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Al-Ahram Weekly 24 - 30 August 2000 Issue No. 496 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 24 - 30 August 2000 Issue No. 496
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Three Vaticans in Jerusalem
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
The closer we get to the presidential elections in the United States, the more difficult it becomes for Clinton to play a superstar role in the Middle East negotiations. Already the presidential campaign is overshadowing everything else in the concerns of the American people. Significant in this regard are the candidates' choices of vice-presidents. In a way, their choice highlights traits that the contending candidates for presidency want to underscore and which, for a variety of reasons, they cannot themselves emphasise enough. The concept of sovereignty originated when Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries were looking for a secular basis for the authority of their emerging nation-states. The state's sovereign prerogatives were seen as absolute. Any violation of state sovereignty was perceived as an aggression that the state was entitled to resist and repel by all available means, including war.
In the 20th century, state sovereignty began to be subjected to constraints which gradually eroded its absolute character. Throughout the Cold War, for instance, the world was divided into two antagonistic blocs, one led by the United States, the other by the Soviet Union. To the same extent that each bloc opposed any interference by the opposing bloc in the affairs of its member states, thereby boosting their sovereignty, the leading states in each bloc had no compunction about violating the sovereign prerogatives of the weaker states in their own bloc. This came to be called the Brezhnev doctrine, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw pact countries in 1968. Soviet leader Brezhnev openly defended the thesis of "limited sovereignty" when it came to relations between socialist countries, under the pretext that the socialist community of states were bonded together by the ideological links of "proletarian internationalism."
Thus the second half of the 20th century witnessed a paradoxical situation in which two contradictory processes operated on the notion of state sovereignty at one and the same time: the traditional doctrine of absolute sovereignty, and the Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty. As a result, sovereignty came to acquire a relative rather than absolute character, more especially in the context of the globalisation process that developed rapidly in the wake of the breakdown of the Soviet Union. With the disappearance of one of the two superpowers, the bipolar world order became unipolar.
However, bipolarity remains a feature of our world, albeit in a different form. Not all global actors consider themselves part of the new unipolar world order. These actors together form a pole which challenge the new order and contest its legitimacy. Represented by the so-called "rogue" states, they are often accused by the leading states in the new world order of encouraging terrorism.
Although the sovereignty of the nation-state remains a frame of reference, albeit one that is no longer as sacrosanct as it once was, the globalisation process has introduced a new form of 'umbrella' sovereignty that transcends state sovereignty and threatens to erode it still further. This new form of sovereignty is still in the making but already has a variety of manifestations, most prominent among which are the following:
-- the new world order itself, which confers a certain legitimacy on the present unipolar world buildup that is assumed to embody a universal set of values: democracy, the rule of law, human rights, the market economy, etc. These values have become the new code words of political discourse throughout the world. Whoever challenges them is regarded as lying outside the legitimacy of the present world order. If bipolarity still exists, it is no longer in the form it assumed under the Cold War, when both poles, though contradictory, were accepted as legitimate and part and parcel of the then-prevailing world order;
-- the integrated character of the world economy, where states no longer stand as economically-independent entities, but rather as elements in a global polycentric web. This does not deny that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer and that bipolar mechanisms still undermine the economic coherence of this polycentric web. But it is the web, more than the economic stresses and strains within it which, for the time being, holds the forefront of the scene;
-- the potency of modern technology, which no longer only "scratches" the surface of our world, but can now explore the infinitely small (the atom and beyond) as well as the infinitely large (the galaxies and beyond). Spacecraft and artificial satellites deprive all states of their sovereignty over the skies. Technology is also revealing the secrets of the depths of the oceans and, eventually, of the depths of the land constituting the sub-stratum of any given political entity, thus vitiating the absolute immunity enjoyed by state frontiers;
-- then there is the impact technology now has on the world of information. No customs can stop the free flow of media electrons. News, audio-visual and not only written, is now immediately accessible to anybody anywhere. Even the most intractable enemies are now familiar with each other as never before. This dramatically changes the image of the Other.
All these developments, with their legal and philosophical implications, are bound to fundamentally transform the notion of sovereignty. Not only is sovereignty becoming relative, it can also become plural. There can be different types and levels of sovereignty. We have already mentioned one type of sovereignty encompassing another, namely, the sovereignty acquired by transactions and interactions within the global system, in the name of the new world order, and the sovereignty, still respected to one extent or another, of the existing nation-states. We could also mention the case of Switzerland, for example, which does not have an army capable of protecting it against external aggression. But Switzerland survived World War II intact because all the warring parties tacitly agreed to make it a "no man's land," a haven for all sorts of people and transactions. So sovereignty need not always have material backing. Why not extend the notion of sovereignty to also include spiritual sovereignty? And here we are on territory that can be relevant to the issue of Jerusalem.
Let us consider the Vatican. A sovereign state under papal rule lying within the city of Rome, capital of the sovereign state of Italy, it does not possess the military power to protect its sovereignty. Its power derives, rather, from the spiritual values embodied in Catholicism and the moral authority wielded by that faith through the ages.
The Vatican model could well be extrapolated to Jerusalem, another city with deep religious significance, not only for one, but for three religious faiths. Why not have three Vatican-style enclaves in Jerusalem, one for the Muslims, one for the Christians and one for the Jews? This would entail the coexistence of two types of overlapping sovereignty in the Holy City: spiritual sovereignty for the holy places of each of the three faiths taken separately, and territorial sovereignty for the land in historical Palestine which is not sacred to any of the three religions. The land having no sacred status and hence subjected to territorial sovereignty will be ascribed to either of the two states in Palestine in conformity with the principle of inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by force as consecrated in the preamble to Security Council resolution 242. Any change in the attribution of such territory is acceptable only in case both the Palestinians and the Israelis agree to its occurrence.
The catch is that spiritual and territorial sovereignty could overlap, as when a site sacred to one religion is located above or below a site sacred to another. This was the case when a row broke out between Muslim and Jewish communities in Jerusalem's Old City some months ago over Israeli excavations in search of King David's Temple under the Haram Al-Sharif. Surely a solution to this and other incidents involving overlapping spiritual interests is not beyond the reach of modern technology.
