Footnote 7 As the case of Europe shows, the reemerging talk of sovereignty means different, sometimes contradictory things about the role of the nation-state to different actors.
The renewed interest in the state has prompted scholars from different fields to revisit historical understandings of sovereignty, that is, most basically, the idea of supreme and independent authority over a territory. Since its emergence in the era of absolutism and, particularly, with its codification in modern international law in the nineteenth century, sovereignty had commonly been considered one of the state's essential defining features. Yet, from the start, the simultaneously increasing movement of people, goods, and ideas over borders created interdependences that haunted claims of sovereignty. Newly intensified economic globalization as well as increasing recognition of the “global challenges” around natural resources and the environment as well as the economy since the 1970s seemed to undermine notions of state sovereignty.Footnote 8 Accordingly, the vast majority of scholars of international law believed that economic globalization necessitated further international legal cooperation and that this development challenged “traditional notions of state sovereignty” and the so-called Westphalian system.Footnote 9
The end of the Cold War encouraged this perspective. A seemingly unipolar world appeared to create space for new international institution building, for example in the realm of international criminal justice. Witnessing these changes, political scientists, international relations scholars, and contemporary historians diagnosed an erosion of state sovereignty and predicted that it would decline even further.Footnote 10 This dominant scholarly perspective neglected that, even in the 1990s, the so-called New Sovereigntists in the United States were planning for a New American Century, in which US sovereignty would reign supreme.Footnote 11 Still predicting that “Westphalian sovereignty would erode” after the Bush administration or even claiming that “it had already eroded beyond recognition,” mainstream international legal scholars underestimated the continuing appeal of sovereignty. They were thus ill-prepared to explain the recent “populist” backlashes in the United States and the European Union or the uncoordinated, state-centric reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, for that matter.Footnote 12
Many of the debates on the state of sovereignty in the present arise from an ambiguity of the concept, which functions as both a legal and a political category.Footnote 13 From a formal, legal point of view, every state may appear sovereign as long as it governs over a territory and can make decisions, whether about the normal state of affairs or the state of emergency, as Carl Schmitt famously put it.Footnote 14 In this sense, it is an expression of sovereignty to forsake sovereign rights by entering an internationally binding treaty, which may later be sovereignly dissolved. This purely legal sense of sovereignty is, obviously, not very useful for historical analyses because it neglects the political, social, and economic conditions of affirming sovereignty. Theoretically, a state can always withdraw from treaties it has signed if it is willing to bear the consequences. Those consequences, however, may appear and actually be unbearable, threatening the very existence of the sovereign state. From a political point of view, however, decisions are never absolutely “independent from any other earthly authority,” as nineteenth-century legal theory defined sovereignty.Footnote 15 Rather, state decisions are always influenced and circumscribed by domestic economic and social factors as well as international dependencies.Footnote 16 In both the legal and the political understanding of sovereignty, the term seems to lack historical depth and specificity.
At closer examination, however, this conclusion and even the theoretical distinction between a legal and a political concept of sovereignty are questionable. Historically, both dimensions are inextricably linked. As Martti Koskenniemi suggests, it is “precisely this ‘limit’ aspect of sovereignty that intrigues us, the way it points to the insufficiency of ‘law’ or ‘politics’ if considered in their own terms as autonomous languages or self-regulating systems of thought.”Footnote 17 Rather than attempting to parse distinctions between legal or political understandings of sovereignty, the articles in this special issue illustrate that such understandings are always intertwined. Moreover, as the contributions on the dissolution of IG Farben after 1945 or the recent debate on gambling restrictions demonstrate, they cannot be disconnected from broader aspects of economic, communicative, or cultural sovereignty. Nor too can concepts of sovereignty be bounded by a particular nation-state, particularly one like Germany, whose boundaries were constantly historically contested. They were shaped by international debates in the context of imperialism and colonialism in the nineteenth century, as well as by interactions within the United Nations after 1945 as Steven Press and Sebastian Gehrig show.
