States Temporary and Permanent
I will look into it.
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Divided sovereignty is also confused sovereignty--we don't know whether Mike Tyson is genuinely incapacitated or will simply get tired of the whole thing and dispense with the kid. Once we start talking about divided sovereignty there really is no obvious way to place a limit--there can be 2, 10 or 100 competing sovereigns--the Supreme court, the president, the heads of the media, etc. In the end, there's no point to trying to nail it down once and for all, because by the time you do that sovereignty has shifted again. But it only makes sense to talk about divided power if we assume power or sovereignty need not be divided--otherwise, what, exactly, would be divided or unsecure? So, rather than trying to pin the tail on the sovereign donkey of the moment, we can distinguish between actions that work to maintain divided sovereignty, or further divide it, on the one hand, and actions that help or imply unified power. Here is where we could start to talk about ethics, even if it's not only an ethical issue. Those people who preserve the primary functions of their institutions are supporting unified or secure power--they are the ones who would benefit most from and contribute most to overtly absolutist power, i.e., a central government that is visibly and explicitly responsible for everything done on its territory. Such a government would want everyone preserving and enhancing the primary function of their respective institutions, as he is doing with the institution of government. These are also the people the prospective sovereign would rely on in taking and establishing power. Now, all of those "pro-sovereignty" people (the "middle," in the post), from the lowest to the highest (of course they are not all equally important) have their own view of divided power in the corruption and subversion of their own institutions. They are therefore sources of information into the field of competing sovereigns, and they will know more about those dividing sovereigns the more they notice, study and resist them. Which means the more divided power is brought into the light and "reified" in the antiversity, the less of it there. So, the question has shifted from "who is sovereign right now" to "where is centrifugal power being countered right now?"
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I don't see why it makes no sense. If sovereignty is unsecure, i.e.., it changes possession, how do we put a limit on how many can occupy that position?
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There can be one sovereign at a time. Sovereignty is transferred from one sovereign to another. This can happen in a formal, orderly way, under the control of the present sovereign; it can happen in informal, disorderly ways, because sovereignty is seized, or abdicated, or delegated in ways that lead to overlapping spheres of responsibility. In the former case, we know who is sovereign; in the latter case, someone is sovereign at any one time, but we have no way of knowing for sure, which means we have to consider a range of possible "candidates." This is both because power can be concealed and because there is actual turnover in sovereignty, do to shifts in social power. The more unsecure and divided the power, the less we can know. Of course, in that case, we really want to know. Pretty much all political argumentation in advanced (i.e., decaying and splintering) liberal societies is over who has the "real" power behind the "apparent" power.
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Well, I've done what I can. We'll have to leave it there for now.
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But the federal government is not a singular, unified sovereign entity. It is explicitly established so as to disallow any final locus of sovereignty. Congress passes laws, the President enforces them, the Supreme Court decides on their validity--but the President can defy the Supreme Court, which would have no recourse, and the Congress can place certain topics outside of the jurisdiction of the Court. The system is set up to allow for constant tests of power over who is the real sovereign, and there is no way of knowing in advance who will prevail (or whether one branch prevails because the other "let" it). This is by design--it's not a flaw in the system. So, when I speak about transferring sovereignty in this context, I mean that the Supreme Court (or the deciding vote on the Court) might take a decision the Court has made before, and could reaffirm now, and lets, say, the President make it.
More broadly, we need to give some meaning to the term "unsecure" or "divided" sovereignty. I think it makes as much sense to see these concepts temporally as spatially--in spatial terms, the sovereign in control of a particular territory might go back and further; in temporal terms, the sovereign to whom I appeal may not be the same sovereign who decides on the appeal.
You're identifying the sovereign with the legally recognized sovereign. But the whole point of thinking in absolutist terms, I think, is to ask whether the sovereign is really sovereign. If you define sovereignty in legal terms, then someone has to determine whether the sovereign in place meets the criteria for sovereignty--let's say, for example, that the issue of whether Obama was really a "natural born citizen" had become a serious one. Whoever would have made the final decision on that question, and would therefore have had the power to remove Obama from office, would be sovereign. Unless, of course, Obama then refused to go, and stood his ground successfully--then, he'd be sovereign--more securely sovereign that he was before the whole affair started, in fact.
I would like to make the whole question of insiders and outsiders more precise--the more power is divided, the more fluid this becomes. Hence the importance of looking past the public/private distinction--something like the Trilateral Commission could be sovereign (I don't say that it ever was); for that matter, if Hillary had won, maybe the Clinton Foundation could have competed for sovereignty. At what point would it go from being an outsider trying to influence to being the insider others try to influence? I am trying to develop an approach that enables us to take up such questions.
Sovereignty is control over territory, but it precedes law--you can only have in reference to a sovereign. For that matter, it is the sovereign who designated territory as this particular territory. Sovereignty is certainly formalized and stabilized through the protection of territory (the enforcing of borders, for example) and law, but for the purposes of my recent posts, the question I'm interested in is whether law and other institutions are defined by and subordinate to sovereign, or are fields where competing sovereigns seek their own advantage.
