Fragmented Sovereignty: From Medieval Decentralization to Nation-States, or There and Back Again.

Forty years ago, Arnold Wolfers and Hedley Bull skeptically argued that a world order characterized by overlapping systems of authority could eventually replace the sovereign state system with what is now called "fragmented sovereignty." In such a system, many states would exhibit the characteristics of Grotian sovereignty--stable international borders, a government with international recognition, a metropolitan core providing some public goods, and some semblance of a national military--but they would not necessarily exhibit Weberian sovereignty --a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence--over significant amounts of that territory. Instead, some of the internationally-recognized territory would be controlled by smaller but stable political units using some combination of economic, military and cultural means to remain in power for multiple generations. Our 2010 ISA paper focused on three emerging military challenges to Weberian sovereignty: gangs, warlords, and private military corporations. In this paper, we support our earlier arguments with a more systematic theoretical explanation of these changes. We use the McNeill- Olson-Strayer-Tilly (MOST) model to highlight a set of fairly idiosyncratic historical circumstances that led to the emergence of the European nation-state at the end of the medieval period, and argue that these are weakening, and consequently elements of fragmented sovereignty are reemerging. We consider four ideational changes that have contributed to this: the obsolescence of war, democratic/liberal peace, the delegitimization of elite violence, and the emergence of failed states. We also consider four material changes: economic globalization, the mass production of small arms, urbanization, and global communications. Due to these changes, the sovereign state is unraveling in some important aspects, though it is likely to remain relevant. However, far from being the ultimate and inevitable unit of global political organization, the system where the nation-state system is considered the sole important actor is probably transient. Fragmented sovereignty theory provides a means to transcend the constraints of IR theories that are overly reliant on the assumption of sovereignty and consequently will provide a better understanding of recent phenomena in world politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]