Sovereign state

• 1. Introduction

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  A sovereign state is one of the most contested ideas in all of political thought, and yet it shapes almost every border on the map. Lassa Oppenheim, one of the leading international lawyers of his era, put it plainly: "There exists perhaps no conception the meaning of which is more controversial than that of sovereignty." From the moment the idea entered political science, he wrote, it "has never had a meaning which was universally agreed upon." H. V. Evatt of the High Court of Australia went further still, arguing that sovereignty "is neither a question of fact, nor a question of law, but a question that does not arise at all."

  Today the international community includes more than 200 sovereign states, most of them represented in the United Nations. Yet a state can be recognized by one country and ignored by another. It can govern a territory de facto while remaining a legal non-entity in the eyes of the world. Some states exist only on paper. Others govern millions without a single seat at the table of international law. How did the world arrive at this system? And what does it actually mean for a state to be sovereign? The answers wind through a 1648 peace treaty, a 19th-century congress in Vienna, an unrecognized republic in northern Cyprus, and a philosophical category that philosophers are only beginning to name.

• 2. The Westphalian Blueprint

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  The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is the founding moment of the modern state system. That treaty established what scholars call Westphalian sovereignty: the principle that a nation-state's authority rests on its territory and that outside powers have no legitimate role in its domestic affairs. Bryan Turner described it as having "made a more or less clear separation between religion and state" and recognized the right of princes to determine the religious affiliation of their kingdoms under the principle of cuius regio eius religio, meaning the ruler sets the religion of the realm.

  Before that settlement, and for two more centuries afterward, the concept of sovereignty carried a sharp edge of exclusion. Up until the 19th century, a radicalized notion of a "standard of civilization" was routinely used to judge whole peoples as "uncivilized." Those deemed to fall short were said to possess sovereignty of an inferior character, or none at all. It was not merely a rhetorical slight. It shaped which entities were granted standing in international law and which were not.

  Jean Bodin first articulated the idea that the powers of the state are suprema potestas, supreme power within territorial boundaries. On that foundation, the legal doctrine grew that foreign sovereigns enjoyed absolute immunity from prosecution in domestic courts. Chief Justice John Marshall of the United States Supreme Court gave that doctrine memorable expression in The Schooner Exchange v. M'Faddon, writing that "perfect equality and absolute independence of sovereigns" produces a class of cases in which "every sovereign is understood to waive the exercise of a part of that complete exclusive territorial jurisdiction." That absolute immunity no longer holds universally. Australia, Canada, Singapore, South Africa, Pakistan, and the United States have all introduced restrictive immunity by statute, limiting protection to public acts and excluding private or commercial conduct.

• 3. Two Theories of Statehood

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  By the 19th century, legal scholars had organized their disagreements into two competing frameworks. The constitutive theory holds that a state becomes a person under international law if, and only if, at least one other sovereign state recognizes it as such. Under that view, a new state could not automatically join the international community or be bound by international law. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna's Final Act recognized only 39 sovereign states in the European diplomatic system, making the point concrete: recognition by the great powers was the gateway.

  L. F. L. Oppenheim stated the constitutive position in 1912 with precision: "International Law does not say that a State is not in existence as long as it is not recognised, but it takes no notice of it before its recognition. Through recognition only and exclusively a State becomes an International Person and a subject of International Law." Hersch Lauterpacht, one of the theory's main proponents, pushed back against its coldness. He argued that recognition is not a mere formality but an active interpretation of facts, and that once granted it cannot be arbitrarily revoked based on another state's internal politics.

  The declarative theory, by contrast, holds that statehood flows from meeting four criteria: a defined territory, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. Under this view, recognition merely acknowledges a status that already exists by right. The declarative model was codified in the 1933 Montevideo Convention, whose Article 3 declares that political statehood is independent of recognition by other states. L.C. Green cited the Allied recognition of the unborn Polish and Czechoslovak states during World War I as evidence that practice has never been purely declarative either, since those entities were recognized before they possessed territory or government in any conventional sense.

• 4. Recognition in Practice

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  Rhodesia and Northern Cyprus stand as the clearest modern tests of what happens when the international community withholds recognition. When a white minority in Rhodesia seized power and attempted to form a state modeled on Apartheid South Africa, the United Nations Security Council described the result as the creation of an "illegal racist minority regime." Recognition was almost universally withheld; only South Africa extended it.