Theoretically, the contributions in this special issue differ from the dominant elaborations of sovereignty and, particularly, from the narratives of its recent demise. Those share what we call a realist fallacy: they conceptualize sovereignty as a property that states have or do not have, which can then be endangered, eroded, or even lost.Footnote 18 Defining sovereignty or, for that matter, its counter-concepts such as globality or globalization as factual descriptions of states or the world inevitably produces conclusions of deficiency.Footnote 19 Some analyses try to address this problem by allowing for different degrees of sovereignty or describing it as “dispersed,” “bounded,” or “shared.”Footnote 20 But from a realist, political point of view, no state has ever been fully independent or sovereign. Nor has the world ever been truly globalized.
Political scientists and legal scholars may continue to debate degrees of sovereignty, and economists might discuss how to define levels of globalization. Yet, the conceptual history of sovereignty points toward a potentially more fruitful angle. Historically, sovereignty is, first of all, a claim that can be made, challenged, and disputed by politicians, businesspeople, intellectuals, or interest groups. We suggest that scholars are better served by treating sovereignty as a claim that historical actors make, challenge, criticize, or deny in concrete circumstances in order to negotiate power relations and achieve certain political goals. This approach follows Hent Kalmo's and Quentin Skinner's observation that “sovereignty is not a property that can be analysed in the abstract, separating it from the multiple discursive contexts in which it has been invoked.”Footnote 21 If we examine sovereignty as a perceptual category, as a claim to authority made and contested by people in particular circumstances, grand narratives about sovereignty's erosion, dissolution, or transfer lose their meaning: If sovereignty is a claim, “there is no sense at all in which it can be ‘reduced’” and it is no surprise that it resurfaces again and again in power conflicts even in a rapidly globalizing world.Footnote 22 Treating sovereignty as a claim undermines linear narratives of its rise and demise. This approach also opens the concept up for concrete historical studies, which analyze who tried to make such claims, why they made them at particular moments in time about particular places or issues, and under which conditions those claims were successful or not. The very slipperiness of the term sovereignty is what has accorded it such discursive power. Different actors have sought to claim “sovereignty” in different realms for different reasons with differing levels of success.
By taking a discursive approach, the articles in this special issue highlight the malleability of sovereignty claims, which were deployed in an astonishing variety of ways over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By taking these discursive approaches seriously and tracing how they evolved over time and in different arenas, this special issue shows how rhetorical claims around sovereignty could result in real political, economic, legal, or social change. In other words, they offer a more fruitful intervention into how sovereignty worked—as a claim that actors deployed to argue for particular stances rather than as a factual description of realities on the ground. The articles in this special issue explore the myriad ways that historical actors deployed sovereignty as a discursive claim. In some cases, political, economic, and social actors as well as experts from various academic disciplines used “sovereignty” as an argument to define the state's and other actors’ power and position in the world often trading different sovereignty claims against one another, as Rüdiger Graf and Philipp Müller argue. Meanwhile, sovereignty could also be deployed in figurative ways to justify colonial conquest or define consumers in gambling law, as Steven Press and Laura Kaiser explore.
The articles in this special issue also collectively make an intervention into the misleading grand narratives around the emergence, decline, or resurrection of sovereignty and its relation to globalization. Sovereignty claims do not conflict with economic globalization and international institution building but rather operate as a close—if not necessary—correlate. On the one hand, the international order and even the structures that facilitate economic globalization depend on sovereign states negotiating and upholding their principles. On the other hand, mutual economic interdependencies often facilitate the recognition of other entities as sovereign states. Thus, grand narratives around the emergence, decline, or resurrection of sovereignty and its relation to globalization lead astray. The contributions in this special issue show how historical actors used the term and its close correlates (independence, supreme authority, control, etc.) to navigate power relations and to claim political, legal, and economic authority in an inextricably entangled and interdependent world. They examine how the slippery concept of sovereignty has been stabilized as it moved among the scales of the individual, the people, the state, the empire, and the world. We ask how an abstraction with no fixed referent has acquired such power in the political imagination. How does it retain such power within political milieus from left to right, with advocates and adversaries who defy separation according to the classical divisions of the political spectrum? Much of the reason lies in the rhetorical flexibility of the ideas behind the term that could be appropriated to mean very different things to different groups of people as the contributions to this volume demonstrate. Before outlining how their analyses of the politics of sovereignty contribute to larger debates on the peculiarities of modern Germany, we will briefly revisit the existing historiography on the concept.
