After the Thirty Years` War, a European religious conflict that affected large parts of the continent, the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 established the concept of territorial sovereignty as the norm of non-interference in the affairs of other states, the so-called Westphalian sovereignty, although the treaty itself affirmed the multiple levels of sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire. This led to a natural extension of the ancient principle of cuius regio, eius religio (whose empire, its religion), so that the Roman Catholic Church had little scope for interference in the internal affairs of many European states. However, it is a myth that the Treaties of Westphalia created a new European order of equal sovereign states. [27] The concept of sovereignty, as it is understood today, was only introduced in the second half of the 16th century. It was integrated into the vocabulary of political discourse at a time when modern notions of the state were taking shape. Until then, notions of supreme authority in the community as a whole were based more on religious than temporal considerations. But already in the Middle Ages, the word sovereign (itself derived from the Latin superanus, meaning “above”) was used to designate a political or other authority that had no authority over itself within its respective hierarchy (such as a sovereign court, which was a court without a superior court). With the development of states in Western Europe in the 16th century and thereafter, the need for state authority to have a solid temporal basis grew. At the same time, the need has become necessary for the leaders of these developing States to assert their authority within their States as much as possible. In this context, the term “sovereignty” was introduced into political science by Bodin in De la République (1577). Building on older notions of what the souvera was, the concept was introduced and developed into political theory in the context of the power of the ruler of the state over everything inside the state. Bodin, who supported centralized absolutism of the state, defined sovereignty as absolute and eternal power within a state: sovereignty was the attribute of a king in a monarchy and the people in a republic.
For Bodin, this power was the highest power within the state, without any restrictions other than the commandments of God and the law of nature. This supreme power could not be limited either by a constitution or by a positive law. Hobbes went further than Bodin in De Cive (1642) in asserting that a ruler is bound by nothing; others (such as Pufendorf, in De Jure Naturae et Gentium (1672)) took a more restrictive view, recognizing that while sovereignty was the supreme power within a state, it was not an absolute power and could be constitutionally limited. But virtually everyone agreed that sovereignty was indivisible – either a state and its ruler were sovereign or not. The collapse of the German Empire in the eighteenth century led several hundred reigning princes from the former member states of the empire to enter the international community. After the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, these states and their leaders enjoyed in practice, although theoretically not a high degree of independence. However, it was not considered appropriate to treat them as sovereign states with the same rank as large European states such as France, Sweden and England. Instead, full sovereignty was granted to all rulers who held the highest authority in their states and enjoyed complete independence in their dealings with other rulers. These “sovereigns” ranked on an equal footing with their sovereign co-rulers, but above other rulers who, in a way, had no supreme authority within their state or unfettered external independence, but were to some extent legally dependent on the authority of another ruler. While kings and emperors were thus recognized according to their highest sovereign authority, the prestige of the many inferior sovereigns, such as princes of different status, grand dukes, etc., was characterized by the fact that they enjoyed only relative, partial or imperfect sovereignty. At a time when a leader could correctly say, “The state is me,” such comparative ranking considerations were not only a matter of personal glorification, but touched on issues of high politics in the nascent international community.
These developments confirmed what had been evident from its origins in the sixteenth century, namely that “sovereignty” was perceived primarily as internal constitutional power and authority, understood as the highest, temporally non-derived power within the state having exclusive jurisdiction within it. They also noted that, contrary to previous views, and despite some persistent theoretical objections (e.g., by Rousseau, Social Contract (1762)), sovereignty was potentially divisible in practice—a practice confirmed in particular by the transformation of the United States in 1787 from a confederation into a federal state in which the overall sovereignty of the state was divided between the central state and individual member states. In essentially religious societies where the development of modern statistical communities took place, no lay leader could assert his supreme authority within the state without at the same time recognizing the higher spiritual authority of what God or God-like beings recognized the community. The constitutional structures of different states developed different ways of responding to this need to combine spiritual and worldly authority – for example, in some of the rulers themselves had divine status, in others the ruler was considered divinely chosen and appointed, in others the divinity was reflected in natural law, to which the sovereign was bound despite his temporal sovereignty.
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