Plurinational Democracy

Plurinational Democracy
Author: Michael Keating
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2001-11-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199240760

This title draws on extensive research from four plurinational states - the United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, and France - to provide a radical rethink of the very nature of sovereignty and the state.

Sovereignty and the Stateless Nation

Sovereignty and the Stateless Nation
Author: Keith Azopardi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 454
Release: 2009-10-06
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1847315429

Gibraltar is an Overseas Territory of the UK within the EU, which has for three centuries been at the centre of a dispute between Britain and Spain, a dispute based on traditional perceptions of sovereignty. Hitherto the dispute has been managed in a predominantly bilateral way, but this has prevented the people of Gibraltar having an equal say on the issue of Gibraltar's sovereignty and decolonisation. It has produced a paradox of governance and constitutionalism that encases the Gibraltar people. This book considers the effects of sovereignty and the culture of bilateralism on the dispute, and examines the resulting deficits of governance and democracy. In assessing the evolution of the themes underlying the dispute it asks how its resolution might be facilitated by the application of ideas drawn from the modern legal context of late sovereignty, pluralism and stateless nationalism, suggesting that a productive trilateral approach and recognition of the legal and societal context could enable an enduring settlement. The author marries theories from international relations, constitutional law and public international law in the context of modern literature on sovereignty and nationalism, applying these theories to the case-study of Gibraltar with emphasis on constitutionalism in its international and EU context to produce a ground-breaking addition to the literature on stateless nationalism, late sovereignty and constitutional pluralism. As such it also complements recent studies of sub-state societies, regions or nations within Europe and elsewhere, including Catalunya, the Basque Country and Scotland and Wales, and in the broader Commonwealth context, other British overseas territories. This book will be of interest to lawyers, political scientists, constitutional historians and constitutionalists.

The Sovrien

The Sovrien
Author: Clark Hanjian
Publisher: Clark Hanjian - Polyspire
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2003-05-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

The pacifist, the anarchist, and the cosmopolitan all struggle with the demands of citizenship. Their hopes – for tolerance, nonviolent social change, and a society ordered by personal responsibility – are routinely dashed by civic obligations to support militarism, parochialism, and a society ordered by threat of force. Fortunately for these idealists, the institution of citizenship is under review. Alternatives such as global citizenship and post-national citizenship are enjoying renewed attention. Of particular interest is the option of statelessness. To be stateless is to be a citizen of no country, a subject of no government, a member of no state. Statelessness exists in two forms. The unintentionally stateless person lacks citizenship status against her will. She is an alien in search of a state. The intentionally stateless person lacks citizenship status on purpose. She elects to be both sovereign and alien – she is a "sovrien." While scholars and jurists have extensively examined unintentional statelessness, they have all but ignored its counterpart. The Sovrien explores this void and considers the possibility that one might choose to live as a citizen of no country. The Sovrien proposes that the choice to be stateless is a legitimate and reasonable option. This work examines: the arguments for and against the existence of a right to be stateless, the advantages and disadvantages of being a sovrien, the process of exercising one's right to be stateless, government attempts to restrict the right to be stateless, and the rights and responsibilities of sovriens.

Statelessness

Statelessness
Author: Mira L. Siegelberg
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674240510

The story of how a much-contested legal category—statelessness—transformed the international legal order and redefined the relationship between states and their citizens. Two world wars left millions stranded in Europe. The collapse of empires and the rise of independent states in the twentieth century produced an unprecedented number of people without national belonging and with nowhere to go. Mira Siegelberg’s innovative history weaves together ideas about law and politics, rights and citizenship, with the intimate plight of stateless persons, to explore how and why the problem of statelessness compelled a new understanding of the international order in the twentieth century and beyond. In the years following the First World War, the legal category of statelessness generated novel visions of cosmopolitan political and legal organization and challenged efforts to limit the boundaries of national membership and international authority. Yet, as Siegelberg shows, the emergence of mass statelessness ultimately gave rise to the rights regime created after World War II, which empowered the territorial state as the fundamental source of protection and rights, against alternative political configurations. Today we live with the results: more than twelve million people are stateless and millions more belong to categories of recent invention, including refugees and asylum seekers. By uncovering the ideological origins of the international agreements that define categories of citizenship and non-citizenship, Statelessness better equips us to confront current dilemmas of political organization and authority at the global level.

State Sovereignty

State Sovereignty
Author: E. Kurtulus
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2005-11-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1403977089

State sovereignty is the foundation of international relations. This thought-provoking book explores the gap between seeing sovereignty as either absolute or relative. It argues that state sovereignty is both factual and judicial and that the 'loss' of sovereignty exists only at the margins of the international society. With many interesting real-world examples of ambiguous sovereignty examined, this is an important argument against those who are quick to claim that 'sovereignty' is under assault.

The State of Sovereignty

The State of Sovereignty
Author: Douglas Howland
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 594
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253220165

The State of Sovereignty examines how it came to pass that the nation-state became the prevailing form of governance in the world today. Spanning the 19th and 20th centuries and addressing colonization and decolonization around the globe, these essays argue that sovereignty is a set of historically contingent practices, and not something that accrues naturally to states. The contributors explore the different ways in which sovereign political forms have been defined and have defined themselves, placing recent debates about nations and national identity within a broader history of sovereignty, territory, and legality.

Visions of Sovereignty

Visions of Sovereignty
Author: Jaime Lluch
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2014-10-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812246004

In the contemporary world, there are many democratic states whose minority nations have pushed for constitutional reform, greater autonomy, and asymmetric federalism. Substate national movements within countries such as Spain, Canada, Belgium, and the United Kingdom are heterogeneous: some nationalists advocate independence, others seek an autonomous special status within the state, and yet others often seek greater self-government as a constituent unit of a federation or federal system. What motivates substate nationalists to prioritize one constitutional vision over another is one of the great puzzles of ethnonational constitutional politics. In Visions of Sovereignty, Jaime Lluch examines why some nationalists adopt a secessionist stance while others within the same national movement choose a nonsecessionist constitutional orientation. Based on extensive fieldwork in Canada and Spain, Visions of Sovereignty provides an in-depth examination of the Québécois and Catalan national movements between 1976 and 2010. It also elaborates a novel theoretical perspective: the "moral polity" thesis. Lluch argues persuasively that disengagement between the central state and substate nationalists can lead to the adoption of more prosovereignty constitutional orientations. Because many substate nationalists perceive that the central state is not capable of accommodating or sustaining a plural constitutional vision, their radicalization is animated by a moral sense of nonreciprocity. Mapping the complex range of political orientations within substate national movements, Visions of Sovereignty illuminates the political and constitutional dynamics of accommodating national diversity in multinational democracies. This elegantly written and meticulously researched study is essential for those interested in the future of multinational and multiethnic states.

Sovereignty

Sovereignty
Author: Stephen D. Krasner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 1999-08-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1400823269

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.