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If my understanding of sovereignty has not been clarified, then, at least, the opposing ways we have been thinking about sovereignty have been. Formal sovereignty vs. real sovereignty.
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Who legally recognizes the real sovereign?
The real sovereign decides on the exception. If free speech is allowed, but under exceptional circumstances it isn't, whoever decides on what counts as an "exceptional circumstance" is sovereign. If the states can decide on their own economic or educational policies, except when it interferes with interstate commerce, then whoever decides what counts as "interference in interstate commerce" is sovereign. These are exceptions defined within the system (even if what counts as a legitimate decision can't be defined within the system), but it's not too hard to push the boundaries. Those in the military take an oath to the constitution, to protect it--if that oath can only be preserved by resisting legal orders from the commander in chief, then whoever (like some top general) takes the mutinous yet preservative action is sovereign (if he succeeds). There's still a legal thread here, so let's push it further--social disorder is so extreme, that despite the lack of constitutional and legal remedies (the president, say, is encouraging the disorder), the head of the Joint Chiefs deposes the president and imposes martial law. He who decides that restoring order cannot await the discovery of constitutional and legal means to do so, and that "order" is therefore prior to and a condition of "Constitutions" and "laws," and that now is the time when that truth becomes inescapable--he is sovereign. The imposer of sovereign law is the real sovereign, without any legal recognition (of course, if he is successful, plenty of legal recognition will follow).
It's easy to distinguish real from formal sovereignty in such extreme circumstances, but it would be helpful to have a way of doing so under more normal conditions. If we stick with reducing sovereignty to the legally recognized, the same problem will emerge but in a distorted way--we have to figure out the effects of all the "outside" influences and proxies--who is influencing, how much, how can we tell, how unsecure is the sovereign, etc. If ultimately, some donor, or international institution has the president of some country in his or its "pocket," e.g., is able to veto any budget proposal the putative sovereign proposes, how do we talk about that?
Anyway, that's what adam is thinking the afternoon of 2/27/2017.
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I do think we've reach an impasse here. If you think that there is a "law of the sovereign" that impersonally recognizes the real sovereign, that an impersonal "legal entity" makes decisions through "mechanisms," we're just talking about different things. Our assumptions are incommensurable. The sovereign imposes and guarantees order, and law follows order. In a sense it follows simultaneously--the first decree of a new sovereign is the establishment of law, and the sovereign must issue a decree upon taking power. But it's not the decree that issues the sovereign.
You are thinking there is a place or locus of sovereignty that transcends any individual who occupies that place. There is a sense in which I would say this as well--someone must be sovereign, so sovereignty transcends any particular possessor of it. But it's not a given, actually existing place--it's just a default condition of community. If the federal government of the US collapsed, we might have 50 new sovereign entities emerge. The territory of the US would still be "saturated" with sovereignty, which would therefore be conserved. But there is no transcendent sovereignty that acts independently of persons, that offers legal recognition, that grants statuses, that exists by itself as a legal entity. Someone has to do all those things, and to do all those things he must be above law and legal recognition, above status, above all entities. We're really speaking different languages here.
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I'll try a little more, even though I'm pretty sure we're talking past each other at this point.
I agree with this:
There are laws, written by people acting either directly as sovereign or in their roles granted them by a sovereign. Probably the very first law written in these instances is to define the sovereign.
As long as sovereignty is secure, the law conveys the will of sovereign and provides for the acknowledgement by all subjects of the sovereign. As sovereignty becomes insecure, the laws are decreasingly enforced by the formal sovereign; instead, various informal rules are imposed and enforced by other agencies than the formal sovereign. These informal rules come to be at odds with the formal law, and the powers enforcing them subversive of the formal sovereign. Who actually rules becomes uncertain--the uncertainty can be concealed as long as the formal sovereign doesn't call attention to it and lets the informal powers set his agenda. If he tries to resist, the uncertainty becomes evident. It is true that this situation cannot go on indefinitely (it can go on for a long time, though). At a certain point, one of the competing powers will have to install himself as formal sovereign, and the informal rules turned into a body of formal law--otherwise, the whole system will be destroyed, or fragmented. In the latter case as well, though, new forms of sovereignty will arise. And then we will know who rules, i.e., who is sovereign.
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Yes, but if the "arbitrary power" is better able to enforce its commands than the sovereign, we need to describe the situation somehow. At some point we would have to say the sovereign doesn't really rule--and in that case, all the formal laws in the world (he can keep issuing new ones) won't make him sovereign. What is the point of calling an impotent figurehead "sovereign"?
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I guess "to stay out of jungle" sums it up. We're speaking about somewhat different things, and I think I have a better idea of why that is, and I'm glad we arrived at a modicum of clarity.
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No, nothing about courage--more along the lines of, what if the jungle is already here?