Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy

by Stephen D. Krasner

The acceptance of human rights and minority rights, the increasing role of international financial institutions, and globalization have led many observers to question the continued viability of the sovereign state. Here a leading expert challenges this conclusion. Stephen Krasner contends that states have never been as sovereign as some have supposed. Throughout history, rulers have been motivated by a desire to stay in power, not by some abstract adherence to international principles. Organized hypocrisy--the presence of longstanding norms that are frequently violated--has been an enduring attribute of international relations.



Political leaders have usually but not always honored international legal sovereignty, the principle that international recognition should be accorded only to juridically independent sovereign states, while treating Westphalian sovereignty, the principle that states have the right to exclude external authority from their own territory, in a much more provisional way. In some instances violations of the principles of sovereignty have been coercive, as in the imposition of minority rights on newly created states after the First World War or the successor states of Yugoslavia after 1990; at other times cooperative, as in the European Human Rights regime or conditionality agreements with the International Monetary Fund.

The author looks at various issues areas to make his argument: minority rights, human rights, sovereign lending, and state creation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Differences in national power and interests, he concludes, not international norms, continue to be the most powerful explanation for the behavior of states.

Genres: International Relations, Politics, Nonfiction, Political Science, History, Theory, Economics

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Kyaw Zayar Lwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

အချုပ်အခြာအာဏာမှာ လေးမျိုးရှိတယ်တဲ့။
Westphalianအာဏာဆိုတာ ကိုယ့်နိုင်ငံအရေးကို ဘယ်သူမှ ဝင်မစွက်ဖက်နိုင်တာ။
နိုင်ငံတကာဥပဒေအရကြောင်းကျိုးညီညွတ်တာကတော့ ဥပဒေသဘောအရ နိုင်ငံတကာက အသိအမှတ်ပြုထားတာ။
ပြည်တွင်းအချုပ်အခြာအာဏာဆိုတာကတော့ နိုင်ငံတွင်းမှာ အာဏာအပြည့်အဝရှိတာ။
နောက်ဆုံးကတော့ နယ်နိမိတ်ကို ထိန်းကွပ်နိုင်တဲ့အရည်အချင်း။

ပထမနှစ်ခုက authorityဆိုတဲ့ ဩဇာနဲ့ဆိုင်တယ်။
နောက်နှစ်ခုကတော့ controlဆိုတဲ့ ထိန််းချုပ်နိုင်မှုနဲ့ ပိုဆိုင်တယ်။

ဒါပေမယ့် အချုပ်အခြာအာဏာဆိုတဲ့ သဘောတရားဟာ အမြဲတစေတည်နေတာမဟုတ်ဘူး။
အချုပ်အခြာအာဏာကို ထိခိုက်စေနိုင်တာတွေက convention-contract-imposition-coercionဆိုပီး ရှိတယ်။

သေချာကြည့်ရင်တော့ နိုင်ငံတကာ ဆက်ဆံရေးမှာ ဗြဲလရမ်းဖြစ်နေတာပဲ။
အဓိကက နိုင်ငံတကာဥပဒေမှာ institutionalized ကောင်းကောင်းမလုပ်နိုင်တာ။
ထက်အောက်အစီအစဉ်သေချာမရှိတာ။
အဲဒါတွေကြောင့် organized hypocrisy ဆိုတဲ့ လေပန်းရင်း အချိန်ကုန်နေတဲ့ သဘောတရားတခုပဲ ဖြစ်နေတော့တယ်။

[Hadrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reread. The "organized hypocrisy" of the subtitle is where states and state actors claim a normative principle or legal basis for sovereignty, but actions violate those rules. That is, to be blunt, a part of life, not just international relations. The concept of sovereignty has never really worked in the way that it was theoretically, and very few places can ever be said to be completely sovereign.

That said, flexibility and ability to have the concept worked around means that it relieves some pressure to find alternative institutional arrangements; and sometimes these arrangements are done voluntarily.

[Lucy Pennington · Rating 2 out of 5]

Argument is in the name and that’s all the reader needs to know. tl;dr.

[Mart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heel eerlijk? Dit was echt een 'moetje' . Ik ben ook helemaal klaar met dit boek. Hij heeft echt wel een paar punten, heeft een zeer realistische kijk op het wereldsysteem. Op sommige punten komt dit zeker overeen met mijn visie, maar het is allemaal wel wat simplistisch. Dat is helaas vaak het geval met realisten.

[QB · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author correctly points out the various contradictions in international policies which effectively undermine sovereignty (eg, non-interventionism vs propagation of democracy and protection of human rights) as well as the inability of both logic (logic of consequences and logic of appropriateness) to completely explain sovereignty.