Sovereignty Is Dead

Making Power Uncomfortable With Itself

An article in Social Europe titled “Sovereignism: Europe’s Most Dangerous Political Plague” by political scientist Jan Zielonka warns that “national leaders cling to sovereignty games that leave citizens vulnerable and searching for scapegoats” and argues that sovereignism prevents Europe from coping effectively with major problems. The piece goes so far as to invoke figures such as Polish prime minister Donald Tusk or German chancellor Friedrich Merz as examples within a supposedly pathological trend. The tone is diagnostic, almost epidemiological: sovereignism is described less as a political doctrine than as a contagion, a relapse, a regression from enlightened interdependence into primitive political instincts. One can almost hear the clinical verdict: the patient has fallen ill with sovereignty.

And yet the entire dispute has something faintly theatrical about it, like a trial being conducted long after the accused has already died. The curious thing about the contemporary polemic against sovereignism is not its hostility but its timing. Sovereignism is attacked everywhere precisely when it has ceased to exist as a coherent political project. The debate rages as if the doctrine were storming the gates, when in reality it has already dissolved into the structures of the system it supposedly threatens. The result is a strange spectacle: intellectuals denouncing a phantom, politicians defending a banner that no longer commands an army, institutions mobilizing against a force that has already been metabolized into their own operating logic.

To understand why this is happening, one has to begin with a simple but unsettling proposition: sovereignty has not been defeated; it has been displaced. It no longer lives where both its critics and its champions keep looking for it. It is not lodged primarily in parliaments, electorates, or national governments. Nor does it reside in the supranational bureaucracies that claim to transcend them. Sovereignty today is diffused across infrastructures, algorithms, supply chains, security architectures, and financial systems whose scale and speed exceed the grasp of traditional political forms. What died was not sovereignty itself, but the belief that it could be possessed, wielded, or restored by a single identifiable actor called “the state.”

The sovereignist movements of the past decade emerged from a genuine perception of loss. Citizens across democracies sensed that decisions shaping their lives were being made elsewhere, by actors they could not name, influence, or remove. Globalization had redistributed authority into transnational markets, legal regimes, and institutional networks that diluted visible responsibility. Sovereignism named this experience and gave it political language. It insisted that something essential had slipped away. On that point it was not wrong. What it misunderstood was where that something had gone.

The classical doctrine of popular sovereignty rested on assumptions that once seemed natural but now appear almost quaint. It assumed that political communities were bounded enough to govern themselves, that power moved slowly enough to be deliberated, and that the most important decisions were intelligible to ordinary citizens. In such a world, sovereignty could plausibly be imagined as a possession of the people, delegated to representatives, exercised through institutions, and periodically reclaimed through elections. Even when imperfect, the model was credible because the scale of action roughly matched the scale of comprehension.

That world no longer exists. Power now travels at digital velocity, operates across jurisdictions, and depends on technical expertise inaccessible to most citizens. Financial flows shift in milliseconds, supply chains stretch across continents, and strategic decisions often require secrecy incompatible with mass participation. Under these conditions, the literal idea that “the people rule” becomes structurally implausible. Not normatively wrong, but operationally impossible. Popular sovereignty, once a partially functioning arrangement, has become primarily a regulative ideal: a standard invoked to judge power rather than a mechanism capable of directing it.

This transformation explains the peculiar texture of contemporary politics. Public life is louder than ever, yet strangely ineffectual. Elections occur with ritual regularity, protests erupt with theatrical intensity, debates rage across media ecosystems, and still the trajectory of policy remains stubbornly continuous. Citizens speak, but systems absorb and redirect their voices. Legitimacy is contested without being redistributed. Noise increases while leverage declines. What persists is not sovereignty as command but sovereignty as critique, a force that can delegitimize authority yet struggles to reorganize it.

The sovereignist response to this condition was to demand the return of sovereignty to the nation-state. If power had escaped into global networks, the solution seemed obvious: reclaim it, repatriate it, reassert it. Yet this diagnosis mistook the nature of the transformation. Sovereignty had not simply migrated upward to supranational institutions; it had also shifted sideways into corporate, financial, and technological systems that no state can fully command. Pulling authority back from Brussels or Washington does not restore it to citizens if it simultaneously concentrates it within executives, security agencies, or insulated technocratic bodies. In practice, many sovereignist victories strengthened states while weakening the sovereign capacity of the people those states purported to represent.

