Wendy Brown Walled States, Waning Sovereignty

Is there any possibility that a nation-state can exercise its sovereignty but allow its population to
be heterogeneous in terms of their political, religious identities? The congruency assumption
theory states that changing state boundaries is ethically difficult because the peoples political
identity corresponds with the designated territory that a state claims. Can the state allow
globalization to continue to progress, i.e. open borders, acceptance of immigration and
emigration, without a fragmentation in the states sovereignty?

Why is it unfeasible for states to permit a diversified population?

It seems paradoxical that states sovereignty is beginning to decline/wane as the effects of
capitalism and globalization become global superpowers; if more people are becoming displaced
due to deficiency in human progress against globalization, then wouldnt their dependence on the
state magnify and their hyper-anxieties increase, thus requiring a more powerful, stronger
sovereignty?

Is the Westphalian system of sovereignty a fixed construct, in that it is unchanging in a

progressive world due to economic globalization, increasing transnational migration, and
regional integration? Though the idea of closed-borders and territorial occupation is archaic,
why do these modern, technologically advanced states continue to glorify monuments that
represent antiquated anxieties and fears?

How is it that industrial democracies, which are interconnected through militaristic,

environmental, trade, peace-keeping alliances, demand that others recognize their sovereignty
yet refuse to accept that of others?

Chapter 1
Three Paradoxes:
1. Simultaneous opening and blocking of walls/borders.
2. Universalization and democratization combined with an even more potent exclusion and
stratification.
3. The futileness of physical barricades in defending the people from virtual, airborne,
penetrable agents (i.e. suicide bombers, airborne toxins, cyber-attacks etc.)

Purposes of Walls:
1. They target non-state transnational actors.
2. Migration, crime, terrorism, political purposes that walls would serve are rarely state
sponsored nor incited by national interests.
a. Appear as signs of a post-Westphalian world (but only in the sense that we take
Browns interpretation of a Westphalian world as something as aspirational).
 i. Westphalian sovereignty may not have actually been about principle
(sovereignty, non-intervention, the legal equality of states) but rather a
containment and mollification of war, depletion of resources, etc.

Features of Sovereignty:
1. Supremacy
2. Perpetuity over time
3. Decisionism (no boundedness by or submission to law)
4. Absoluteness and completeness (sovereignty cant be partial)
5. Nontransferability (sovereignty cant be conferred without canceling itself)
6. Specified jurisdiction (territoriality).

Causes of the Disintegration of Nation-State Sovereignty:

1. Growing transnational flows of capital, people, ideas, goods, violence, and political and
religious fealty.
2. Neoliberal rationality Displaces legal and political principles (i.e. universal inclusion,
equality, liberty and the rule of law) with market criteria
a. Reduces the importance of a political sovereignty.
3. Growth and international dependence on economic and governance institutions (i.e. IMF
and WTO)
4. Postnational and international assertions of law, rights, and authority (aim to subvert or
supersede state sovereignty).

Brown argues that the decline in power in sovereignties does not imply a complete elimination of
state sovereignty but rather that the principles that the Westphalian treaties signified are losing
value today.
- The Peace of Westphalia contained within or subordinated to nation-states, the political
economy (capitalism) and religiously legitimated violence.
- There is a shift in power and monopolization from the nation-state to unprecedented
factions that in one way or another are claiming a universal authority.

