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Sovereignty

By Richard N. Haass

Sovereignty — the notion that governments are free to do what they want within their own territory — has provided the organizing principle of international relations for more than 350 years. Thirty-five years from now, sovereignty will no longer be sanctuary. Powerful new forces and insidious threats will converge against it.

Nation-states will not disappear, but they will share power with a larger number of powerful nonsovereign actors than ever before, including corporations, nongovernmental organizations, terrorist groups, drug cartels, regional and global institutions, and banks and private equity funds. Sovereignty will fall victim to the powerful and accelerating flow of people, ideas, greenhouse gases, goods, dollars, drugs, viruses, e-mails and weapons within and across borders. All of this traffic challenges one of the fundamentals of sovereignty: the ability to control what crosses borders. Sovereign states will increasingly measure their vulnerability not to one another, but to forces of globalization beyond their control.

Implicit in this is the notion that sovereignty is conditional, even contractual, rather than absolute. If a state sponsors terrorism, develops weapons of mass destruction or conducts genocide, then it forfeits the normal benefits of sovereignty and opens itself up to attack, removal or occupation.

The world in 2040 will be semi-sovereign. It will reflect the need to adapt legal and political principles to a world in which the most serious challenges to order come from what global forces do to states and what governments do to their citizens, rather than from what states do to one another.

Richard N. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations

If Americans elect Condi Rice or any other of the candidates proposed by the GOP or even the democratic party, then this will come to pass. Americans must not elect candidates associated with the Council on Foreign Relations, they are actively working to destroy the concept of sovereignty and thus the protection that our constitution provides sovereign citizens of the United States of America are supposed to enjoy. Please note that this is NOT happening because the American people have asked for it to happen, but that a corrupt group of individuals have been put into power in our government and they are acting from within to bring their plan to eliminate nations to fruition.

The world in 2040 will be semi-sovereign.

The thing about this is the same as for the Club of Rome. Their world is closed, that is, it is a system--pre-Copernican--planet earth by itself in the unimaginably huge universe that has no practical limits as far as the lifetime of our species is concerned. It takes no account of anything that might be developed off planet, off earth. They will do whatever, neglect whatever, to ensure their world remains closed.