The Modern NatSov? Life After National Sovereignty
Approximately a year and a half ago, The Dourian Embassy boldly proclaimed the existence of “the Modern NatSov” - a new, flexible stage in the evolution of National Sovereignty that is not fundamentally opposed to the World Assembly. The essay concludes that this new iteration of National Sovereignty demands that its adherents “engage with our opposition until it's no longer reasonable to do so.” However, several conditions - principally, the desertion of the fundamental motivation underlying National Sovereignty as a distinct argument in its favor and the rise of internal inconsistency on issues of policy - have caused the intellectual basis for the movement to collapse. The premise of this essay is that we are currently interacting in a post-NatSov world where the ontological assumption is that power derives from the World Assembly and that member nations must choose which issues they believe do not fall under the scope of its authority. Consequently, member nations choose, based solely on policy preference, not on basic ideological conceptions of sovereignty, which issues should be covered by the World Assembly. This essay is not a condemnation of National Sovereignty, nor does it seek to deny the existence of individual players who still adhere to the national sovereignty of yore - it is an observation on the current environment.
The conception of National Sovereignty presented in Douria’s piece is imaginary - to the contrary, National Sovereignty has been intellectually defunct for several years. There are two reasons for the total intellectual collapse of National Sovereignty. Firstly, the most fundamental idea at the core of the NatSov movement - that, ontologically, power derives from member states and that they are free to cede or reclaim their sovereignty by their own volition - has been totally abandoned. Instead, self proclaimed NatSovs have resorted to pedantry and misrepresentation to advance an agenda whose true ideological motivations are avoided meticulously and deliberately. Repeals like the repeal of GAR#99 were clearly motivated by a desire to return sovereignty to member nations, yet the arguments presented complain about whether or not the resolution established a committee or simply a building, because the inclusion of the word “courthouse” in the committee's title somehow precludes it from executing bureaucratic functions or how the resolution included a “separate but equal” form of justice for criminals that committed crimes in multiple jurisdictions - a meaningless distinction in the context of GAR#99 but one that shamelessly evokes imagery of Jim Crow. The argument that such authority simply does not fall within the scope of appropriate World Assembly legislation is, shockingly, absent. This, by itself, does not suggest that National Sovereignty as an idea does not exist - of course it does if authors are pursuing it (albeit, while hiding their true motivation). What it suggests is that the movement has chosen to abandon its intellectual basis. By refusing to countenance the ideological motivation for National Sovereignty as a discrete argument in support of the movement, modern National Sovereignists have, whether deliberately or otherwise, eliminated an intellectual basis for the movement. If not even NatSovs can stomach the argument that National Sovereignty is, in and of itself, an appropriate reason to repeal legislation, no one can be expected to. This is largely responsible for making national sovereigntism seem like it's intellectually illegitimate - because its most vocal proponents see it as an end to be achieved only and refuse to make it a cohesive argument in its own right.
There is another dimension to the intellectual failure of modern National Sovereignty: internal consistency. Models of modern National Sovereignty have promulgated the idea that the World Assembly lacks the authority to act on specific domestic issues, yet simultaneously support legislation like GAR#286 which permits the termination of pregnancy well into the third trimester. Supporting international legislation on abortion is, by no means, inherently bad. However, support for radical intervention on particular “pet issues” cannot be reconciled with the general and fundamental ideas of National Sovereignty.
The consequence of the intellectual collapse of National Sovereignty is that the lens through which the new generation of players fundamentally view the scope of the World Assembly has changed. Even self-proclaimed NatSovs operate under the assumption that the World Assembly theoretically has infinite power and that member nations must choose which issues don’t fall under the scope of World Assembly authority. This accounts for otherwise irreconcilable statements regarding the authority of the World Assembly. Indeed, it is not uncommon to find authors simultaneously peddling some pet issue while denouncing other, equally intrusive (or nonintrusive) projects as “not an international issue.” The “NatSov refrain” - that an issue is not an international one - has lost entirely its intellectual meaning. Decoded, it now means something along the lines of “my particular government doesn’t want the World Assembly to act on this issue,” but noticeably it lacks a consistent conception of National Sovereignty as its intellectual basis.
Is this new intellectual environment that bad? Not necessarily. However, it is disingenuous. Member nations coopt the language of a largely defunct ideology to code their own intentions for voting one way or another - perhaps not even consciously. National Sovereignty as a distinct, consistent ideological basis for repeal or opposition to a resolution no longer exists. Instead, self-proclaimed NatSovs will decry the merits of consumer protection laws, but embrace unrestricted access to abortion or support an international arms trading regime but viciously oppose basic legal rights. Modern day National Sovereignty is a meaningless idea that means whatever its supporters want it to mean. If we have any hope of debating honestly with each other, modern NatSovs must either return the ideology to its few remaining true proponents or embrace its fundamental principles and apply them consistently.
tl;dr: NatSovs don't exist anymore. Players simply coopt the movement's language selectively according to their own policy preferences.
[/Self indulgent navel-gazing]
Disclaimer: I acknowledge that there are NatSovs today that defy this trend. This isn't meant to include all NatSovs. It's merely an observation on what has become of the mainstream movement today.
) and explain it in simpler language. That's what I'm good at. But do the same with a law book, and I'll be reading it with a thesaurus, the Wiktionary, English-to-Finnish dictionary 