She also states that the newly developed walls are icons of the nation-states erosion, rather than
a resurgent expression of its sovereignty.
- The walls express an inherent weakness in a single states potency against a rapidly
expanding globalization.
o Fighting against these kinds of global forces is a sign of weakness and fear of
change.
- Weakening of the nation-state sovereignty and detachment of sovereignty from the actual
state causes of the rise in wall-building.
Brown says that theres a theatricality and performative interpretation of these walls.
- Present a theological awe/presence of monumentality that serve no purpose to its
functional use (if there even is one).
- But theyre also reassuring to the people (i.e. Trump and the wall along the Mexican
border).
o When a nation is faced with the feeling of lacking horizons, containment and
security, such walls create a reassurance because humans have historically relied
on such securities for social and psychic integration and for political membership.
o However, these walls rarely have any functional use and effectiveness.
Especially in resolving or reducing the conflicts, hostilities or traffic.
- If certain walls serve different purposes (i.e. defense against terrorism vs. religious,
ethnic cleansing and blockading does the just purpose legitimate the walls
existence? or should we observe them all objectively?
Israel Security Fence:
1. Palestinian sovereignty vs. Israeli separatism
2. The Israeli wall in the West Bank serves to spatially divide two intimately
overlapping/entwined populations.
a. Represents separation, occupation, territorial expansion mandated by state-
sponsored and outlaw extensions of settler colonialism.

Differentiating Barriers from Borders:

1. Barriers do not separate the inside of a sovereign, political or legal system from a
foreign outside but act as contingent structure to prevent movement across territory.
2. Most walls aim to function more as blockade systems of postnational, transnational or
subnational forces that do not correspond with the nation-states or their boundaries.
3. Some walls appear as national boundary markers, but are actually driven by postnational
investment in barriers to global immigration.
4. Often nations justify their exclusion and closure to the outside because of hungry masses
of refugees and cultural-religious aggression/hatred of Western values.
a. However, it is often the case where nations cant differentiate the people of two
completely different groups (i.e. Trumps Muslim ban).

Chapter 2
Lockean idea of Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity:
1. He essentially legitimated the European colonization of the Native Americans land
because they A) believed that they could not enjoy political sovereignty, thus should
remain as a class of political savagery; B) the way that Native Americans were using
their land was not seen as a productive, relative to the European production.
 a. Basically an idea of entitlement, that is based on the theory of desert. Because one
believes to have exerted more effort, one is more deserving of a certain
good/benefit. b

Thomas Hobbes
Social Contract Theory:
1. In a world characterized by a state of anarchy, people will only act through self-interest.
2. Hobbes describes the natural state as a war of all against all.
a. Morality is non-existent, and every individual lives in fear.
b. The most abundant fear is the fear of death fueled by the omnipresence of
violence.
c. Living in fear is considered unacceptable, so people give up the use of violence.
This however, entails a variant of the prisoners dilemma: If I give up violence
but my neighbor does not, my safety is not guaranteed.
i. This idea brings forth a correlativity between one persons right and
another persons right: If a person X has a right A, then person Y has a
right A somewhere. **If I have a right not to die, then you have a right not
to kill me.**
3. A ruler is installed to enforce the renunciation of violence by the people.
a. This Leviathan may use force, even against its own population, as long as the
benefit of the population is pursued.
4. In Hobbes view, the states main role is to maintain and impose law and order, and to
prevent the situation of war of all against all.

