Question for Professor Klabbers …

(I put this as a comment below, but have decided to move it up as a post, with a question for Professor Klabbers.)

What a fascinating post – thanks for being with us on OJ!  I have two reactions that seem, on the surface, perhaps contradictory – but perhaps they are not.

On the one hand, the idea of gradations of sovereignty makes a lot of sense to me, in part to deal with what, in the dim past, might have been trust territories, or situations like Kosovo.  On the other hand, and unlike many professors of international law, I am skeptical of efforts to reduce, dissolve, or otherwise de-sovereignize sovereignty – both descriptively and normatively.

Descriptively, it seems to me that one of the lessons of the rise of China for the developing world, as they see it, is that ‘hard’ sovereignty is an excellent plan, and anyway, as David Rieff points out, a multipolar world is a more competitive world, not a more cooperative one.  So I don’t think the world is headed in the direction of less importance attached to sovereignty (and I don’t see you as suggesting that, either, instead that even a world that is more focused on the privileges of sovereignty would do better to have a graduated gateway, particularly if sovereignty means more, rather than less).

Normatively … when I look at Haiti, or failed states around the world, and the disordered areas of the world, I think … sovereignty is actually a major achievement, and seeking to dismantle or delegitimize it a bad idea.  The problem of China is that it offers an example of sovereignty as its own justification, for its own sake – rather than seeking to make the condition of legitimate sovereignty premised on some set of basic substantive human rights and democratic values.  But again, I don’t see that as running against the idea of graduated sovereignty in places like Kosovo.

So let me put this as a question.  I don’t read your post as calling, as international law professors often do, for a weakening of sovereignty through the device of gradations of sovereignty.  It seems to me just as well an argument, and a good one, for gradations of sovereignty precisely because sovereignty means so very much (and more in a competitive world of sovereigns modeled on China’s quasi-mercantilism and assertively self-interested, “don’t squawk to us about values,” foreign policy) that we need a way of treating some states as part of the full club and some as something less?  Or am I re-writing Professor Klabbers as … Professor Anderson?