Although not explicitly included by Hedley Bull (2002 (first published: 1977)) among the institutions of international society, sovereignty is central to Bull’s theorising as well as to International Relations (IR) scholars’ theories more generally. Sovereignty is commonly referred to as the unquestioned basis or ‘grundnorm’ of international relations, but the concept has nevertheless been constantly debated since the ‘birth’ of the discipline of IR (Schmidt, 1998). The core of this debate has been centred on the relationship between theory and practice of sovereignty. This artificial but nevertheless influential divide between reality and discourse (which mirrors the division nature/reality versus culture/theory) has played an important and constraining role for scholars studying sovereignty, forcing them to choose their epistemological camp between the prevalence of reality (foundational approaches) and a focus on discourses (representational approaches).
This paper argues that this latter approach has been beneficial for the understanding of international relations, but has nevertheless only turned the dichotomy upside down without demonstrating its artificiality. This paper intends to use a representational approach combined with some insights from performative theory in order to further deconstruct the established separation between theory and practice. Indeed, performative theory reveals not only that the ‘material’ reality can only been understood through discourses (re-presentations), but also that these very discourses serve as exclusionary and arbitrary processes that re-creates a supposedly foundational ‘materiality’. Thus, these discourses ‘call’ into being this ‘materiality’ and pose it as pre-existing to the discourse itself. Performativity as defined by Butler (1992, 1995) allows the analysts to question these foundations in order to reveal their arbitrariness.
To apply representation and performativity to the study of sovereignty, I will first explain the epistemological assumptions of a representational approach and how these assumptions can be usefully combined with some performative insights. Secondly, I will show why this approach is particularly adapted to the study of sovereignty, especially given the characteristics of the concept. In a third part, this conceptualisation of sovereignty will be informed and illustrated with the example of the discourse of sovereignty developed by the Concert of Europe in the 19th century.
