Since Bodin the concept of sovereignty not only dealt as the unchallenged leitmotif of each and every narrative on statehood, but bundled every narratives’ normative potential as well. As a consequence, the turning points within political history led to variations of the concept of sovereignty which sought to recapitulate its altered status and reveal its implications for the idea of state and statehood. Today, however, the things have changed. The well-known features of globalization has led to a “questioning of sovereignty”. What has come to the forefront of academic discussion is the question whether or not the concept of sovereignty should still have its place within political and legal vocabulary. These discussions about the interrelation between sovereignty and statehood are being led by jurisprudential and empirical social science scholars today. The jurisprudential discourse asks to what extent the process of global legal developments challenges the decision-making competences of the state. This discourse has generated a variety of different approaches (Global Constitutionalism, legal pluralism, Global Administrative Law, societal constitutionalism). In contrast, the empirical social and political science debate explores the organizational competences of the state in the transnational constellation. Besides the “End-of-state”-assumption, a diversity of Governance approaches, or the “disaggregated state” as the key figure of Global Government Networks, one can also find the “statist position”, for which sovereignty, state and statehood are still closely connected with each other. In my paper I argue that all these attempts not only reconsider the meaning of the concept of sovereignty for a global political order and have made sovereignty a contested concept, they also furnish new narratives of Statehood in the Global Realm – narratives in which the concept of sovereignty lost by and large its status as a leitmotif. Moreover, these narratives outline a normative spectrum from which a “realistic” International Political Theory should attain its criteria for a political-normative evaluation of the transnational constellation.