Rousseau
Social Contract Theory: The individual desire for security, or safety, demands fulfillment
through a collective agreement. This collective agreement transforms the human realm from the
natural, primordial state into an organized society.
1. His central doctrine is that a state can legitimate only if its guided by the general will
of its members.
2. Believes that individual rights are derived from the social order
a. The social order and obedience of the societys members is achieved through an
artificial entity.
3. Rousseau seeks a reconciliation of the freedom of the individual with the authority of the
state. This reconciliation is necessary because human society has evolved to a point
where individuals can no longer supply their needs through their own unaided efforts, but
rather must depend on the co-operation of others DOL and a system of specialization.
4. Rousseau argues that this state would, in effect, be a class state, guided by the common
interest of the rich and propertied and imposing subordination on the poor and weak.
a. The property-less consent to such an establishment because their immediate fear
of a Hobbesian state of war leads them to fail to attend to the ways in which the
new state will systematically disadvantage them.
b. Thus, the sovereign gains obedience from his subjects through a threat of
punishment/evil.
5. Rousseau argues that the law cannot be general in application and universal in scope.
a. The law cant name particular individuals and it must apply to everyone within
the state must be impartial.
6. Rousseau believes that this condition will lead citizens, though guided by a consideration
of what is in their own private interest, to favor laws that both secure the common interest
impartially and that are not burdensome and intrusive.
a. First, individuals all have private wills corresponding to their own selfish interests
as natural individuals;
b. Second, each individual, insofar as he or she identifies with the collective as a
whole and assumes the identity of citizen, wills the general will of that collective
as his or her own, setting aside selfish interest in favor of a set of laws that allow
all to coexist under conditions of equal freedom;
c. Third, a person can identify with the corporate will of a subset of the populace as
a whole.
7. Rousseau describes the general will as both a property of the collective and a result of
its deliberations, and a property of the individual, given that he or she identifies as a
member of the collective.
a. Not about advancing the interests of one individual but for all.
8. In a well-ordered society (John Stuart Mill), there is no tension between private and
general will
a. Individuals accept that both justice and their individual self-interest require their
submission to a law which safeguards their freedom by protecting them from the
private violence and personal domination that would otherwise hold sway.
9. Just War + Slavery:
a. War can only exist between one state and another, not a state against a private
individual because there is no relationship between entities of disparate natures
(21-22).
i. The ruler/sovereign must respect the rights [of others] upon which his
own rights are founded (22).
ii. War doesnt grant a right that is unnecessary to its purpose/end-state, but
rather based on reason.
b. There is no right of slavery because slavery and right, by definition, are
contradictory mutually exclusive.
10. Alienation of the self Gives oneself to the entire community/all, thus each person
gives himself to no one.
a. The condition is the same for all, therefore no one has an interest in making it
burdensome for others (24).
11. What is freedom for Rousseau?
a. Rousseau regards the capacity for choice, and therefore the ability to act against
instinct and inclination, as one of the features that distinguishes the human race
from animal species and makes truly moral action possible.
i. Similar to Aristotles concept that men are political animals, in that
humans are able to form communities and discuss ideas about a polity.
b. Rousseau calls for a considerably more active role for the population. The
political process shouldnt be dominated by the state, but should be actively
participated in by the population.
i. If everybody expresses their desire, the will of the people can be
determined and thus the course of policy can be ensued.
c. People lost their natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything through the
social contract, but they gain civil liberty and the proprietary ownership of his
property.
i. Natural Liberty limited solely by the force of the individual involved
ii. Civil Liberty limited by the general will.
iii. Possession The effect of force or the right of the first occupant.
iv. Proprietary ownership based solely on a positive title.
12. Sovereign formed when free + equal persons congregate and agree to submit
themselves as a single body
a. For the purpose of securing each others interests and rights.
i. Only the general will can influence the state, for the purpose that it was
instituted the common good.
ii. Private will tends towards preferences.
iii. General will tends towards equality.
b. Sovereignty is indivisible and inalienable.
i. B/c sovereignty is the exercise of the general will, and it cant represent
anything else but itself.
c. Mentions that often empires have an advantage when the monarch is in power b/c
there were no rebellions, wars, or conspirators to fear (p. 19).
i. Hobbes also says that of the three forms of sovereignties possible
(Monarchy, Aristocracy, Democracy) the Monarchy was better in
governance because an assembly of multiple peoples (as in democracies
and aristocracies) could be prone to dissent and potentially a civil war.
ii. That would undermine the sovereignty.
d. The sovereign could only rule if he transforms force into right and obedience
into duty (p. 19, Bk 1. Ch. III).
i. However, is this merely a manipulation of rhetoric and an exploitation of
individuals freedoms for the self-interest of the sovereign? Or is this very
conception merely a product of contemporary thought that views
sovereigns as a negative thing.
ii. Our duty and interest equally obligate both parties to help each other and
advance each others positions (26).
e. Rousseau believes force is a physical power that couldnt produce morality.
i. Force doesnt engender rights.
f. There must be reciprocity between the public and private individuals.
g. A sovereign cant have obligations to another being/higher authority.