Is there evidence to suggest that sovereignty as a corner stone of modern politics crumbling?

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Sovereign states are the basic and indispensable building blocks of the international system. However in modern politics, there are many times where sovereignty is seen to be crumbling. This essay, aims to examine evidence to see if sovereignty as the cornerstone of modern politics, is actually crumbling. It will examine and analyze vital organisations, phenomenon’s, and situations such as globalization, the United Nations, the European Union and wars. It will show that they most certainly do compromise a state’s sovereignty, but there are also positive aspects to these compromises. It will prove that even though certain aspects of traditional sovereignty are being compromised, those compromises are positive ones and will also show that sovereignty is still a vital aspect in modern politics.

Contemporary pundits often cite the 1648 Peace of Westphalia as the political big bang that created the modern system of autonomous states. Westphalia-, which ended the thirty years’ war against the hegemonic power of the Holy Roman Empire-, delegitimized the already waning transnational role of the Catholic Church and validated the idea that international relations should be driven by balance – of power considerations rather than ideals of Christendom (Krasner, 2001). The international state system, organizations and multinational corporations that are flourishing today are said to have originated from the Peace of Westphalia. Therefore the sovereignty we have today is also known as Westphalian sovereignty. The three basic principles of this sovereignty are the equality between states, a policy of non-intervention of a state by another state and the right to political self-determination of a state. Therefore sovereignty is defined as the ena...

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...mpact on the three principles of sovereignty. The United Nations still holds up the flag of sovereignty and condemns whoever infringes it, the European Union is emerging and reinforcing it by building a European super state and most importantly wars that are fought on an honest humanitarian approach in fact help reinforcing sovereignty between a state and its society. Therefore in modern day politics even if sovereignty is diminishing in certain areas it is mainly for the positive, where as in other areas it is still a vital concept to all nations as well as modern day politics.

Works Cited

Featherston, Scott (2004) ‘Review of Stephen C. Schlesinger Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations’ SAIS Review, 24 (1): 201-203.

Annan, Kofi (2005) In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All (New York: United Nations).

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