Histories of Sovereignty
As indicated previously, in the 1990s and the early 2000s, three major positions emerged on the contemporary history of sovereignty. Scholars either diagnosed a loss of sovereignty, or they described its transfer to supranational institutions and its dispersion in increasingly complex structures of multilevel governance, or they questioned the utility of the category altogether. The first narrative portrayed state sovereignty as dissolving due to accelerated economic globalization. In the 1970s, economic historian Charles Kindleberger had already concluded that the state was no longer a meaningful economic unit.Footnote 23 The free flow of goods and services across national borders, which had become essential for a state's economic well-being and stability, seemed to narrowly circumscribe its ability to exert any sovereign rights. With the privatizations of the 1980s, states even relinquished control over their domestic economies by submitting to perceived pressures of “neoliberal globalization” and market globalism, as left-wing critics argued.Footnote 24 This process of marketization and economization only seemed to accelerate after the end of state socialism in Europe in the 1990s.Footnote 25
The second narrative conceptualizes the transformation of sovereignty not as a dissolution, but as an increasing transfer of sovereignty to inter- and supranational as well as regional bodies, leading to structures of multilevel governance.Footnote 26 It focuses on international institution building and often uses European integration as a paradigmatic case. With a different accentuation, economic historian Alan Milward argued, after 1945 European governments transferred certain sovereign rights to supranational institutions to rescue the European nation-state, which might have otherwise proven unable to secure its citizens’ well-being.Footnote 27 Though often formulated with a disclaimer that integration did not follow an inherent teleology, historians usually presented this history as a success story of overcoming the lure of national sovereignty.Footnote 28 In Europe, this conviction became even stronger when scholars in the United States started to reaffirm their country's sovereign right to exert its supreme military power unilaterally under the administration of George W. Bush.Footnote 29 In 2002, international relations scholar Robert Keohane highlighted the historical irony that the United States “from which the first republican critique of the concept of sovereignty emanated, has now become one of its staunchest defenders” while in Europe, where the idea had been developed, the “European Union has moved away from the classical conception of external sovereignty.”Footnote 30
Finally, scholars concluded that the world had become too closely interconnected politically, economically, and culturally and that structures of governance had become too complex and interwoven for the concept of sovereignty, of supreme and independent authority, to be useful at all.Footnote 31 Important questions of our time, they argued, concerned governance, which was always shared, multilayered, and not confined to state actors.Footnote 32
Historical examinations of sovereignty, which assume a broader temporal perspective, however, suggest a more nuanced picture of the nature of sovereignty in the past and present than these narratives convey. As the British international relations scholar Andrew Hurrell put it in 2007: “If you have never thought hard about sovereignty in the past, then it is easy to conclude that sovereignty today has suddenly become complex and contested.”Footnote 33 Sovereignty has always been an “essentially contested concept,” which is defined differently in legal, political, or economic terms and may be wielded for various purposes.Footnote 34 As the articles in this special issue show, sovereignty and related concepts have never held one fixed meaning but have been mobilized by different groups for different purposes over time. Much of the power of sovereignty lay in the power to define its boundaries, whether geographical or conceptual. Definitions of sovereignty were used to exclude groups and interests from negotiations, when they were deemed “incapable” of working within Western epistemological frameworks.
