States Are Not People: Harold Laski on Unsettling Sovereignty, Rediscovering Democracy:

This essay examines the relationship between democratic theory and historical critiques of state sovereignty by analyzing Harold Laski's geneological approach to the history of political thought. This approach led Laski to conclude that the apparently "unified" character of soveriegn statehood made differences within states invisible, rendered similarities across states meaningless, obscured the liberal state's connections to capitalism, and supported order and authority over the less predictable qualities of democratic freedom. Laski's critique of sovereignty ultimately suggested that true democracy was impossible within the context of sovereingty and that real "international cooperation" could only happen under conditions in which individual states were prevented from speaking in the unified voice of their people. The esssay suggests that contemporary democratic theorists and international ethicists could have much to learn from Laski's refusal to relegate democracy to the internal boundaries of states. Shortly before the 2003 war with Iraq, polls in the United Kingdom showed that a significant majority of British voters opposed the invasion.1 While the majority of Americans polled during that same period indicated support for the war with Iraq that number dropped to 40 percent without United Nations approval.2 Public opinion in almost every other country in the world was, from the outset, decidedly against the war as evidenced by the unprecedented visibility of the international peace movement. And yet, despite the fact that an event which had world consequences was opposed by the majority of world citizens, the commanders in chief of two of the most powerful states in the world declared their intention to go to war regardless. And they articulated this intention through the time worn language of sovereignty. In the words of George W Bush, the "United States of America has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security."3 As the case of Britain and the U.S. demonstrates, the majority of citizens within a liberal democratic state may oppose that state's actions in the international arena. Yet, in the context of international politics, all dissention within states is erased by the logic of sovereignty, a logic that transforms multifarious citizen populations into a single person with a single will. We see a similar erasure domestically when state leaders invoke something called a "national interest." In that instant, the bumpy surface of national politics-class conflict, race and gender oppression, political divisions-is smoothed over to make one holistic union, an untroubled totality that neatly reflects both our true desires and the essence of our collective identity. And yet, despite the obvious implications of this phenomenon for democratic theory, most contemporary political theorists have largely accepted the domestic and international divide that currently bisects the discipline and left the thinking about sovereignty to others. While a number of political theorists explore the relationship between democratic practices and the apotheosis of "national interest," such analyses usually end at the internal borders of the state. Likewise, while many international ethicists theorize the possibility of creating a more democratic international politics, these thinkers usually do so in a way that ultimately accepts sovereignty as inevitable. Those who challenge the inevitability of sovereignty tend to be post-structuralist International Relations (I.R.) scholars who focus their energies on theorizing sovereign statehood as a contested site of discursive power rather than imagining forms of post-sovereign democracy. There is then, a radical disconnect within the discipline between scholars engaged in critical, deconstructive work on sovereignty and those theorizing democracy in either the international or domestic realm. Historically, this was not always the case. In the wake of the First World War, before the discipline had had a chance to petrify around its current sub-disciplines, there was a moment when liberal and radical scholars in England and America attempted to re-conceptualize a sphere for international democracy through a critique of sovereignty. …