[The European Conservative] Whither National Sovereignty?

Emmanuel Macron’s invocations of “European sovereignty” notwithstanding, the nation — not Europe, nor the entire world — remains the only viable locus for the exercise of democratic power.

Europe in 1648 (the Peace of Westphalia after the Thirty Years’ War), showing: The possessions of the two branches of the house of Habsburg [purple]; the possessions of the house of Hohenzollern (union of Prussia with Brandenburg) [blue]; the Swedish empire on both shores of the Baltic and in northern Germany; the Danish monarchy, Denmark, Norway, and Scania; the British isles, with the battlefields of the civil wars; France, with the battlefields of the civil wars [red]; Germany with the battlefields of the Thirty Years’ War; the republic of Poland at its greatest extent; and the western boundary of Russia. From An Historical Atlas Containing a Chronological Series of One Hundred and Four Maps, at Successive Periods, from the Dawn of History to the Present Day by Robert H. Labberton, 1884.

Editor’s note — This essay is adapted from the author’s remarks at a panel on “Sovereignty and the Nation-State from a European Perspective” at New Direction’s Nostos conference in Oslo on May 21st in honour of the late Sir Roger Scruton. The other panelists were Prof. Hannes Gissurarson (University of Iceland), Danish literary critic Kasper Støvring, and Norwegian philanthropist Christian A. Smedshaug. The panel was chaired by New Direction’s Senior Policy Advisor Robert Tyler.

“The term sovereignty,” remarked the historian of ideas Howell A. Lloyd in 1991, “denotes a complex abstraction which defies concise definition.” Most attempts follow a compound form, he noted in that essay for the august Revue Internationale de Philosophie, with both of the definition’s elements necessary to warrant any use of the fuzzy noun. One half of “sovereignty” concerns the “coercive ability” that flows from a given raw power over a group of people. To reach the more subtle form of authority that “sovereignty” denotes, however…