Historically, the concept of sovereignty emerged in the absolutist legal and political theory of the early modern state. It was supposed to describe the ruler's claim to supreme authority over a territory against concurring claims of local elites and external powers.Footnote 35 In his Six Books of the Republic, the French philosopher Jean Bodin (1529–1596) famously justified the ruler's sovereignty as his absolute power to set law, arguing that he was not bound by any other earthly authority but only by natural and divine law. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the concept of sovereignty became increasingly detached from the person of the ruler and was ascribed to the state itself and the carrier of its highest authority.Footnote 36 These states formed the elementary units of the international society. At the same time, imperial conquest and exploration laid the groundwork for defining the boundaries of which units of governance could exercise sovereignty. As Lauren Benton has shown, the British and Spanish empires from 1400 to 1900 developed geographic and legal claims to imperial spaces that were uneven, fragmented, and inconsistent. What was consistent, however, was the intertwining of law, geography, and sovereignty. Benton noted that “law formed an important epistemological framework for the production and dissemination of geographic knowledge, while geographic descriptions encoded ideas about law and sovereignty.”Footnote 37 The contingent and contested construction of sovereignty in overseas colonies paved the way for violent conquest not just in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, but also in land empires and borderlands on the Eurasian and North American continents.Footnote 38
The concept changed in the nineteenth century under the double influence of colonialism and nationalism, which made territoriality its defining feature and established the sovereign nation-state as a specifically European norm.Footnote 39 Unequal treaties between China and colonial powers, for instance, reshaped the Chinese state and treaty ports’ ability to control everything from trade to laying telegraph lines, issues that historians of China have long discussed through the lens of sovereignty.Footnote 40 Long-standing polities like the Ottoman Empire were confronted by problems when their definitions of territoriality did not wholly fit into European imperial norms.Footnote 41 Settler colonial societies like Australia, Canada, or the United States embarked upon new forms of dispossessing indigenous peoples, for example, through creating reservation systems, violating previous treaties, ignoring Aboriginal land titles, and outlawing social and economic practices (like potlatch ceremonies banned from 1885 to 1951 in Canada).
At the turn of the twentieth century, Lassa Oppenheim (1858–1919) defined the legal consensus of international lawyers that a state consisted of a people, a territory, and a “sovereign government.” This sovereignty was supposed to be a “supreme authority, an authority which is independent of any other earthly authority. Sovereignty in the strict and narrowest sense of the term includes, therefore, independence all around, within and without the borders of the country.”Footnote 42 This concept of sovereignty was essentially European as lawyers and politicians argued that peoples and tribes in Africa and Asia did not exercise sovereign rule over a certain territory, as defined by European conceptions of rule. In North America and Australasia, such concepts also enabled further expropriation of indigenous lands.
European conceptions of sovereignty further globalized through two major steps. First, at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, US President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) declared “national self-determination” a universal principle. Wilson's own actions and statements showed that he really meant universal within Europe, although independence movements in China, Egypt, and elsewhere referred to Wilson when claiming self-determination and national rights.Footnote 43 The second step was the wave of decolonization in the decades after World War II, when the United Nations made national sovereignty one of its founding principles.Footnote 44 Still, violence in colonial borderlands (like Kenya's northern frontier in the 1960s) or conflicts over what territorial units could claim national sovereignty (like Nagaland or South West Africa) created continued contestations over the meaning of sovereignty.Footnote 45 As Adom Getachew has shown, some postcolonial politicians also sought other arrangements such as regional political structures in West Africa and the Caribbean. In the end, however, the idea of national self-determination prevailed.Footnote 46 At the same time, governments of newly sovereign countries in the so-called Third World soon realized that their political independence meant little, as long as economic and media dependencies from the colonial era remained. This was particularly true in the field of resource extraction carried out by multinational companies with headquarters in the former colonizing countries. Hence, “permanent sovereignty over natural resources” became the central demand of developing countries organized in the Group of 77 and UNCTAD.Footnote 47 Nonaligned countries simultaneously sought media sovereignty by pushing for a New World Information and Communication Order that would reduce their dependence on Anglo-American news organizations such as Reuters and the Associated Press.Footnote 48 Again, this experience of the decolonized world points to the central ambiguity of the concept of sovereignty being both a legal and a political category.Footnote 49
Sovereignty discourse could often operate in realms beyond the “classic” domains of high politics, economics, and law. To take one example, the apparently surprising emergence of contemporary sovereignty talk around digital technology has deeper historical roots, particularly in Germany. Carl Schmitt may be best known for his legal scholarship and thought around states of emergency and political sovereignty. But his work also drew on decades of German debate around media technology, space, and sovereignty. In 1942, Schmitt argued that “modern transportation and telecommunication technologies” like wireless and radio had transformed the relationship between land and sea.Footnote 50 Sailors could now know their ship's exact location at any time, dissolving divisions between land and sea. This was one factor inspiring Schmitt's belief that the link between oceanic and global control (See- und Weltherrschaft) had been severed. This had in turn undermined the last century's nomos of the earth. Sovereignty, for Schmitt, involved communications as well as politics and law.
