A Sovereignty Taxonomy rather than Monolithic, Basket, or Rejectionist Sovereignty

Broadly, many sources agree that sovereignty is the condition of jurisdictional priority (final decision-making authority and control) that polities exert over people and territory. As Marie Bunck and Julie Fowler describe, some scholars (like Hans Morgenthau) believe that sovereignty is monolithic. In this sense sovereignty is all or nothing. It cannot be divided. You are either a sovereign state or you are not. Monolithic sovereignty theorists, like Morgenthau, reject the idea that partially independent territories, federation member units, or global level organizations that exercise some piecemeal state-like power (like the WTO dispute mechanism) exercises sovereignty. Bunck and Fowler, however, disagree (as do a wide range of others from America’s Founding Fathers to modern scholars of federalism, the European Union, partially independent territories and others). Still others, like Steven Krasner, reject sovereignty as a useful concept. Krasner calls sovereignty a type of "hypocrisy" because he cannot make sense of its different applications, in which de facto states, like Taiwan, which are not full-fledged sovereign states, nevertheless seem to exercise some sovereign power. Krasner can therefore be described as a sovereignty rejectionist. Bunck and Fowler have, nevertheless, found a way to make sense of sovereignty. They are proponents of basket sovereignty. With basket sovereignty, a polity can indeed have a little bit or part of sovereignty. Sovereignty can, for example, be separated between legislative, judicial, and executive branches (a horizontal division of sovereignty). It can be separated between center and periphery governments, like in a federation (a vertical division of sovereignty). It can also be divided between a government and its people (in which the people exercise popular sovereignty with their voting power). Bunck and Fowler however believe that entities are divided between having more baskets and less baskets of sovereign power. The US for example has many more baskets of sovereignty than a much weaker state, like Somalia. In this view, polities are more or less hampered with regard to their degree of sovereign power. Distinctive political forms, like partially independent territories or federation member units, can mostly be viewed as states, except that they have many fewer baskets of sovereignty. In this sense, polities are relatively uniform, except that their sovereignty can be scaled up or down. But just as a squirrel is not a scaled-up mouse and a dog is not a scaled-up rat, it can be argued that a taxonomy of political systems based on their sovereignty characteristics might make more sense. As distinct from the monolithic, basket, and rejectionist views, the view advanced here is one of a sovereignty taxonomy. With a sovereignty taxonomy, instead of units having more or less baskets of sovereignty, they can be divided according to their possession of some of the features of sovereignty, much like a biologist might characterize different organisms according to their differing characteristics. This paper therefore advances a structural theory with regard to the units of the international system and asserts that the international system has increasingly neo-medieval structural characteristics as opposed to commonly perceived state centric notions.