Sovereignty is a useful construct to avoid international conflicts, but is there in any moral sense a "right" to sovereignty? Do I have a "right" not to have my country ruled by "foreigners"? I'm asking this because it seems quite obvious that the hostility to foreign rule turned out to be at least as important a factor in Iraq as all the nice individual rights (voting, speech.) that we bestowed on the Iraqis after our invasion (assuming for now that those rights have some reality, and aren't just a way to prop up a puppet government). It’s also pretty clear that in modern history the quest for national sovereignty or self-rule has had a lot more influence and a lot more popular support than the quest for the right to vote, for free speech, etc. Yet we hardly ever see a violation of national sovereignty defined as a human rights violation. In fact people seem to see no contradiction at all in occupying or invading a foreign nation in order to guarantee the human rights of their population.
This would seem to imply that sovereignty is not a “right”. Indeed it’s hard to make sense of sovereignty starting from an individualistic view of rights, as we tend to do since our intellectual life is so soaked in methodological individualism. The right must in some sense inhere in a “people”, not an individual. One must define the meaning of “foreigner”, and what counts as the “self” in “self-rule” (were the Iraqi Shi’ites being ruled by foreigners under Saddam)? Is it possible for there to be a “right” to sovereignty when the sovereign government is violating some rights (say free speech) of the individuals under its control? But there are a number of rights that can’t be individually defined. The right to vote can only be defined relative to the legitimacy of an entire system of governance that the voter is participating in. And it’s worthwhile to think about these issues, I think, because it forces us to think about the meaning of nation and community as conceived by their populations, instead of applying an individualist perspective on rights.
I really have no problem with this issue because I’m a thoroughgoing consequentialist when it comes to rights – I see them as useful rules that pre-commit us to courses of action that usually turn out to be better ex ante, and allowing ex post violations of rights for utilitarian reasons is usually a bad idea because the ability to violate them will be abused by those in power. So the “right” to sovereignty is a comittment based on the belief that people who share my culture and background will in general rule me more effectively, competently, and respectfully than people who don’t know me well. But I don't know whether this kind of rule-utilitarianism is the accepted way of looking at it.
Any moral philosophers want to weigh in?
Marcus