Schmitt's focus on wireless formed part of a broader, decades-long focus among some German political, economic, and military elites on communicational sovereignty. Even in the late 1860s, Bismarck had intervened to ensure that Prussia could retain a German-owned news agency, Wolff's Telegraphisches Bureau, rather than have the territory covered by the British-based Reuters. Domestic control over communications appeared crucial. By the 1890s, concerns around communication had gone global. Many more colonial-minded elites believed that a cartel contract among the three major news agencies of the time (the British Reuters, French Agence Havas, and Wolff's) had constrained German news provision to the rest of the world, which in turn was undermining German global geopolitical and economic ambitions. The business of news seemed to hamper imperialist ambitions to bolster Germany's global standing.
Simultaneously, these elites feared apparent British control over the dominant communications technology of submarine cables. When the British government denied landing rights for a planned cable from Germany to the United States in the late 1890s, this seemed to confirm German fears that the British would weaponize cables for political purposes and were preventing Germany from controlling its own conduits of communication. Such worries spurred half a century of investment both in new media technologies like wireless to bypass British cables and in news agencies to disseminate news from Germany around the world.Footnote 51 World War I and its aftermath only accelerated these concerns, for example, around how the Weimar government could lose ties to the Rhineland because the French and British forbade Wolff's from providing news to the region. Although the news content changed dramatically during the Nazi era, Nazi journalists and propagandists similarly sought to use news and radio infrastructure to exert domestic and global power, as Schmitt's work suggested.
The history of German debates on communicational sovereignty is one example of the loose boundaries and concrete effects of such discourse. Communicational sovereignty was simultaneously an abstract desire to disseminate German content around the globe, an economic debate around media business, and a concrete infrastructural effort to build world wireless networks. Based on concerns about German communicational sovereignty, German investments in wireless technology in the early twentieth century had shaped the development of wireless as a point-to-many technology that could reach as many people as possible.
Midway through what Charles S. Maier has called the “territorial” twentieth century of the 1860s to the 1970s based on “spatially anchored structures for politics and economics,” wireless technology created new ways to order the spaces of the sea and the air as well.Footnote 52 Exploring communicational sovereignty in the first half of the twentieth century also shows how the space of sovereignty could change. As in other realms, concerns about sovereignty were national, imperial, and international. But sovereignty also became more multi-dimensional, encompassing land, sea, and air.
The German example points to how Germany was simultaneously particular and paradigmatic. Concerns around communicational sovereignty were both peculiar to German fears around comparative weakness in global communications and similar to burgeoning American interest in global communications business and wireless infrastructure.Footnote 53 It also points to how scholars can historicize contemporary discussions of sovereignty. The language of communicational sovereignty is omnipresent today. “Who can claim to be sovereign, on their own, in the face of the digital giants?” asked Emmanuel Macron in March 2019.Footnote 54 Just a month before, Russia had tabled a “sovereign internet” bill to “ensure the reliable operation of the Russian segment of the internet in the event of disconnection from the global infrastructure of the World Wide Web.”Footnote 55 China's Great Firewall too is framed as a form of sovereign protection. But the question of communicational sovereignty has a long history, one that tells us about the relationship between nation and multi-nationals as well as how battles over communicational sovereignty played out in new spaces such as the sea and the air. Communicational sovereignty combined technology, business, infrastructure, and information.
