Jorge Emilio Nunez (Manchester Law School) has posted About the Impossibility of Absolute State Sovereignty. The Modern Era on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
State sovereignty is often thought to be and seen as absolute, unlimited. We have seen that there is no such a thing as absolute State sovereignty. Indeed, I maintained in the first article of this series that absolute or unlimited sovereignty is impossible because all sovereignty is necessarily underpinned by its conditions of possibility. The present paper focuses on the Modern Era. What happens after the mediaeval period is crucial, because that is when the kings try to obtain all the power, and theories of total sovereignty are presented, like those of Bodin and Hobbes. In both cases, they fail to demonstrate their thesis of absoluteness in regard to sovereignty and their theories actually introduce limits. Moreover, sovereignty is in practice curtailed by many elements that are particular to this period in history and that are still existent: a) by the increasing power of the people — this could in principle result in a new kind of unchecked sovereignty, but is itself (as the theories from Locke and Rousseau will show) checked by; b) increased emphasis on individual rights; c) the use of separation of legislative and executive powers; and d) international agreements, some voluntary, some required.
