In What is sovereignty? (Folio essays, 352 pages, 9.40 euros), the philosopher Gérard Mairet analyzes why this concept, which once contributed to the construction of Europe, today represents an obstacle to the deepening of the Union.
In “The Fable of the World. Philosophical investigation into the freedom of our time » (Gallimard, 2005), you diagnosed “the completion of sovereignty”. But, far from having deserted public debate, the word “sovereignty” today seems omnipresent…
It is true that in 2017, in his speech at the Sorbonne, Emmanuel Macron theorized “European sovereignty”, and we very often hear today, including among members of the government, talk about a national sovereignty which would sometimes be food , digital or industrial. This is an excess of language at best. In certain cases, this must be seen as a rhetorical concession made to a certain sovereignist discourse which campaigns for the “return of sovereignty”. According to this speech, it would be a question of repatriating sovereignty that would have been lost because of Europe.
However, nothing was lost: to create Europe, we did not abandon sovereignty, but we sovereignly and freely decided to delegate its exercise, in certain well-defined areas, to an external entity. Thus, with Brexit, the United Kingdom has regained all the exercise of its sovereignty that it had voluntarily delegated, an unfortunate policy moreover. Europe is not the effect of a capture of the sovereignty of States, because nothing is alienated. This is why it is a great philosophical confusion to speak of “European sovereignty”. Sovereign States cannot be members of an entity that is itself sovereign.
How to define sovereignty?
Sovereignty, as it has been constituted in theory and practice in modern Europe, is the conceptual lever of the territorial division of Europe and the subsequent division of peoples enclosed within borders defined in and by war. The division of territory consisted of building national peoples. There is therefore a particularism that sovereignty invents: the idea of what is just is not the same from one country to another. The role of the historical State is to close and guard its borders in order to preserve the ethos of the nation: territoriality is jealous of itself. This freedom can be more or less successful, it can be criticized, but the general principle is to constitute particular freedoms for peoples.
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