Focusing on sovereignty is fruitful not only because recent developments suggest that the concept is most likely here to stay for the foreseeable future. Recurring criticisms of the concept and its usefulness have not made it superfluous but rather demonstrated its crucial function in theoretical and political debates on the relationship between legal authority and crude power.Footnote 56 Moreover, the concept can bridge the political and analytical divide between international and domestic developments, as the article on the attempt to bring German war criminals to trial after the First World War shows. According to Stephen Krasner, sovereignty may refer to both a government's domestic authority and a state's position within the international society: “On the one hand, states assert, in relation to this territory and population, what may be called internal sovereignty, which means supremacy over all other authorities within that territory and population. On the other hand, they assert what may be called external sovereignty, by which is meant not supremacy but independence of outside authorities.”Footnote 57 Because both claims are closely interconnected, focusing on the politics of sovereignty claims in concrete circumstances offers a lens into the interaction of domestic and international politics.
The Peculiarities of German Sovereignty
The articles in this special issue address these questions by focusing on Germany, which is arguably both a paradigmatic and a special case in the history of sovereignty. Coming late as a nation-state and a colonial power in the nineteenth century, German sovereignty had to be negotiated between the Reich and the states, and German federalism continued to be a reminder that authority over territory is never fixed but may be challenged and has to be affirmed. For example, the states of Bavaria and Württemberg continued to run their own postal and telegraph administrations all the way until April 1920. Only the Weimar constitution laid the legal groundwork for a unified federal postal system. In the twentieth century, perhaps no country has experienced stronger assertions of both sovereignty and the necessity to integrate into inter- and supranational structures than the country that attempted to conquer and dominate Europe in the Second World War and was divided during the Cold War. Founded in 1871 as a union of sovereign rulers, Imperial Germany's sovereignty was already a matter of debate among contemporary legal scholars.Footnote 58 Its constitution, which was closely intertwined with the Prussian, contained both elements of popular sovereignty and monarchic autocracy. German legal scholars eagerly joined their international colleagues in denying sovereignty to colonial peoples while politicians tried to build a global empire to rival the British.Footnote 59 Berlin itself was the site for the 1884–1885 conference most associated with the division of the African continent among the European powers.Footnote 60
The articles in this special issue further explore the tension of the interactions between sovereignty and globalism. As Steven Press's article shows, Germany was no exception in its imperial approaches to sovereignty, but in fact aroused suspicion from other colonial powers for embracing colonial norms of sovereignty too enthusiastically. By examining an attempt to purchase sovereignty in the Caribbean island of St. John, Press shows the continuities in German attitudes from the 1880s into the early 1900s, which involved “exchanging money for sovereign control in colonial settings and blurring private and public territoriality there.” Press reminds historians that by the late nineteenth century, sovereignty could be traded as a commodity and was a business involving tricksters and entrepreneurs as well as more conventional state and military actors like Wilhelm II, Bernhard von Bülow, or Admiral Tirpitz.
At the end of the First World War, Germany not only lost sovereignty over its colonies and parts of its territory, but the Versailles Treaty also circumscribed its sovereignty in economic, political, and military terms for the years to come. German politicians as well as the overwhelming majority of the public protested against what they perceived as the reduction from a world power to a pariah in the international community. Revanchist and nationalist claims to reestablish sovereign power were fueled by allegedly being treated like a colony and having parts of German territory occupied by Allied soldiers from the colonies.Footnote 61 In particular, Allied demands to put the Kaiser on trial because he violated “the sanctity of treaties” and try soldiers who were accused of having committed “acts in violation of the laws and customs of war” met fierce resentment. As Rüdiger Graf shows in his contribution, the German government used seemingly paradoxical arguments to avert the attempt to implement principles of international criminal justice and overcome the principle of sovereignty, which had been used to shield soldiers from prosecution. Emphasizing its limited domestic sovereignty and its actual inability to extradite the soldiers, the government tried to convince the Allies to hand over the prosecution to the German Imperial Court at Leipzig. The German government thus successfully used its limited domestic sovereignty in order to increase its international sovereignty as a state allowed to conduct trials of its own citizens. The Leipzig trials also raise larger questions about the role of transitional justice in stabilizing febrile democracies.