This paradox lies at the heart of the sovereignist era. The more states seek autonomy in a fragmented world, the more they centralize decision-making internally. External competition justifies internal consolidation. Geopolitical rivalry demands strategic coordination. Economic insecurity requires rapid intervention. Security threats legitimize secrecy. Under such conditions, sovereignty does not flow downward to citizens; it coagulates upward into narrower circles of authority. The rhetoric of empowerment accompanies the reality of insulation.

Seen from this angle, the denunciation of sovereignism as a disease misses the point. It is not an aberration afflicting an otherwise healthy order. It is a symptom of structural change. Calling it pathological does not cure it, just as mocking fever does not eliminate infection. The impulse toward sovereignism arises from real dislocations produced by global integration, technological acceleration, and institutional opacity. What critics interpret as irrational nostalgia is often an intuitive recognition that control has slipped beyond democratic reach.

Yet the defenders of sovereignism are equally mistaken when they present it as a solution. They promise restoration where only transformation is possible. They speak as if sovereignty were an object that could be retrieved from abroad and handed back intact to the nation. In reality, the conditions that once made such restoration conceivable have vanished. Sovereignty cannot simply be brought home because the world in which it once resided no longer exists. The stage has changed, the actors have multiplied, and the script has dissolved into improvisation.

This is why the fiercest battles over sovereignism often feel strangely disconnected from outcomes. Intellectuals attack it as a looming menace while policymakers quietly implement many of its premises. Governments adopt industrial strategies, restrict strategic exports, subsidize domestic sectors, and fortify borders even as commentators warn against nationalist relapse. The doctrine is denounced in theory and enacted in practice. The quarrel persists not because sovereignism is advancing, but because it has already seeped into the background assumptions of governance. It no longer needs to win arguments; it has become the terrain on which arguments occur.

The irony is there! Critics portray sovereignism as a contagious ideology threatening to infect politics, while in fact it has already been domesticated, sanitized, and institutionalized. The emergency rhetoric survives, but the insurgency has faded. What remains is a system that behaves in sovereignist ways without needing sovereignist movements. States pursue autonomy, resilience, and strategic control not because populists demand it, but because systemic pressures require it. The doctrine that once sounded radical has become administrative routine.

One might say that sovereignism died of success. It achieved its underlying aim, not by conquering institutions but by reshaping their assumptions. The language of strategic autonomy, supply security, technological independence, and national resilience now circulates through policy documents and ministerial speeches with bureaucratic calm. What was once a rallying cry has become a line item. The insurgent vocabulary of yesterday is the managerial jargon of today.

This does not mean states are suddenly omnipotent. On the contrary, they remain constrained by forces they cannot fully control. But it does mean that the central drama of politics has shifted. The decisive struggle is no longer between sovereignists and globalists, or between nationalists and federalists. It is between different configurations of power within systems that all accept the necessity of strategic state capacity. The real question is not whether sovereignty should exist, but who exercises it, under what constraints, and for whose benefit.

Here the debate returns to the problem of popular sovereignty. Even in its historical prime, popular sovereignty was never a literal description of how power operated. It functioned as a normative constraint, a principle requiring rulers to justify their authority in the name of the people. Its strength lay precisely in its incompleteness. Because it could never be fully realized, it could always be invoked to challenge existing arrangements. It disciplined power by forcing it to claim legitimacy.

Today that disciplining function persists, but its institutional supports have weakened. Parties no longer aggregate interests as effectively as they once did. Mass media no longer provide common informational frameworks. Labor unions, civic associations, and other mediating structures have eroded. Without these transmission belts, popular sovereignty struggles to translate discontent into durable leverage. It destabilizes legitimacy without reorganizing authority. The result is a politics of permanent agitation without structural transformation.

