IDEOLOGY AND POLITICS JOURNAL © 2021 Foundation for Good Politics ISSN 2227-6068
THE SOVEREIGNTIST TURN: SOVEREIGNTY AS A CONTESTED CONCEPT AGAIN Mikhail Minakov Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars OCRid: 0000-0002-0619-7321 https://doi.org/10.36169/2227-6068.2021.01.00005
Abstract. This paper is based on an analysis of the concept of sovereignty as promoted by contemporary sovereigntists. I argue that although the sovereigntists vary greatly from country to country, they are united around a specific interpretation of the concept of sovereignty. Based on an analysis of Trumpism and Putinism, the sovereigntist ideologies of the core old democracy and the new autocracy, I argue that the sovereigntists define sovereignty as the supremacy of the people, the imagined majority; deny the sovereignty of the human person; and promote distrust of international organizations and treaties that support cosmopolitan norms of justice. I propose further that Trumpism and Putinism represent two cases of the sovereigntist turn in different political contexts; however, Putinism is a more radical ideological position and has had a deeper impact on the political and constitutional systems of Russia than Trumpism has had on those systems in the United States.
Key words: sovereignty, sovereigntism, cosmopolitanism, social imagination, ideology, Trumpism, Putinism, populism In 2021, in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated socioeconomic crisis, the existing political contradictions sharpened in global, regional, national, and subnational contexts. The sources of these contradictions, however, are predominantly to be found in the prepandemic era: in the exodus of America from international politics and its abrupt "return" in 2021, in a certain declared "Westlessness", in the manifest disappearance of common, West-supported rules, in the growing role of non-Western states and economies in shaping the global agenda, and in the many other changes that our "full world" lived through in the immediate past decade.1 One of several core contradictions that have escalated in 2020 is the sharpened contest for the understanding of sovereignty. On the one hand, sovereignty is interpreted as state sovereignty, an underlying legal and political principle guiding processes inside Here I refer to several concepts that critically differentiate our era from the previous periods of modernity. "Westlessness" is a process whereby the world “is becoming less Western” and the West itself is “getting less Western, less rule-based, less value-oriented” and may become less Western, too (see: Westlessness 2020: 6; Beyond Westlessness 2021). "Full world" denotes the relatively recent situation in which humanity has lived since the mid-20th century where no more "empty space" is available for growth and every action in every national sector influences other sectors in other nations (see: Weizsäcker & Wijkman 2018: 9ff). Both concepts describe the profound change in the global cultural and political situation in which "sovereignty" becomes a freshly contested concept, with potentially far-reaching consequences for the international order. 1
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