On June 28, 2004, during a meeting of the NATO alliance in Istanbul, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice slipped the following handwritten note to President George W Bush: 'Iraq is sovereign. Letter was passed from Bremer, 10.26 am Iraq time. Condi.' The president replied by writing in bold letters, 'Let Freedom Reign.' In retrospect, this exchange is one more example of the false hopes and genuine disappointments that attended the United States' misadventure in Iraq. It also shows just how elusive the concept of sovereignty turns out to be. After all, what could sovereignty possibly mean for Iraq in 2004, a state occupied by foreign troops and without a government that could control most of its divided and contested territory?
For more than a century, scholars have complained about the concept of sovereignty. Some thought it would eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. In 1919, for example, Harold Laski wrote that 'when we examine the historic perspective of sovereignty, it becomes sufficiently obvious that its association with the modern state is no more than the expression of a particular environment which is already passing away.' Eight decades later, Hans Lindahl remarked that 'while not yet completely routed, the concept of sovereignty certainly seems on the retreat. Sovereignty, of course, has not passed away. Some observers remain convinced that it should. Jacques Maritain, for example, insisted in 1950 that political philosophy must eliminate sovereignty both as a word and as a concept.' More recently, in a book appropriately entitled Sovereignty RIP, legal scholar Don Herzog provided what might be called a […]
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DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2026.2648456
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