by Amir Taheri
Now we are witnessing attacks on national sovereignty in a number of other ways. In France, a couple of judges managed to change the putative results of the 2017 presidential election by convicting the leading candidate of the right of breaking the law by hiring his wife as a political assistant paid by parliament.
What is clearly a political opinion is redefined as a crime, and the French nation, supposedly sovereign and in charge of its own destiny, shouldn't be allowed to decide who to vote for. Worse still, denying [Marine] Le Pen the right to stand for any elected office for five years came into effect upon her March 2025 conviction, even before her appeal has been decided.
The dictatorship of the judges claimed another victim in 2025, former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was sent to jail on charges that the court itself admitted it couldn't prove but insisted that the intent to commit them was there.
In other words, even the mere intention of committing a crime together with others could send you to jail and make you ineligible for office, even before a final appeal is heard.
The world order shaped after World War II is clearly shaken, both inside many countries and across the globe, with the seemingly endless Ukraine war, a clear case of trying to efface a nation's sovereignty by force.
Redefining national sovereignty won't be enough. We also need to be clear about the consequences of violating it, either by segments within a society or by outside powers.
National sovereignty is a phrase that, before President Donald Trump brought it into question with headline-grabbing shenanigans on Venezuela, Iran and Greenland, among other places, was seldom heard outside political science classrooms.
Now, however, it is at the center of debates about international law, the future world order, and the need for peace and stability. The concept is under attack not only from Trump but also from elements within many societies, including some Western democracies.
But before we examine those threats, let us remember what sovereignty means. It means a power or an authority that has the final word on all human affairs and, in the case of some religions, the fate of the universe as a whole. In the ancient world, that is to say in the early Mesopotamian civilizations, priest-king figures represented sovereignty.
In ancient Greek city-states the voting citizenry, known as demos, to be distinguished from slaves and ethnic minorities, claimed sovereignty.
In the heyday of the Persian and Roman empires, the sovereign was the emperor. In medieval times, that function was transferred to the Pope in Christendom and the Caliph in lands controlled by Islam.
With the Reformation and the declining status of the Pope, Christendom was plunged into sectarian wars that, in one form or another, lasted over 100 years.
Dar al-Islam, too, was also fragmented into sultanates, emirates, khanates and ungoverned badlands on the margins, where sovereignty belonged to whoever had enough force and money to impose his will.
In the 17th century, some in Christendom invented the concept of nation-states and codified it in treaties known as the Peace of Westphalia, under which sovereignty belonged to whoever controlled a distinct territory, known as a nation, regardless of religion, ethnic background or language. People in such structures were subjects rather than citizens of the established order.
Hobbes depicted sovereignty as a leviathan, a monstrous all-powerful machine or animal that has the power of life and death over everyone, but in exchange offers security against the law of the jungle based on the survival of the fittest.
The American and French Revolutions of the 18th century invented the concept of citizenship as the building block of a nation-state in which sovereignty is exercised by an elected state on behalf of the nation.
Over the past two centuries, that model has been adopted by almost all countries across the globe, albeit with great variations. Even where there are no elections, for example, in the People's Republic of China or North Korea, the assumption or pretense is that sovereignty belongs to a nation, however vaguely defined. The United Nations Charter has made that principle or pretense the cornerstone of international law.
Thus, a nation is regarded as sovereign regardless of its location, size, population, religion, race, history and economic or military power. It is in charge of its own destiny, with its demarcated and indivisible territory. This is why, for example, the UN cannot accept Somaliland as a separate entity and still regards it as part of Somalia, a state whose writ, for all intents and purposes, doesn't run beyond Mogadishu.
The same principle is used to deny Kosovo, by all measures a genuine nation, entry into the UN.
To be sure, a nation can share part of its sovereignty with other nations, as many do through membership in the UN, NATO, the Organization of American States, the African Union, the European Union, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Arab League and dozens of other organizations.
In some instances, two states share sovereignty over a territory, as is the case with France and Spain exercising it over Andorra.
Now we are witnessing attacks on national sovereignty in a number of other ways. In France, a couple of judges managed to change the putative results of the 2017 presidential election by convicting the leading candidate of the right of breaking the law by hiring his wife as a political assistant paid by parliament.
A similar case has been launched against another right-wing candidate, Marine Le Pen. She is charged with having used funds from the European Union to pay salaries of "militants" in her National Rally party. Interestingly, this time the case was initiated by the European Parliament and one of four charges leveled is "hostility to the European Union".
In other words, what is clearly a political opinion is redefined as a crime, and the French nation, supposedly sovereign and in charge of its own destiny, shouldn't be allowed to decide who to vote for. Worse still, denying Le Pen the right to stand for any elected office for five years came into effect upon her March 2025 conviction, even before her appeal has been decided.
The dictatorship of the judges claimed another victim in 2025, former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was sent to jail on charges that the court itself admitted it couldn't prove but insisted that the intent to commit them was there.
In other words, even the mere intention of committing a crime together with others could send you to jail and make you ineligible for office, even before a final appeal is heard.
Elsewhere, in many parts of the world, the concept of sovereignty is under attack by the military cliques, as recently witnessed in several African states and Myanmar.
In Iran, that concept is shaken by a coterie of clerics who can decide to whom to allow standing even in tightly engineered elections. A man barred today from standing for election to a minor position may find himself propelled into a much more important position tomorrow.
All the above shows that the very concept of national or people's sovereignty faces the risk of becoming a hollow shell and that could endanger the very rule of law that took mankind more than a millennium to acknowledge as an antidote for the law of the jungle and its modern variation of might is right.
The world order shaped after World War II is clearly shaken, both inside many countries and across the globe, with the seemingly endless Ukraine war, a clear case of trying to efface a nation's sovereignty by force.
Redefining national sovereignty won't be enough. We also need to be clear about the consequences of violating it, either by segments within a society or by outside powers.
Gatestone Institute would like to thank the author for his kind permission to reprint this article in slightly different form from Asharq Al-Awsat. He graciously serves as Chairman of Gatestone Europe.
Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan
in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable
publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987.
Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/22241/national-sovereignty-under-attack
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