Shinoda resists tracing sovereignty back to the Peace of Westphalia, implying correctly that the peace had much less to do with conventional notions of sovereignty than most students of international law and international relations have realized. The Peace of Westphalia validated the idea that international relations ought to be guided by considerations of balance of power and reason of state rather than some notion of a unified Christendom, but it did not legitimate state autonomy: the Holy Roman emperor accepted some elements of religious toleration within the empire. The peace reaffirmed but did not grant the right of the principalities of the empire to make treaties, which was a right that they already had according to the traditional rules of the empire and a right that they frequently exercised.

Shinoda argues that the modern debate about sovereignty began in the eighteenth century—especially with the French Revolution and the theorists associated with it. In terms of national sovereignty the state as a kind of organic entity is the ultimate expression of authority and receptacle of power. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the most important theorist of the French Revolution, the state is a manifestation of the general will. There is no legitimate authority beyond the general will, for the appropriate state is a reflection of it.

In discussing the struggle between national and constitutional sovereignty in a series of chronologically ordered chapters, Shinoda identifies Germany as the focal point of ideas about national sovereignty in the nineteenth century. The idea of sovereignty as an unconstrained expression of the national will is reflected in the work of conservative nineteenth-century German thinkers. For them, sovereignty is distinct from the sovereign; it surpasses the individual ruler regardless of who that ruler might be. Sovereignty depends on power since without it the will of the state could be constrained.

The doctrine of national sovereignty, of unconstrained power and authority, is not limited to Germany. In the United States, the concept of national sovereignty was more widely embraced after the Civil War, which weakened the autonomy of the individual American states. In Great Britain, the writings of John Austin during the first part of the nineteenth century endorse the idea that sovereignty must be thought of as the one final unconstrained source of law and authority. The nationalism and imperialism of the last half of that century embodied the philosophical principles of national as opposed to constitutional sovereignty. The nation actualized in the state was the ultimate expression of political will. Nineteenth-century imperialism, which required the European states to claim the right to rule over wide swaths of the earth’s territory, required a doctrine drawn from national rather than constitutional sovereignty. The state was the final authority—the final arbiter over its own actions, including occupying foreign lands and governing alien populations.

In the twentieth century, the concept of national rather than constitutional authority was most obviously manifest in the ideology of Nazi Germany. But the embrace of national sovereignty was hardly limited to autocratic regimes. In the United States, the Cold War seemed to underline the notion that there could be no constraint on the state. The most important expositor of the concept of national sovereignty in the United States, Shinoda points out, was Hans Morgenthau, a German-born thinker who was more than familiar with conservative German theorists like Carl Schmitt. After World War II, realism became the dominant theoretical approach to the study of international relations in the United States. Weaker Third World states also have embraced some aspects of the doctrine of national sovereignty, insisting, for instance, on their right to decide at the very least their own domestic institutions.

The idea of national sovereignty as the ultimate seat of power and authority is the easiest way to understand the concept, or at least the way that is most closely associated with the work of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, who created the modern idea of sovereignty. Although Bodin was more respectful of natural law and tradition than many casual observers have realized, both he and Hobbes were fundamentally concerned with legitimating the idea that there was only one final source of authority. As they understood it, sovereignty was the only path to political order in a world that was rent by divisive and bloody internecine religious struggles. Sovereignty understood as national sovereignty fits smoothly with traditional ideas, but it is not, as Shinoda underlines in his book, the only way that it has been understood as a concept.

Shinoda contrasts constitutional sovereignty with national sovereignty. Constitutional sovereignty is the idea that power and especially political authority are in some way limited. The source of these limitations can be located in either the state or the international system. John Locke plays the same role for constitutional sovereignty that Rousseau plays for the idea of national sovereignty. Locke sees both the people and the legislature as sharing power; there is no single source of authority. The Founding Fathers of the United States embraced constitutional but not national sovereignty. Control and power were divided between the states and the federal government, although America’s founders still insisted on autonomy in the international system.

