Perspectives on Third-World Sovereignty

Denham, Mark E. and Mark Owen Lombardy, Perspectives on Third-World Sovereignty. NY St. Martin's Press, 1996. 185 pp.

The focus of the book, Perspectives on Third-World Sovereignty, edited by Mark E. Denham and Mark Owen Lombardy is the idea of sovereignty, or more accurately state sovereignty, as an operative concept in understanding transnational politics. What makes this book curiously interesting is its range and capacity of thought conceptualizing types of international problems in the Third World as postmodern paradox. In the introductory essay, Denham and Lombardy provide the reader with the paradigm: the state as the pre-eminent international actor credited as the exclusive source of political identity, even as it continues to be challenged decisively.

This research effort integrates two fields of inquiry-international relations theory and international political economy-in calling sovereignty into question especially in the South. A given, theoretically, is the critique of classical sovereignty and the Westphalian model of the state as factors influencing "the parameters of Southern problem-solving." In this book, these factors justify the analysts moving beyond traditional analyses of the constitutive nature of the state and its relation to sovereignty to perspectives which intertwine issues of international political economy, development, and underdevelopment, ecology, intercultural conflict and security, sociopolitical identity and global communications.

The questions raised by the approach are implicational for leaders and individuals of the South, as well as analysts, and none appear more challenging than the following two: "What solutions can they fashion that take advantage of emerging global trends while limiting the adverse impact of prior mistakes and asymmetries of power and wealth? How can the South deconstruct and restructure its relationships with the North within a post-sovereign framework?"

Among the problems the authors focus on are the many conventional terms used in international studies not functionally serving "as symbols and sources of meaning for postmodern societies." It is collectively argued that sovereignty is conceptually differentiated from its Western conceptualization and this obvious contradiction gives considerable importance to any linkage of problem-solving and sovereignty, in the South, and necessitates its redefinition.

The book is a collection of ten essays dealing with the various facets of sovereignty in analytically interesting, if at times overlapping, ways. R.B.J. Walker's opening essay critiques "exotic theorization* with space/time and points out that among the many problems intrinsic to modern theories of international relations is the "single failure to ask questions about how sovereignty is made to work under specific conditions." For Walker, too often analysts have taken for granted "that which is most problematic about modern political life" and this, he suggests, is "profoundly apolitical."

David Stern is concerned with the politics of identity, of the idea of state sovereignty presupposing "the place of politics is pre-eminently the state." He considers the postmodern character of identity as transcending state boundaries which, in essence, represents "a new political modality that cannot be grasped within traditional theoretical frameworks."

The ethics of post-sovereignty in international affairs is the subject of Michael Shapiro's essay. He observes both the practices of modern political space and the narratives that reproduce and legitimate them linking any achievement of an ethics of post-sovereignty to "transcendence," of the "state system's spatial and linguistic hegemony." The borders drawn by cartographers, notes Shapiro, have become "moral geographies" with values and belief systems perceiving sovereignty as a physical reality.

Charles Blatz's articulates a communitarian perspective of what he terms "normative sovereignty" The demands for normative sovereignty (self-determination), he suggests, help us understand the community's social construction of norms, its concerns, its interaction and its discussion. Conflictive scenarios of a national community of concern and global communities of concern (associations of agents expected to respect each other's autonomy) manifest because of conflicts between interactive communities of commerce and culture. The Balkans, Rwanda and Somalia resonate as cases in point. In the postmodern world, Blatz points out, a "global ethical community" is unnerved by the state because of sovereignty. When Non Governmental Organizations (NGOS) challenge the state, too often the state prevails. However, he reminds us that "nonstate communities have the same sorts of capacities and competencies to serve the social functions at stake" and, at times, their norms are prioritized over the states.

Rethinking borders associated with sovereignty is the central point of David Blaney's and Naeem Inayatullah's essay. Conceptually they differentiate internal sovereignty from external sovereignty-the latter is credited with extending Third World diplomatic claims of property rights from the association of sovereign states, in relation to the so-called "logic of capitalism," and the global division of labor upon which capitalism is firmly anchored. This differentiation defines "a particular problematic order" developmentally internationally. The task of the analyst given the South's embrace of sovereignty, the authors contend, is to "unbundle the multiple meanings and purposes associated with sovereign boundaries."