Sovereignty is defined in the glossaries of many introductory international relations texts as having supreme political authority. While this is true, there is much more to sovereignty that is not captured in this definition.
Sovereignty has both an observable or emprical aspect and a juridical or legal aspect.
Sovereignty is based on two doctrines in international law, the doctrine of nonintervention and the doctrine of formal equality. It is because of sovereignty that international relations is said to exist in a system of anarchy . The modern concept of sovereignty traces its history back to the emergence of centralized absolutist states from the decentralized political systems of feudal Europe. While it is impossible to place an exact date on when the modern nation-state emerged, it is often associated with the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. That is, states were recognized as political units associated with a population that had a common cultural, language, religious, or historic heritage.