At the international level, the notion of constitutional sovereignty came later, at the beginning of the twentieth century in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. These efforts to limit and regulate the conduct of war implied that individual states could not be a law unto themselves. There were higher principles to which they were obliged. The League of Nations raised more fundamentally the idea that sovereignty could be derogated to an international authority. Both the Hague Conventions and the League were obviously products of state choice. But the League created an elaborate international bureaucracy. Smaller states could hardly refuse to join, even if they were anxious about some of the organization’s specific arrangements.

In the United States, Quincy Wright, the best-known international relations scholar of the interwar period, challenged the notion that sovereignty was absolute, even at the international level. He argued that there could be degrees of sovereignty. The mandate system of the League, for instance, had worked effectively, although it was not clear whether sovereignty and final authority resided with the League, the mandatory power, or the mandated community. Despite various international agreements and some elegant theoretical expositions regarding constitutional sovereignty, the rise of Nazi Germany, World War II, and the Cold War eclipsed especially the idea of international limitations on the state.

By the latter part of the twentieth century, the concept of constitutional sovereignty as the idea that power and authority are limited became more prominent. In academic writing, the English School argued that political entities, including sovereign states, were always embodied in some larger institutional structure. The concept of the sovereign state was a product of a wider set of shared ideas that had emerged out of Western Christendom and then spread to the rest of the world. At the level of national law, the doctrine of sovereign immunity—a reflection of the notion of national sovereignty—came under increasing attack. In the 1970s, court decisions in the United States and subsequent legislation distinguished between acts of state that were protected by sovereign immunity and commercial acts by foreign governments that were not. Shinoda points to human rights as the most prominent contemporary expression of constitutional sovereignty. States cannot do what they want; they are constrained by globally legitimated practices. The idea of human rights is not a challenge to the idea of sovereignty, but rather it is a reflection of a long line of analysis that has always seen the state as constrained.

Re-Examining Sovereignty provides a road map for understanding the concept of sovereignty. Unlike many recent works that attempt to explicate or define sovereignty, the book focuses helpfully on the way the term has actually been developed and used by thinkers and policymakers. The contrast between constrained or constitutional sovereignty and unconstrained or national sovereignty is serviceable—although it would have been more illuminating if Shinoda had more clearly distinguished between domestic and international constraints on power and authority.

The idealized form of sovereignty envisioned by Bodin and Hobbes was fundamentally a domestic concept. In fact, at the international level, Bodin grounded his discussion in natural law and argued that sovereigns were bound by contracts or treaties that they signed with each other. Rousseau also was more concerned with internal than external issues; his idealized polity was a self-sufficient republic isolated from the rest of the world. None of these ideas of an idealized organic internal sovereignty has ever been realized in practice. It might be possible to locate the source of final power in Stalin’s Russia or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but such polities are hardly guarantors of the political order and virtue to which someone like Rousseau aspired. In most polities, domestic sovereignty and authority have always been in one way or another divided. In some of the most successful polities, such as the United States, this was the intention from the outset. At the domestic level, at least in the contemporary world, there is no real debate between unconstrained and constrained sovereignty.

At the international level, the notion of complete autonomy and freedom from external constraints, which Shinoda terms national sovereignty, has always been challenged. It has been challenged by alternative principles: human rights in the contemporary world, minority rights in the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries, and religious toleration in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.

Sovereign lending also has been accompanied by arrangements that either explicitly or implicitly deny the national sovereignty or autonomy of the borrowing states. The conditionality agreements of international financial institutions in the last half of the twentieth century have analogues in the practices of major European lenders in the nineteenth century in Egypt and in the Ottoman Empire and Serbia, where foreign actors secured control over domestic financial affairs after defaults.

After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union divided up Europe and supported or imposed their own preferences for domestic political structures. External actors, powerful states, have claimed persistently the right to intervene in the domestic order of weaker polities to defend either international stability or humanitarian principles. In the international environment, the struggle between constitutional and national sovereignty, between constrained and unconstrained authority, is long standing and perhaps inevitable. Re-Examining Sovereignty makes it easier for the reader to understand the historical antecedents of these contemporary issues.