Sovereignty and Difference — Narrowing Down what Qualifies

Sovereignty can certainly be a tool to protect those who are “different”. While difference is not the only thing associated with sovereignty, sovereignty is essential to protect differences that are present in society, especially those of groups or cultures that are diametrically opposed to each other. However, historically, there have been several different factors that make this a viable option.

One obvious way sovereignty protects difference is the protection of minority groups from persecution. There are two ways for a minority group to protect itself -- one, change society around it to accept them, or two, form their own safe haven with rules that applied to them and borders that defined the extent of the rules. This second approach worked much better a long time ago, when minority groups usually all lived in the same geographical area and their oppression originated from an external force, but there are also variations to it, most obviously, in the definition of what constitutes a difference. One example is America, which broke off from England to become an independent sovereign state. America became sovereign because of difference, even though they weren’t a different cultural or ethnic group in the traditional sense. Even though at the time of the American revolution, Americans identified themselves as English, the colonists’ differences from other Englishmen is what caused their separation. While they didn’t have a radical cultural difference from the rest of Britain, they were treated by the British government differently than other british people, in a negative way, especially with regard to economics. Eventually, the American colonists’ differences with the British government became so great that it trumped the colonists loyalty to Britain and self-identification as British, and caused them to gain independence, and sovereignty to retain their independence from interference by the British.

An interesting parallel between Rosenblum’s book and the revolution is that in both instances, the group seeking independence was geographically grouped together and isolated from the motherland -- Earth and Britain respectively. In these situations, it’s not a lucky chance that both groups happened to be isolated and could therefore easily form a sovereign state, but they wouldn’t have developed the differences that would cause them to feel the need to form a sovereign state, had they not been separated. (While the first colonists were persecuted minorities fleeing England, this same movement of immigrants was not the one that would later push for American independence.) It was their geographical difference, in conjunction with their differences in values, that made sovereignty a plausible way of protecting differences. This ties in with the still-valid notion that a nation-state, fixed and geographical in definition, is the only truly accepted sovereign entity. Therefore, while sovereignty does indeed protect difference, it only protects a specific kind of difference, one that is partially based on geography, and cannot be a solution to the protection of all forms of difference.