Sovereignty

Sovereignty is the central issue of contemporary international relations. The dividing line—and at times even the front line—runs between claims to global hegemony and the desire of individual states for independence and sovereignty. To borrow the language of an earlier era, this is the principal contradiction of our time.

Real sovereignty must be distinguished from formal sovereignty. The mere attributes of sovereignty do not, in themselves, make a state genuinely sovereign. The United Nations currently has 193 member states; when the organization was founded in 1945, it had only 50. Not all states, however, possess genuine autonomy.

Sovereignty is a wonderful thing, but it comes at a high price. As the experiences of Iran and Russia demonstrate, defending sovereignty entails the risk of war, sanctions, and various forms of external pressure. Not every state possesses the resources and the political will required for such a fierce and prolonged struggle.

By the mid-2020s, Russia had proclaimed itself a “civilization-state.” This represents the highest degree of sovereignty—a declaration of its intent to be self-sufficient while remaining an integral part of humanity. Being a “civilization-state” means possessing a distinctive vision of the world, its own philosophy and system of values, its own system of education and upbringing, as well as a modern technological base. This is Russia’s agenda and vision for the twenty-first century. If it succeeds, Russia will establish itself as an important and distinctive component of human civilization. If it fails, however, Russia is guaranteed to lose its sovereignty.

Sovereignty is the central issue of contemporary international relations. The dividing line—and at times even the front line—runs between claims to global hegemony and the desire of individual states for independence and sovereignty. To borrow the language of an earlier era, this is the principal contradiction of our time.

Real sovereignty must be distinguished from formal sovereignty. The mere attributes of sovereignty do not, in themselves, make a state genuinely sovereign. The United Nations currently has 193 member states; when the organization was founded in 1945, it had only 50. Not all states, however, possess genuine autonomy.

The essence of sovereignty is the ability to set independent goals and pursue them autonomously. This requires intellectual independence, together with a reasonable degree of self-sufficiency and access to essential resources. Equally critical are political will and resilience in the face of external pressure—whether political, military, economic, psychological, or otherwise.

Dmitriy Trenin:
Russia’s Foreign and Security Priorities in the Era of World Turbulence

Sovereignty, of course, does not imply a state’s complete independence from its external environment or from the international system. To paraphrase a prominent saying, no state can exist within the international system while remaining entirely free from it. It is therefore more appropriate to speak of sovereignty in relative terms. Overall sovereignty is possible so long as the degree of dependence in the most important respects does not become critical.

The most important attribute of sovereignty is the ability to provide for one's own defense. Delegating responsibility for national defense to another state, or accepting—in the literal sense—a foreign protectorate, amounts to surrendering sovereignty and subordinating not only defense and foreign policy but the country's overall course to an external patron. This is clearly illustrated by today’s U.S.-led alliances.

Sovereignty is a wonderful thing, but it comes at a high price. As the experiences of Iran and Russia demonstrate, defending sovereignty entails the risk of war, sanctions, and various forms of external pressure. Not every state possesses the resources and the political will required for such a fierce and prolonged struggle.

Russia, in its modern form (dating from the fifteenth century), is a state that was forged in the struggle for independence, and subsequently in the constant need to defend its sovereignty. A distinctive feature of Russia is that, after the liberation from the Mongol yoke, neither its rulers nor its people ever acknowledged any higher authority over them, insisting instead on the autocratic—in the literal sense of the word—character of their state.

This is crucial to understanding the present stage of Russia’s development and its future prospects. The past four decades have been marked by two parallel processes: the rapid loss of sovereignty and its slow, gradual recovery.

Beginning in 1988, the Soviet Union rapidly began to lose its sovereignty—and within three years it had ceased to exist. Several factors contributed to this: a precipitous increase in financial dependence resulting from inept economic policies; ideological dependence following the loss of even the remnants of belief in communism; the general professional incompetence of the ruling elite; and the personal dependence of the head of state on his relations with his new partners in the West, etc.

Dmitriy Trenin:
Russia’s Foreign and Security Priorities in the Era of World Turbulence

Post-Soviet Russia did not begin from a low starting point but from one below zero. In the early 1990s, former U.S. President Richard Nixon visited Moscow, where he met, among others, the country's foreign minister at the time, Andrei Kozyrev. Nixon asked Kozyrev what the national interests of the new Russia were. The Russian foreign minister's reply astonished him. Russia, Kozyrev said, had shed communism and become a democratic country. Its interests were now inseparable from the common interests of the democratic world. Moscow therefore looked to Washington, as the leader of that world, to define those common interests, which Russia would then follow.

Thus the early 1990s marked a unique instance of Russia’s voluntary relinquishment of sovereignty. However, this period was very brief—roughly three years—and a shift in the opposite direction had already become evident by the mid-1990s. Nevertheless, the road back to the heights of sovereignty proved to be very long and difficult. Russia had to weather the war in the North Caucasus, resistance to NATO’s plans for enlargement, and the crises in the Balkans. By the early 2000s, the country had overcome both internal instability and external financial dependence. Shortly thereafter, it formulated its own perspective on the collapse of the Soviet Union and mounted a political challenge to the unipolar world. What followed is now well known and requires no further elaboration.

By the mid-2020s, Russia had proclaimed itself a “civilization-state.” This represents the highest degree of sovereignty—a declaration of its intent to be self-sufficient while remaining an integral part of humanity. Being a “civilization-state” means possessing a distinctive vision of the world, its own philosophy and system of values, its own system of education and upbringing, as well as a modern technological base. This is Russia’s agenda and vision for the twenty-first century. If it succeeds, Russia will establish itself as an important and distinctive component of human civilization. If it fails, however, Russia is guaranteed to lose its sovereignty.