Sovereignty Deconstructed

If they think of sovereignty at all, most Americans view it as the right of a nation to govern itself. Academics take an approach that may not only be at odds with that view but with the dictionary as well.

“The definition of sovereignty is that sovereign states acknowledge no superior,” Harvard professor J. Bryan Hehir said in a seminar sponsored by the Center for American Progress. Actually, the dictionary defines sovereignty as “freedom from external control.”

The question is rapidly becoming more than merely academic although academics themselves are playing a key role à la Hehir, in redefining American sovereignty. The Senate is poised to pass the Law of the Sea Treaty, largely a United Nations creation, which would give control of the world’s oceans to that troubled international body. To promote the treaty the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has relied upon witnesses such as University of Miami law school professor Bernard H. Oxman, whose troubling testimony Accuracy in Media editor Cliff Kincaid has dissected.

The Center for American Progress (CAP), where Professor Hehir spoke, is in turn a favorite project of left-wing billionaire George Soros. Both AIM and conservative author and activist David Horowitz have shown the links between Soros, never a fan of national sovereignty, and CAP.

(Incidentally, the CAP, which claims to want to fight global poverty, is staving off penury very well. It occupies a choice corner of real estate in downtown Washington.)

As it happens, Professor Hehir, who is also a priest, may have been the most moderate panelist at the October 15th CAP event. He was the only panelist who spoke of sovereignty in a manner that could be considered amenable to the general concept.
“We have moved from sovereignty to intervention but you will always have sovereignty because that is how you get admitted to the UN,” Father Hehir told the crowd. He elaborated on this theme in an essay that appears in the CAP anthology Pursuing the Global Common Good: Principle and Practice in U. S. Foreign Policy.

“The concept of ‘proper authority’ is as old as Augustine’s notion of ‘care for the common good,’ but the possessors of that authority have varied; medieval princes, political leaders in democracies, and sovereign rulers generally,” Father Hehir writes. “In the modern context—sovereign states couched in the setting of the U. N. Charter—there is a strong consensus about the right of states to act in the name of international order, self-defense or defense of other states under attack (Article 51), but less clarity about proper authority to undertake intervention.”

“Finally, there is even less clarity, and much less support, for the moral authority of individual states to engage in preemptive war.” Most Americans might argue that the U. S. retains its sovereignty in spite of the UN.
“You need a balance between relative sovereignty and relative intervention,” Father Hehir advised the crowd at the CAP.

Father Hehir argues that “Israel’s actions against Syria” do not strike that balance.
Similarly, Father Hehir mentions the sovereignty of the PLO but not of Israel, or, for that matter, the United States.

“With the collapse of the Cold War, the issue is proliferation,” Father Hehir explains. “A hundred and fifty nations have signed onto the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty.”

He calls the NPT “a flawed treaty but not an indefensible one.” He takes a similar view of the UN.
p> “Treat the UN as an adult but it does not always make the right decisions,” Father Hehir says. Some of the decisions he has problems with involve UN sanctions.

“In Iraq and Haiti, we see that sanctions will fall on the wrong people,” Father Hehir said at the CAP. During the aforementioned Cold War, Father Hehir was most frequently critical of western democracies and anti-communist nations.

“Hehir, who makes no secret of his liberal tendencies, often testifies before Congress on such topics as amnesty for draft resisters, disarmament, world food policy, and human rights violations in Chile and South Korea,” Time magazine reported in 1982. Currently, Father Hehir also serves as Secretary for Social Services for the Archdiocese of Boston.

In that capacity, he demonstrated his support not necessarily for American sovereignty but for a concept also dear to conservative hearts—states rights—but in a manner which conservatives would probably not emulate. “On the matter of adoption by gay couples, Hehir explained that Catholic Charities, a faith-based organization that uses government money, must abide by state laws prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation,” the National Catholic Reporter revealed in 2005.

Apparently, there are circumstances under which Father Hehir will acknowledge America’s autonomy vis-à-vis at least one universal institution—his own Catholic Church.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.