The perceived humiliation of Versailles was one factor among many that motivated Germans to rally behind the National Socialist promise to free Germany from international obligations and economic interdependencies. In this perspective, the “Third Reich” can be interpreted as a hypertrophy of sovereignty in political and economic terms, domestically as well as internationally. The “total state” as envisioned by legal scholars such as Carl Schmitt and Ernst Forsthoff was supposed to reign over every aspect of the life of its citizens.Footnote 62 Waging an aggressive war, Germany denied competing sovereignty claims of its neighboring countries in an attempt to establish its supreme and independent control over large parts of Europe. Long before 1939, the National Socialists had tried to create an autarkic economic space in order to reestablish the country's capacity to wage war and free their policies from international considerations. Despite the overall primacy of politics, however, this meant relying heavily on large industry conglomerates such as IG Farben.Footnote 63
The National Socialist attempt to establish German sovereignty over large parts of Europe led not only to mass killings of an unprecedented scale but also to the dissolution of the German Reich, as the Allied powers assumed supreme authority in Germany with the Berlin Declaration in 1945. In the war, the anti-Hitler coalition, or rather the “United Nations” against Germany, had already formed the core of a new world organization that was supposed to overcome such unilateral power ambitions while simultaneously reaffirming the principle of national sovereignty.Footnote 64 German postwar history is at least partly explicable as a result of the Allied attempt to prevent a resurgence of German hypertrophic sovereignty by integrating it into larger international systems as well as of their conflicts. As Philipp Müller's contribution to this special issue shows for the case of the IG Farben, however, this attempt often implied sovereignty trade-offs. The Allies demanded economic deconcentration and decartelization in West Germany as part of denazification, and they believed that a West German state could become sovereign by breaking up industrial conglomerates that had exerted too much political influence. Yet, West German business representatives argued that state sovereignty relied upon retaining larger industrial firms that could compete on the global stage. In the end, IG Farben was divided into only three major producers (Bayer, Hoechst, and BASF), who continued to coordinate. As Müller shows, economic elites shaped state-business relationships from the very start of the Federal Republic by making arguments about the sovereign ability of West Germany to be an international exporter. Though these debates occurred in a very different context, they foreshadowed developments and debates on the relations between state and business power from the 1970s onward.
At the foundation of the two German states in 1949, their sovereignty was narrowly circumscribed by Allied prerogatives. As a rule, West Germany regained sovereign rights step by step on condition of its willingness to integrate into the European Communities as well as the military alliance of the West. In a famous formulation by Helga Haftendorn, this strategy has been conceptualized as winning sovereignty by giving up sovereignty: “Souveränitätsgewinn durch Souveränitätsverzicht.”Footnote 65 From a national point of view, this process usually seemed to be a peculiarity of German postwar history. Yet, as the contributions to this volume suggest, it may have been a much more general feature of the politics of sovereignty. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, East Germany was integrated into the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact. The Brezhnev Doctrine even codified the status of the German Democratic Republic as “limited sovereignty,” and the same description could have been applied to the Federal Republic. Unlike in Weimar Germany, however, state representatives now embraced integration and interdependence in their public utterances. When both Germanys finally joined the United Nations in 1973, Chancellor Willy Brandt solemnly declared that his country was willing to transfer sovereignty to international organizations and subordinate national to international law because “the sovereignty of both the individual and of peoples [can] be secured only in larger communities.” Brandt continued: “The nation can no longer attain security through isolated sovereignty. In reality, isolation creates dependencies that have nothing in common with enlightened sovereignty.”Footnote 66
As Sebastian Gehrig shows, German-German concerns around sovereignty were not so special as it seemed in the older nation-centered historiography. Rather, they were heavily shaped by the broader international context of decolonization, battles over other divided territories, and United Nations debates on representation. West German legal scholars debated in the early 1970s whether German-German sovereignty questions should be seen as domestic or international problems. Gehrig shows how the distinctly German tradition of Staatsrecht clashed with changing UN norms of recognizing member-states, pointing to the particular importance in 1971 of changing Chinese representation in the United Nations from the Republic of China to the People's Republic of China. As much as domestic changes, global developments meant that West German diplomats and lawyers “could no longer simply ignore international legal norms of sovereignty and self-determination.”
