he events taking place in Pakistan for several months now have raised the question: to what extent does the country fulfill the criterion set for sovereign states?

Our compromised ability to make important choices puts Pakistan in the category of a satellite state with the exception of a few years under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Sovereignty is a political concept that refers to dominant power or supreme authority. In a monarchy, the supreme power resides in the sovereign or king. The concept of sovereignty is arguably one of the most controversial ideas in political science and international law. It is closely related to the difficult concepts of state and government and of independence and democracy.

Sovereignty, or the general will, is inalienable, for the will cannot be transmitted; it is indivisible since it is essentially general; it is infallible and always right, determined and limited in its power by the common interest; it acts through laws. Derived from the Latin superanus, through the French souveraineté, the term was originally understood to mean the equivalent of supreme power.

In the 16^th Century France, Jean Bodin (1530–96) used the new concept of sovereignty to bolster the power of the French king over the rebellious feudal lords, facilitating the transition from feudalism to nationalism. He was a jurist and political philosopher, member of the Parlement of Paris and professor of law in Toulouse.

A close reading of Bodin’s writings underlined that even with respect to their subjects, sovereigns are bound to observe certain basic rules derived from the divine law, the law of nature or reason, and the law that is common to all nations (jus gentium), as well as the fundamental laws of the state that determine who is the sovereign, who succeeds to sovereignty and what limits the sovereign power.

Thus, Bodin’s sovereign was restricted by the constitutional law of the state and by the higher law that was considered as binding upon every human being. The thinker who did the most to provide the term with its modern meaning was the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who argued that in every true state some person or body of persons must have the ultimate and absolute authority to declare the law. To divide this authority, he held, was essentially to destroy the unity of the state.

The theories of the English philosopher, John Locke (1632–1704), and the French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) — that the state is based upon a formal or informal compact of its citizens, a social contract through which they entrust such powers to a government as may be necessary for common protection — led to the development of the doctrine of popular sovereignty that found expression in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Another twist was given to this concept by the provision enshrined in the French Constitution of 1791 that “Sovereignty is one, indivisible, unalienable and imprescriptible; it belongs to the Nation; no group can attribute sovereignty to itself nor can an individual arrogate it to himself.” In the 19th Century, the English jurist, John Austin (1790–1859), developed the concept further by investigating who exercises sovereignty in the name of the people or of the state. He concluded that sovereignty is vested in a nation’s parliament. A parliament, he argued, is a supreme organ that enacts laws binding upon everybody else but is not itself bound by the laws and could change these laws at will.

In modern democracies, sovereign power rests with the people and is exercised through representative bodies, such as the Congress or Parliament. In other words, sovereignty is the ultimate power, authority and/ or jurisdiction over a people and a territory. No other person, group, tribe or state can tell a sovereign entity what to do with its land and/ or people.

An example of an internal sovereign is Louis XIV of France during the Seventeenth Century, who claimed that he was the state. Jean-Jacques Rousseau rejected such monarchical rule in favour of another type of authority in a sovereign state: public sovereignty.

Four elements are vital for sovereignty. These are: (1) population, (2) territory, (3) government, (4) independence. The first two elements constitute the physical or material basis of the state while the last two form its political and spiritual basis. Sovereign power is eternal and has unlimited powers. Sovereignty is above the law and is not regulated by law. It is for this quality that the state can legislate.

The principle of sovereignty, previously applied to a very limited number of European states. The system of international relations based on it became universal. The principle of the states’ sovereign equality was fixed in the Charter of the United Nations and became the cornerstone of the international legal system. After the establishment of the United Nations the world abandoned the old system, in which sovereignty was limited by the right of force, to move to a new one that limited the use of force against sovereign states. Having been born in Europe, the idea of sovereignty, which implies the independence of states and their mutual unaccountability, finally reached the colonial possessions of European powers and struck root there.

The supremacy of the Westphalian political system rested on the European powers’ economic and military pre-eminence. When the alternative Philadelphian system (based on the principle of confederation in the North American states) fell apart, it was left without rivals. In the 20th Century, the Westphalian system embraced the entire world in the form of the League of Nations, the first ever international organisation with 65 members (all the existing states except for the US and Saudi Arabia were its members).

Its successor institution, the United Nations came into being after the World War II (in 1945), had wider scope than the League of Nations. Currently, it has 191 members.

Major limitations on the sovereignty of a state include constitutional provisions, public opinion, membership of international organisations and international law. Sovereignty of a state is also limited if another state uses force to interfere in its domestic affairs to settle internal conflicts there. The United States is the starkest example of such interference, perpetrated directly or through multi-lateral institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Another way of such interference is through metropolitan bourgeoise. That is how neo-colonialism is sustained.

The writer is Professor in the faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore