In Norway the king died recently. The Parliament declared: “The King is dead. Long live the King!” and put a new one onto the throne.

Ambrus Béla, however, declares sovereignty dead - for good.

Also Kristian Thyregod is concerned about sovereignty, although thinking that it - like security - gradually may become indivisible, so that the sovereignty of one state cannot be considered independently of other states. “Sovereignty as such need not simply be surrendered. It can also be exercised collectively.” He thinks that ‘sharing authority’ (in EU) may be a way of making ‘sovereignty’ more powerful, while there still should be room for some ‘indivisible sovereignty’ within some fields for the individual nation state, making a distinction between “formal sovereignty” and “practical self-government”.

This is the traditional view - more or less (divisible) sovereignty can be moved up or down, i.e. from nation states to supranational bodies like the EU.

Béla pours in cold water: Sovereignty is definitely dead, lost by the nation states, but not because of the EU or similar.

In addition the the up-transition there has been going on a sideways transition of sovereignty from nation states to the global business players:

Sovereignty has not been defeated; it has been displaced. It no longer lives where both its critics and its champions keep looking for it. It is not lodged primarily in parliaments, electorates, or national governments. Nor does it reside in the supranational bureaucracies that claim to transcend them. Sovereignty today is diffused across infrastructures, algorithms, supply chains, security architectures, and financial systems whose scale and speed exceed the grasp of traditional political forms. What died was not sovereignty itself, but the belief that it could be possessed, wielded, or restored by a single identifiable actor called “the state.”

Béla goes on to claim that sovereignty has become ‘operationally impossible’ - because power now is too dynamic and spread around for any citizens’ institution to have the competence and capacity to get hold of it and direct it. What goes on in public life is loud, but ineffectual theater - at best able to “delegitimize authority, but not reshape it”. What we see is “politics of permanent agitation without structural transformation”.

Pulling authority back from EU to the nation states will thus not restore sovereignty because it now resides elsewhere - “in corporate, financial and technological systems” - control has slipped, politics as we know it has become futile.

Béla leaves it there - the world has moved on, sovereignty as we knew it, is dead, but the political theater lives on as powerless agitation - because the actor has not yet grasped the already transformed structure of society.

This ending is for me a bit unsatisfying. Why are we all sleepwalking? What will happen when we wake up?

To put it simply: The French revolution brought us sovereign bourgeois nation states and political democracy. Since then the lack of economic democracy and the growth of capitalism have brought us globalization and corporate rule - back-riding on the ‘sovereign states’ and their ‘supranational institutions’. Corporate power has learned to manage the populace by keeping the theater performing - our sleepwalking is part of the product.

Béla sees through this - and so can others! What will they do then?
Stop the political theater and let corporations rule - being happy with what it brings them?
Stop the political theater and take on corporations rule - not being happy with what it brings them?

Corporate rule here is another words for capitalism. What history learns us is that if you let capitalism loose at a small scale it will grow over time and transform into large scale and finally global scale. It is just the logic of accumulation.

Most people are happy with small-scale capitalism, but feel out-competed by large-scale and getting annoyed at the globals - thus their dreams of moving backwards in history.

We live in an era of capitalism itself creating this resistance to itself. The call for traditional national sovereignty just being the immediate un-reflected outcry.

But as capitalism continues eating it’s own tail (the big eating the small) the scale and depth of the wake-up will grow and it is hard to see how corporate rule can endure in the longer run.