or more persons who are the representatives of the people and rule according to the law of the land. An anarchistic community is not a State. There must, fourthly and lastly, be a Sovereign Government. Sovereignty is supreme authority, an authority which is independent of any other earthly authority. Sovereignty in the strict and narrowest sense of the term includes, therefore, independence all round, within and without the borders of the country. States. § 65. A State in its normal appearance does Not-full possess independence all round and therefore full Sovereign sovereignty. Yet there are States in existence which certainly do not possess full sovereignty, and are therefore named not-full Sovereign States. All such States as are under the suzerainty or under the protectorate of another State or are member-States of a so-called Federal State, belong to this group. All of them possess supreme authority and independence with regard to a part of the tasks of a State, whereas with regard to another part they are under the authority of another State. Hence it is that the question is disputed whether such not-full Sovereign States can be International Persons and subjects of the Law of Nations at all.1 That they cannot be full, perfect, and normal subjects of International Law, there is no doubt. But it is wrong to maintain that they can have no international position whatever and can never be members of the Family of Nations at all. If we look at the 1 The question will be discussed again below, §§ 89, 91, 93, with regard to each kind of not-full Sovereign States. The object of discussion here is the question whether such States can be con sidered as International Persons matter as it really stands, we observe that they actually often enjoy in many points the rights and fulfil in other points the duties of International Persons. They often send a receive diplomatic envoys or at least consuls, the ften conclude commercial or other international treaties, their monarchs enjoy the privileges which according to thew of Nations the Municipal Laws of the different States must grant to the monarchs of foreign States. No other explanation of these and similar facts can be given except that these not-full Sovereign States are in some way or another International Persons and subjects of International Law. Such imperfect International Personality is, of course, an anomaly; but the very existence of States without full sovereignty is an anomaly in itself. And history teaches that States without full sovereignty have no durability, since they either gain in time full sovereignty or disappear totally as separate States and become mere provinces of other States. So anomalous are these not-full Sovereign States that no hard and fast general rule can be laid down with regard to their position within the Family of Nations, since everything depends upon the special case. What may be said in general concerning all the States without full sovereignty is that their position within the Family of Nations, if any, is always more or less overshadowed by other States. But their partial character of International Persons comes clearly to light when they are compared with so-called Colonial States, such as the Dominion of Canada or the Commonwealth of Australia. Colonial States have no international position whatever; they are, from the standpoint of the Law of Nations, nothing else than colonial portions of the mother country, although they enjoy perfect self-government, and may therefore in a sense be called States. The deciding factor is that their Governor, who has a veto, is appointed by the mother country, and that the Parliament of he mother country could withdraw self-governn from its Colonial States and legislate directly for them. contested. S. The distinction between States full Sovereign Divisibility of and not-full Sovereign is based upon the opinion that Sovesovereignty is divisible, so that the powers connected reignty with sovereignty need not necessarily be united in one hand. But many jurists deny the divisibility of sovereignty and maintain that a State is either sovereign or not. They deny that sovereignty is a characteristic of every State and of the membership of the Family of Nations. It is therefore necessary to face the conception of sovereignty more closely. And it will be seen that there exists perhaps no conception the meaning of which is more controversial than that of sovereignty. It is an indisputable fact that this conception, from the moment when it was introduced into political science until the present day, has never had a meaning which was universally agreed upon.1 § 67. The term Sovereignty was introduced into Meaning political science by Bodin in his celebrated book, reignty in "De la République," which appeared in 1577. teenth and Before Bodin, at the end of the Middle Ages, the word Sevensouverain2 was used in France for an authority, Centuries. political or other, which had no other authority above itself. Thus the highest courts were called meine Staatslehre, 1899, §§ 10-16. 1 The literature upon sove- Rousseau, 1900; Rehm, Allgereignty is extensive. The follow ing authors give a survey of the opinions of the different writers: Dock, Der Souveränitäts-begriff von Bodin bis zu Friedrich dem Grossen, 1897; Merriam, History of the Theory of Sovereignty since 2 Souverain is derived either from the Latin superanus, or from suprema potestas, of Sove the Six teenth Cours Souverains. Bodin, however, gave quite a new meaning to the old conception. Being under the influence and in favour of the policy of centralisation initiated by Louis XI. of France (1461-1483), the founder of French absolutism, he defined sovereignty as "the absolute and perpetual power within a State." Such power is the supreme power within a State without any restriction whatever except the Commandments of God and the Law of Nature. No constitution can limit sovereignty, which is an attribute of the king in a monarchy and of the people in a democracy. A Sovereign is above positive law. A contract only is binding upon the Sovereign, because the Law of Nature commands that a contract shall be binding.1 The conception of sovereignty thus introduced was at once accepted by writers on politics of the sixteenth century, but the majority of these writers taught that sovereignty could be restricted by a constitution and by positive law. Thus at once a somewhat weaker conception of sovereignty than that of Bodin made its appearance. On the other hand, in the seventeenth century, Hobbes went even beyond Bodin, maintaining that a Sovereign was not bound by anything and had a right over everything, even over religion. Whereas a good many publicists followed Hobbes, others, especially Pufendorf, denied, in contradistinction to Hobbes, that sovereignty includes omnipotence. According to Pufendorf, sovereignty is the supreme power in a State, but not absolute power, and sovereignty may well be constitutionally restricted.3 But in spite of 1 See Bodin, De la république, I. c. 8. * See Hobbes, Del cive, c. 6, $$ 12-15. 3 See Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium, VII. c. 6, §§ 1-13. all the differences in defining sovereignty, all authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries agree that sovereignty is indivisible and contains the centralisation of all power in the hands of the Sovereign, whether a monarch or the people itself in a republic. Yet the way for another conception of sovereignty is prepared by Locke, whose "Two Treatises on Government" appeared in 1689, and paved the way for the doctrine that the State itself is the original Sovereign, and that all supreme powers of the Government are derived from this sovereignty of the State. of Sove Eigh Century. § 68. In the eighteenth century matters changed Meaning again. The fact that the several hundred reigning reignty princes of the member-States of the German Empire in the had practically, although not theoretically, become teenth more or less independent since the Westphalian Peace, enforced the necessity upon publicists to recognise a distinction between an absolute, perfect, full sovereignty, on the one hand, and, on the other, a relative, imperfect, not-full or half-sovereignty. Absolute and full sovereignty was attributed to those monarchs who enjoyed an unqualified independence within and without their States. Relative and not-full sovereignty, or half-sovereignty, was attributed to those monarchs who were, in various points of internal or foreign affairs of State, more or less dependent upon other monarchs. By this distinction the divisibility of sovereignty was recognised. And when in 1787 the United States of America turned from a Confederation of States into a Federal State, the division of sovereignty between the Sovereign Federal State and the Sovereign member-States appeared. But it cannot be maintained that divisibility of sovereignty was universally recognised in |