The End of History

This controversial thesis gained widespread attention in the early 1990s through the pen of Francis Fukuyama, a former official of the US Department of State. Fukuyama (1992) argued that the demise of communist regimes heralded a worldwide triumph of liberal democracy over all rival forms of governance. Since, in his view, liberal democracy was free of fundamental internal contradictions and answered the deepest human longings, its tri­umph marked the end of social evolution.

The Westphalian system was a framework of governance. That is, it provided a general way to for­mulate, implement, monitor and enforce social rules. At the core of this mode of governance stood the principles of statehood and sovereignty.

Statehood meant that the world was divided into territorial parcels, each of which was ruled by a sep­arate government. This modern state was a central­ized, formally organized public authority apparatus that enjoyed a legal (and mostly effective) monop­oly over the means of armed violence in the area of its jurisdiction. The Westphalian state was moreover sovereign, that is, it exercised comprehensive, supreme, unqualified, and exclusive control over its designated territorial domain. Comprehensive rule meant that, in principle, the sovereign state had jurisdiction over all affairs in the country. Supreme rule meant that, recognizing no superior authority, the sovereign state had the final say in respect of its territory. Unqualified rule meant that, although Westphalian times witnessed occasional debates about possible duties of humanitarian intervention, on the whole the state's right of total jurisdiction was treated as sacrosanct by other states. Finally, exclusive rule meant that sovereign states did not share competences in regard to their respective domestic jurisdictions. There was no 'joint sovereignty' amongst states; 'pooled sover­eignty' was a contradiction in terms.

It must be stressed that the Westphalian order was a historical phenomenon. In other words, the system of sovereign states was a particular frame­work of governance that arose at a specific time owing to the peculiar circumstances of a certain period. Sovereign statehood is not a timeless, nat­ural condition. Politics operated without this orga­nizing principle prior to the seventeenth century, and there is no reason why world history could not once again carry on without a system of sovereign states.

The End of Sovereignty

In fact, it can be argued that, largely owing to globalization, the Westphalian system is already past history. The state apparatus survives, and indeed is in some respects larger, stronger, and more intrusive in social life than ever before. However, the core Westphalian norm of sovereignty is no longer operative; nor can it be retrieved in the pres­ent globalizing world. The concept of sovereignty continues to be important in political rhetoric, especially for people who seek to slow and reverse progressive reductions of national self-determina­tion in the face of globalization. However, both juridically and practically, state regulatory capaci­ties have ceased to meet the criteria of sovereignty as it was traditionally conceived.

State sovereignty was premised on a territorial world. In order for governments to exercise total and exclusive authority over a specified domain, events had to occur at fixed locations, and jurisdic­tions had to be separated by clearly demarcated boundaries which officials could keep under strict surveillance. Yet when, with globalization, social relations acquire a host of non-territorial qualities, and borders are dissolved in a deluge of electronic and other flows, crucial preconditions for effective sovereignty are removed. (See Fig. 1.1.)

On the one hand, a number of material develop­ments have undercut state sovereignty. The con­temporary state is quite unable by itself to control phenomena like global companies, satellite remote sensing, global ecological problems, and global stock and bond trading. None of these things can be grounded in a territorial space over which a state might endeavour to exercise exclusive jurisdiction. Computer data transmissions, nuclear fallout, and telephone calls do not halt at frontier checkpoints. Global mass media have detracted from the state's dominion over language and education. In the face of huge offshore bank deposits and massive world­wide electronic money transfers, states have also lost sole ownership of another former hallmark of sovereignty, the national currency.

Alongside these material changes, globalization has also loosened some important cultural and psy­chological underpinnings of sovereignty. For example, as a result of the growth of transborder networks, many people have acquired loyalties that supplement and perhaps even override feelings of national solidarity that previously lent legitimacy to state sovereignty. With the help of global confer­ences, global telecommunications, and so on, sig­nificant supra territorial bonds have been cemented in women's movements, amongst a transnational managerial class, in lesbian and gay circles, amongst disabled persons, and in thousands of computer-mediated communities formed through newsgroups on the Internet. At the same time, globalization has also, as already mentioned, often reinvigorated more localized loyalties, for example, amongst indigenous peoples and other substate ethnic groups. In addition, many people in the con­temporary globalizing world have become increas­ingly ready to give values such as economic growth, human rights, and ecological sustainability a higher priority than state sovereignty and the asso­ciated norm of national self-determination.

States have affected the manner and rate at which they have lost sovereignty in the face of globalization, but they have not had the option to retain it. Even the Chinese government, which has been particularly insistent on perpetuating a sover­eignty-centred world order, put 'global interdepen­dence' at the heart of its Ten-Year Economic Blueprint for the 1990s. Of course there were viola­tions of sovereignty under the Westphalian system, too, but at that time the norm was at least hypothetically realizable. A state could, by strengthen­ing its institutions and instruments, graduate from mere legal sovereignty to effective sovereignty. In contrast, under conditions of contemporary global­ization, governance in terms of supreme and exclu­sive territorial state authority has become utterly impracticable. No amount of institution building and unilateral legislation will allow a state to achieve absolute control of its realm. Indeed, many new post-colonial states—established during the recent time of globalization—have never been sov­ereign.