My take on how states put their big boy pants on and became sovereign

After reading countless articles and books written by scholarly scholars with big

vocabulary and extremely long run-on sentences about their opinions on who, what, when,

where, why, and how of the relationship between sovereignty and states; I've pretty much

been able to decipher two simple words: it happened. That’s the great thing about history: it’s

really just a never-ending story of how long it took the whole entire human race to figure out

how to live with each other and as history should serve as a lesson for how to progress in this

world, we still can’t get along with each other. So what do we do? We do the noodle dance and

come up with ideas, we go to war, we exploit resources, we make profit from it, lose it all, and

then we make friends until we come up with newer ideas just to start a new cycle of

relationship problems. That is the fundamental bane of our existence. And so it is up to those

scholarly scholars to delve into history and write pages and pages of the most genius

explanations as to what started it all and why things are the way they are. The funniest part is,

even these intelligent accounts are at war with each other: I mean, these people actually call

each other out in their own written work; mind you, it’s done in the wordiest way possible so as

to stick to the whole scholarly framework of their hundreds of pages of how they think states

became sovereign.

Personally, I like to think that a combination of all of their explanations justifies how and

why states became sovereign. Call me a philosophical hippy, but I believe that’s just the way

things work in the world. Take the human body for example: if we have too much or too little of

anything like say, cholesterol, we’re kind of screwed. And I know we all like to think of ourselves

as unique human beings but in the end, our lives are all about living in moderation. To me

moderation means balance and balance means a crap ton of everything coming together to be

whole. However, since life is pretty unfair and I’m not really allowed to opt for the grey area

explanation, I guess I have to choose which of these scholars really hit the spot or at least was

easiest to understand since I am, sadly, not as smart as these folks.

So how did states in fact become sovereign? Well out of all the viable explanations

available it seems that Robert Jackson has sort of a legitimate take on this topic in his book

Sovereignty: Evolution of an Idea. Jackson, much like his peers, focuses on Europe in answering

this question; long story short: he blames religious ideology and its faltering hold in politics.

While Jackson gives a pretty basic description of how the movement of ideas gave rise to

sovereign states, I think Rodney Bruce Hall gives more of a detailed layout of Jackson’s answer

in chapter three of his own book National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and

International Systems. Hall provides a step by step process of how this movement of ideas in

early modern era of European history came about. The trigger, according to Hall, was the

“Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century on through the end of the Thirty Years’

War in the mid seventeenth century” (Hall 52) in which we first see the rise of dynastic

sovereignty: the king is the state and his subjects are bound by his confessional status rather

than the pope’s religious decree. After the Treaty of Westphalia, the dynastic principle gives

way to territorial sovereignty in which the king must now serve the state. With religion pushed

to the side after seriously draining both Catholic and Protestant states of all reason and rhyme,

they finally decided to call truce and recognized each as “equal” and “autonomous”, focusing

on more plausible things like “the agency of the burgeoning state” (Hall 59). While he briefly

talks about the half step of the state-nation in which the nation serves the state, Hall skips

forwards to the final step, national sovereignty: the state finally serves the nation.

Hooray for sovereignty. I had to decipher twelve pages of this chapter to come to such a

simple explanation. Both Hall and Jackson argue that the driving force for states in becoming

sovereign was the strength of ideas and I happen to agree with them on that matter. Sure,

others can and have argued that state sovereignty is derived from wars or economic power.

These factors definitely play a role but they are essentially birthed by ideas. From the beginning

of time, wars have been fought over ideas being imposed over other ideas and economic power

was the result of someone or a collective group of people with good ideas. So isn’t it only

appropriate that ideas are the seed of state sovereignty? I know everyone is just dying to

answer this question and share their own explanations on the matter so I’ll just leave it at that

(mostly because I really don’t know how many more ways I can regurgitate scholarly words).

Work Cited:

Hall, Rodney Bruce. National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and

International Systems. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Ch. 3

Jackson, Robert H. Sovereignty: Evolution of an Idea. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.