As Brandt's speech in front of the UN General Assembly already indicated, the concept of sovereignty may not only be applied to states but also to people denoting the individual's autonomy and self-control. As the cultural history of subjectivity has established, the nineteenth century conceptualized the normative subject commonly as male, white, heterosexual, and economically independent.Footnote 67 Yet, over the course of the twentieth century, and in particular since the 1960s and 1970s, forms of legitimate subjectivity multiplied, as women and ethnic groups, LGBTQ+, and disabled people claimed sovereignty in determining their own affairs.
Simultaneously to group assertions of sovereignty, the sovereign consumer emerged as the ideal of a neoliberal consumer society.Footnote 68 As Laura Kaiser shows in her contribution, state and individual sovereignty were closely intertwined in the debates on national gambling regulations. European integration challenged Germany's ability to exert its own national laws around online gambling markets. When the rise of online gambling and the liberalization of European regulation challenged restrictive German gambling laws, experts and policymakers argued for the need to protect citizens from addictive behavior. Advocates of liberalization relied upon ideas about individual consumer sovereignty, placing responsibility for addiction on the individual psychology of the “pathological gambler” rather than liberalized gambling markets. By contrast, the German government argued for reclaiming state sovereignty over gambling regulations from the European Union so that it could protect its own citizens from their individual gambling propensities. Kaiser's work thus explores another example of sovereignty trade-offs that has become characteristic for the member countries of the European Union, namely between individuals, the nation-state, and Brussels.
In an afterword, Helmut Walser Smith examines “The Long Shadow of Jean Bodin” and puts the articles into the broader context of sovereignty in German history and historiography from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. All in all, this special issue moves beyond simplistic assertions about sovereignty by showing its multi-faceted potency in the realm of discourse about power and dependence. Rather than falling into the realist fallacy, the articles highlight how sovereignty talk encompassed not just the state and international institutions, but also individuals, groups, and businesses. They remind us that German debates about sovereignty were sometimes unique, due to the hypertrophic assertion of sovereignty by the National Socialists and its subsequent loss of and national division. But even these peculiarities exhibit more general features of the essentially contested nature of claiming sovereignty at the threshold of power and law. Moreover, the articles show that German history cannot be studied in the isolation of a national container. Even the most basic questions concerning the German state and states—their capacity to exert power, authority, and control—were always closely intertwined with and influenced by international and global concerns and debates. Concerning the history of sovereignty in general, the special issue demonstrates that sovereignty cannot be observed in the world and measured like a temperature, but has always been contested as a means to assert power over participation.
As a unified nation ever more visible within the European Union since the 1990s amid growing demands to assume a greater role on the global scene, Germany offers a paradigmatic case to study the entangled histories of sovereignty, international cooperation, and globalization from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. How might we disentangle the intertwined legal, political, economic, and cultural sovereignty claims in a globalizing world? How are domestic and international sovereignty interconnected? Does participation in global arrangements weaken sovereignty, or is meaningful sovereignty attainable only through cooperation beyond the nation? Is ceding sovereignty not a specifically German approach, but actually the only way to secure it? As the contributions to this special issue show, these basic questions remained unsettled through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, they have erupted with new force and will likely occupy us for some time to come.
Acknowledgments
This special issue emerged from a workshop on “The Politics of Sovereignty and Globalism in Modern Germany,” held at the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, DC, in March 2019. We thankfully acknowledge the support of the GHI, Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (Leibniz Center for Contemporary History) in Potsdam, and the University of British Columbia. We are deeply grateful to our conference co-organizers, Quinn Slobodian and Anne Schenderlein. For our lively discussions, we thank all the conference presenters and participants. Finally, we are grateful to our team of authors in this special issue, to the anonymous peer reviewers for their trenchant comments, and to Monica Black for expertly shepherding this work to publication.