Yet even in this attenuated form, the ideal matters. Regulative ideals shape behavior not by being fulfilled but by being expected. Power that must justify itself remains constrained by the need to persuade. Even regimes with little democratic substance feel compelled to stage elections, invoke public will, or claim national consent. This performative obedience to the principle of popular sovereignty creates pressure points, vulnerabilities, and moments of accountability. Authority that must speak in the name of the people is less free than authority that speaks only in its own.

The real danger arises when popular sovereignty is treated not as a constraint on power but as its embodiment. When leaders claim to personify “the people,” sovereignty flips from a limit into a license. It ceases to discipline authority and begins to sanctify it. This is the populist trap: sovereignty becomes a rhetorical shield behind which executives consolidate discretion. The language of popular rule masks the practice of concentrated rule.

In this sense, sovereignism did not die because its critics defeated it. It died because its core promise proved structurally unworkable. The idea that sovereignty could be restored to a unified national people presupposed conditions that no longer obtain. Political communities are no longer neatly bounded, decisions no longer move at human speed, and governance no longer operates within a single institutional layer. Sovereignty has become multi-level, fragmented, and functionally specialized. No single actor, whether state or citizenry, can plausibly claim to possess it whole.

What persists is not sovereignism but a post-sovereignist condition in which sovereignty is everywhere invoked and nowhere fully located. States speak the language of autonomy while depending on interdependence. Citizens are told they rule while experiencing limited influence. Institutions proclaim legitimacy while fearing contestation. The concept survives as a vocabulary of justification, not as a stable architecture of rule.

From this perspective, the continuing polemics against sovereignism resemble arguments about the habits of a ghost. Critics warn that it will corrode democracy, undermine cooperation, and empower demagogues. Defenders insist it will restore dignity, control, and self-determination. Both sides assume that sovereignism is an active force struggling for dominance. In reality it has already passed into history, leaving behind only its traces: policies, reflexes, and anxieties embedded in the machinery of governance.

The insistence on fighting it may even be comforting. A visible enemy simplifies politics. If sovereignism is a plague, then federalization appears as a cure, NGOs as antibodies, technocratic integration as therapy. The narrative is neat, moralized, reassuring. But it is also childish, because it imagines politics as a contest between diseases and remedies rather than as an evolving ecology of power. One can almost predict the next article in this genre, warning that federalism itself is a pathology and that only corporate coordination can save society. The labels change, the metaphors persist, and the underlying transformations continue regardless.

What makes these debates futile is not that the participants are insincere, but that they are arguing about a stage of history already past. Sovereignism belonged to the transitional moment when globalization’s promises had faded but its structures remained intact. It was the language of a world trying to reverse course without knowing how. Now the course has already changed. Supply chains are being reorganized, industrial policies revived, strategic sectors protected, and geopolitical competition normalized. The system has internalized the lesson sovereignists once shouted from the margins. The shouting is no longer necessary.

If sovereignty has a future, it will not resemble the doctrines that once claimed its name. It will not be a possession, a fortress, or a banner. It will be a contested field, a set of constraints, a shifting balance between actors who never fully control it. Citizens will not wield it directly, but they may still shape the rules under which it is exercised. States will not monopolize it, but they will remain crucial arenas where it is negotiated. The concept will survive, stripped of its certainties and illusions, as a reminder that power must always answer to something beyond itself.

In that sense, sovereignty is dead only if one expects it to live as it once did. The corpse lies in the mausoleum of political myths, alongside the belief that any single institution can embody the will of a people in a world of planetary systems and instantaneous flows. But death is not disappearance. The idea continues to haunt politics, not as a program but as a question that refuses burial. Who decides? In whose name? Under what limits? As long as those questions remain open, sovereignty has not vanished. It has simply shed the forms that once made it seem tangible.

The tragedy, if there is one, is not that sovereignism failed. It is that its failure has not yet been fully understood. Its critics still treat it as a menace. Its supporters still treat it as a promise. Both speak as if it were alive. And meanwhile, unnoticed, it has already become something else: not a movement, not a doctrine, but a residue of a world that has moved on.

Sovereignty is dead. Long live the argument over who gets to say so.