What is sovereignty

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:54

What is sovereignty? In modern politics and international relations, this definition is extremely common. Diplomats, deputies, all sorts of statesmen, in search of popularity and their flattering with the people, periodically turn to this concept. It comes up even more often when it comes to relations between Russia and neighboring states: Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Kazakhstan and others. In order not to get confused, let's try to understand the details of what sovereignty is.

The essence of the concept

The concept of sovereignty implies the right to supreme political power over anything and the independence of one's actions from any external forces. That is, in this case, what is the sovereignty of the state? This is the political and legal ability of state power to act freely and fully in its own interests in domestic and foreign policy. Political scientists distinguish between two types of state sovereignty. Internal, which expresses the absolute completeness of government power over all state systems, its monopoly over the legislative, executive and judicial powers. External: denotes the independence and equality of state representatives in the international arena, inadmissibilityintervention of other states in foreign affairs. Having answered the first question about what sovereignty is, let's look at some of its varieties. Since this concept can apply both to public education, and specifically to the national organism.

National sovereignty

Today, international law highlights the concept of not only state, but also national and popular sovereignty. The idea of national sovereignty took shape during the nineteenth century, the period of the birth of nations proper in the modern sense. Mass national movements for the independence of peoples who do not have it (in the nineteenth century - Poles, Czechs, Hungarians; at the dawn of the twentieth - Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Irish and others) pushed the world socio-political thought to the conviction that every nation has the right to gain absolute political freedom from other nations and the creation of their own state. Through its own state, any nation realizes its highest aspirations and ambitions in all historical aspects. In modern international law, this essence is expressed by the phrase that every

the nation has the right to self-determination. However, here in international law there is an unresolved conflict to this day, since this principle comes into play with another principle - the inviolability of existing borders.

People's sovereignty

The concept of popular sovereignty was born somewhat earlier than the national one. Itarose along with the ideas of the French Enlightenment about democratic, not monarchical power. Actually, it is precisely the fact that the people are the source and bearer of the supreme power in the state, and the elected government is only its instrument, and it is assumed when we talk about people's sovereignty.