Content area
Full Text
Recently, some analysts have accused the United Nations of eroding the sovereignty of its members. However, these critics often ignore the fact that the creation of the United Nations was itself one incident in the process of reinterpreting sovereignty which has gone on for centuries. Before 1945, sovereignty was often reinterpreted to fit the changing norms and institutions. As a principle which legitimises political control and helps enhance international security. sovereignty often reflects the prevailing notions of international order. While the Security Council has tried to redefine sovereignty after the cold war, the UN Charter remains a constraint on such reinterpretation. If the Charter is not amended to reflect post-cold war changes, the international society might be split between supporters of the Charter principles of sovereignty and those who seek change.
The concept of state sovereignty has received a lot of attention from scholars, journalists, political leaders, bureaucrats, international civil servants, and NGO workers in the past few years, but their divergent, and sometimes contradictory, interpretations have made it much harder to define. For example, there are disagreements about the history, nature, practice and future of state sovereignty. At the core of the argument about the future of state sovereignty are the roles of international organisations, rapid developments in technology, globalisation, critical social movements, human rights, democratisation, and changes in civil society. As these factors have become more prominent, they have raised doubts about the continuing legitimacy of states, and especially the recognition of the centrality of states in political activity at the local, national, regional and global levels.
Moreover, the growing perception that state sovereignty is increasingly being eroded or constrained by the United Nations and other international organisations, has ruffled political leaders in both developed and developing countries.1 For example, the political elite in many developing countries often take exception to any effort by the United Nations to undertake military operations and other actions in any country without the permission of the respective country's government. In this connection, UN interventions in Haiti and Somalia in the early 1990s provoked a number of questions about the relationship between state sovereignty and international security in the post-cold war era. At another level, China has repeatedly described the UN Human Rights Commission's complaints about its...