Sovereignty and the common good

This article develops an argument for the value of state sovereignty based on its capacity to promote the political common good. My claim is not of course that the common good is always promoted by state sovereignty but rather that state sovereignty possesses features particularly conducive to the promotion of the common good. Although this may sound like a modest claim, its truth is sufficient to undermine the view—held by many constitutional pluralist and cosmopolitan theorists—that sovereignty has little at all to recommend it from a normative perspective. The article is structured in three sections. Section 1 briefly defines state sovereignty, before setting out two constraints on a successful argument for its value. In section 2 I demonstrate why an argument based on services to the common good is well placed to meet these constraints. Section 3 argues that the value of self-determination—which features prominently in many normative defenses of state sovereignty—ultimately derives from the common good.