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In the spring of 1994, Louis Henkin, then the president of the American Society for International Law, urged that the word "sovereignty" should be "banished from polite or educated society.1 By the spring of 2004, as the UN security Council grappled with the impending transfer of authority to a new government in Iraq, diplomats could not stop talking about "sovereignty."
Optimists may see the recovery of the word into "polite or educated company" as a sign of progress. Politicians and pundits had learned, after a decade of rhetoric about "global governance" and a "post-sovereign world," that sovereignty was, after all, an indispensable concept.
Yet among the most insistent champions of "full sovereignty" for Iraq in the spring of 2004 were European leaders who were, at the same time, urging European states to yield more of their own sovereign attributes to the European Union.2 And only the year before, such figures as French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder had insisted that the United States could not make war on Iraq without UN approval-which might seem to be a considerable restriction on American sovereignty.3
From the most immediate political perspective, there is an obvious thread of consistency in such European protests, since they aim, at every turn, to maintain veto points on American initiatives. Opponents of the American-led war in 2003 had obvious incentive to claim that the war could only be legitimate if endorsed by the Security Council, since the Council was not then prepared to endorse the war. Past opponents of the war had somewhat similar incentives, in 2004, to challenge any arrangement in which the new government in Iraq might be left dependent on troops supplied by the United States and its partners in the war. Those who wanted to challenge or contain the United States had obvious reason to favor an enhancement of central authority for the European Union. Many EU member states had actually sided with the United States in the war against Iraq in 2003, contrary to the preferred policy of the EU's otherwise dominant member states, France and Germany.4
At a deeper level, the debate revealed quite different assumptions about the meaning of sovereignty. If it is true, as the French and German governments contended, that only...