Sovereignty defines the boundaries of nationhood, yet it also shapes the dynamic economic, political, and cultural relationships between peoples and governments. In the conventional view, sovereignty hinges on physical control over territory, backed by military force. But global capital flows are challenging the essence of traditional notions of sovereignty. Moreover, because law - in the form of national legislation and judicial decisions - is one of the primary means of regulating the flow of cross-border capital, law is an ideal and practical focal point for such a study.
The present dissertation project, to be conducted by Kevin Sobel-Read under the supervision of Dr. William O' Barr, seeks to shed light on key aspects of modern state-sovereignty by examining the central role of law in the management of global capital flows and, in turn, the critical relationship between legal regulation and state sovereignty. The research will be conducted in the South Pacific region, focusing on the Cook Islands and New Zealand. Given that a majority of Cook Islanders reside in New Zealand, and given the differences in wealth between these two nations, a cross-border analysis of Cook Islanders' capital movement offers special insight into the interplay between the state sovereignty and financial regulation of developing and also developed nations.
The project will be carried out through overlapping legal, archival, and ethnographic methods. The data collected will provide a means: (1) to map the movement of capital among Cook Islanders inside and outside the Cook Islands; and (2) to analyze that movement of capital against relevant legal regulation in the Cook Islands and New Zealand, pinpointing where and how the regulation affects the capital flow. As such, the goal is to offer a fuller understanding of the relationship between the forces of globalization on the one hand and the continuing role of state power on the other, helping to explain the nature and general processes of sovereignty in the 21st century.
The fieldwork and research led to, among others, the following conclusions: (1) Sovereignty: Traditional notions of sovereignty have focused on sovereignty as a monolith, as seemingly totalizing power. But these notions have failed to adequately explain the ways that nation-state sovereignty interfaces with other nation-state sovereignties, the ways that the state manages these interfaces, and the relationship between the state and the individual; these traditional notions likewise have not fully recognized that some elements of sovereignty are unique to each sovereign while others are largely identical (like compatible nozzles on a hose, so that they always fit together). Indeed, sovereignty is not something that ‘is’ but something that ‘does’; it is not the ethereal fantasies of philosophers but the day-to-day existence of the nation-state as managed by the people who populate it, in constant flux due not only to domestic caprice but also to the dynamic influences of other nation-states. As such, a definition of nation-state sovereignty might reasonably be the following: the animated realm of [domestic] power held and exercised by a nation-state that is gained through the management of [external] relationships. (2) Globalization: A reasonable definition of globalization is that globalization is at once: (i) the combination of the cross-border movement of people(s), goods and capital; (ii) the economic interdependence of nation-states in international economies, driven by a co-production and co-consumption of goods; (iii) the effects of planet-wide communications technologies, including the internet; and (iv) the above factors as they become integral to cultural (re-)productive practices, intersecting to some – in each instance varying – degree in both the formation of the individual subject and in every function of the state. (3) The relationship between nation-state sovereignty, globalization, law and capital: There are at least three important aspects of the relationship between sovereignty, globalization, law and capital: First, contemporary globalization is co-produced by the nation-states of the world through the legal regulation that is the function of nation-state sovereignty, namely the regulation of the movement of capital and individuals: in short, nation-states co-produce goods, which – together with the co-consumption of those goods – is the driving force behind globalization; as such, one can likewise say that nation-states co-produce globalization itself. Second, nation-states remain the central structural machinery of globalization. Third, globalization is not uniform. To be sure, the effects of globalization have transformed every culture on the planet and capitalism has been the vehicle for doing so. But just as not all cultures are the same, all capitalisms are not the same either. No model of sovereignty and globalization is therefore complete without a mechanism for accounting for differences in culture and capitalism.