  The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, known as the TRNC, presents a different and longer-running case. Only Turkey has recognized it. Yet the courts have been reluctant to treat the TRNC as a legal void. On the 2nd of July 2013, the European Court of Human Rights decided that "notwithstanding the lack of international recognition of the regime in the northern area, a de facto recognition of its acts may be rendered necessary for practical purposes." On the 9th of October 2014, a US Federal Court described the TRNC as purportedly operating "as a democratic republic with a president, prime minister, legislature and judiciary." On the 3rd of February 2017, the United Kingdom's High Court stated there was no duty in UK law upon the government to refrain from recognizing Northern Cyprus, and noted that the United Nations itself works with Northern Cyprus law enforcement agencies.

  Turkish Cypriots have gained observer status in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and Northern Cyprus holds observer membership in organizations including the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the Economic Cooperation Organization, and the Organization of Turkic States. Kosovo and Somaliland similarly sit in the gap where recognition and non-recognition by other states can override what the declarative theory criteria might otherwise suggest. The gap between legal status and practical reality turns out to be a permanent feature of the system, not an exception to it.

• 5. De Facto, De Jure, and the Margins

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  Most sovereign states are both de jure and de facto: they exist in law and in practice at once. But the two can come apart. During the Second World War, governments-in-exile of occupied states continued to enjoy diplomatic relations with the Allies even though Axis powers held their actual territory. Those governments were de jure authorities over lands they could not touch.

  The mirror image is the de facto state: an entity that controls territory and a population but lacks international recognition. Somaliland is the most cited contemporary example. Laurence Broers, writing for EurasiaNet in early 2024, described de facto states as "a product of the very system that excludes the possibility of their existence: the post-Second World War and post-colonial system of sovereign and equal states covering every centimeter of the globe." In Alexander Iskandaryan's phrase, such entities are "temporary technical errors within the system of international law." The Soviet and Yugoslav collapses generated several of them, including Abkhazia, Transdniester, South Ossetia, and the NKR, which survived for decades in the margins of international relations despite non-recognition.

  A further category, the semi-sovereign state, complicates the picture further. Sovereignty is usually conceived as a binary: present or absent. Yet political scientist Peter Katzenstein applied the term semi-sovereign to West Germany in his 1987 book Policy and Politics in West Germany: The Growth of a Semi-sovereign State. West Germany's sovereignty was constrained internally by its federal system and the role of civil society, and externally by membership in the European Community and reliance on its alliance with the United States and NATO for national security. Belarus, in its relationship with Russia, has more recently been proposed as a contemporary example of the same condition.

• 6. What a State Actually Is

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  Robert Heath Robinson of the University of Buffalo makes a point that cuts against intuition: states are non-physical juridical entities, not organizations of any kind. Because they have no physical form, their extinction cannot be caused by physical force alone. A state can outlast a lost war, an occupation, or the destruction of its government, as the governments-in-exile of World War II demonstrated.

  Philosophers have reached for a new category to describe what states are. They do not fit the classical Platonist duality of concrete and abstract objects. Concrete objects have a position in time and space; states do not, though their territories do. Abstract objects have a position in neither time nor space; but states can be created at a specific moment in time and can later become extinct. That places them in a third category, the quasi-abstract, which has attracted philosophical attention in the field known as Documentality, an ontological theory concerned with the role of documents in understanding social reality. Quasi-abstract objects like states can be brought into being through document acts and can be bound or surrendered through documents such as treaties.

  Georg Hegel, who lived from 1770 to 1831, proposed a different answer entirely. For Hegel, the state was a spiritual or mystical entity with its own being, distinct from the individuals who compose it. His definition was that the state is "the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth." That view never achieved consensus, but it shaped an entire tradition of German idealist political thought. Scholars in international relations remain divided between realists, who see the world as composed only of states and interstate relations, and pluralists, who see the state as merely one actor among many in a field of competing forces.

• 7. A Changing Count

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  Since the end of World War II, the number of sovereign states in the international system has surged. Harvard economist Alberto Alesina and Tufts economist Enrico Spolaore, writing in their book Size of Nations, argue that this increase can partly be attributed to a more peaceful world, greater free trade and international economic integration, democratization, and the presence of international organizations that coordinate economic and political policies.

  Research also points to a structural incentive: the existence of international and regional organizations, wider access to economic aid, and greater acceptance of the norm of self-determination have all raised the appeal of secession for political units that might previously have lacked the means or the legitimacy to attempt it.

  Before the end of the 19th century, large stretches of the globe were either unclaimed, uninhabited, or home to nomadic peoples not organized into states. Today that is almost entirely gone. Even so, large remote areas like the Amazon's tropical forests remain either uninhabited or home to indigenous peoples, some of whom are still not in regular contact with outside societies. And in some modern states, de facto control is either contested or not exercised over the entire national territory. The clean lines on the map conceal a reality that Alesina and Spolaore's work on the size of nations continues to probe.