Sovereignty is regularly characterised in juridico-philosophical discourse as an illimitable power 'beyond law'. It is territorialized, equated with the nation-state, delimited in space and time, and thus regarded as having a finite presence as the symbol of a particular 'political community'. Sovereignty is also treated as an infinite power which transcends juridical limits. The central thesis developed here is that sovereignty is at once finite and infinite (in-finite). The objective of this thesis is to elaborate this ambivalent 'position' of sovereignty in relation to law. The thesis seeks to 'de-position' monistic conceptions of sovereignty through a critical examination of the delimited and illimitable presence, the in-finitude, of sovereignty. The opening concern of the thesis, then, is to identify the in-finitude of sovereignty in the telling instance of Australian 'postcoloniaP law. In Australia, an imperial sovereign assertion which treated the continent's indigenous people as barbarous and without a 'settled law' needed to be rendered 'finite' - that is, delimited - so that this sovereign excess could be disavowed in the process of inaugurating a 'postcolonial' law and society. A 'finite' sovereign event that took place 'back then' was central to re-presenting the juridical order as 'post-racist' and 'postcolonial'. However, the imperial sovereign 'event' also needed to be preserved as the 'infinite' ground of present and future law and society. Sovereignty is thus imbued with a 'finite' and 'infinite' quality in the 'postcolonial' context. The question which then arises is how the contradictory lineaments of in-finite (finite and infinite) sovereignty are sustained.

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The claims of cultures and nationalities have presented liberal, democratic and republican theory with a persistent problem: on the one hand, the principle of peoples' self-determination requires a realm of autonomy to cultural and national groups to govern themselves in their own ways; one the other hand, the national and cultural models of the political community come into sharp tensions with the universal principles of individual rights and legal and democratic equality. The thesis addresses one aspect of this problem and explores the role of cultural and national claims in the definition and conception of the political community and in drawing its boundaries. I provide a critical discussion of the prominent approaches to this question in contemporary theories of liberal nationalism and liberal multiculturalism, and argue that the cultural notions of the political community which they espouse are inadequate. Drawing on earlier approaches to the claims of nationalities in liberal, republican and democratic political thought - as they emerge in Europe during the 1848-9 revolutions and in the peace treaties at the end of WWI - I retrieve and develop an alternative conception of the political community and its boundaries, which I call 'the political approach'. This approach, I argue, is better equipped to accommodate in theory the legitimate claims of cultures and nationalities, without falling into the traps of cultural essentialism, homogeneity and exclusion. At the same time, different from civic and cosmopolitan views, the political conception does not ignore or deny the public role and place of cultural and national identities.

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This study investigates whether British elites’ discourse on sovereignty has changed as European integration has progressed. Academic research has long recognized the existence of discourse change regarding sovereignty, and the process of European integration is likely to be a modern event that produces such change in elite understanding of sovereignty. The dissertation thus investigates the question of whether elite discourse on sovereignty has indeed changed in the context of European integration. This research is separated into two parts. The first part examines how the academic literature has discussed sovereignty in the contemporary world, how sovereignty has generally been conceptualized in Britain and the challenge of European integration to the academic and British political debates around sovereignty thereby presenting the key mechanism behind modern discourse change. The second part conducts a discourse analysis focusing on statements of British MPs from British accession to the EC to the debate on the Treaty of Lisbon. In order to conduct discourse analysis, MPs are classified into specific groups: Government, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, and those who favoured a bill, and those who were against a bill. Further, I divide the process of European integration into three time periods: the Accession to the EC and the referendum on membership (1971-1975); the Single European Act and the Treaty of Maastricht (1985-1993); and New Labour (1997-2009). The analysis is carried out by a comparison between different groups and time periods. Ultimately, the dissertation determines whether British elites’ discourse on sovereignty has changed and, if so, whether there is a new interpretation of sovereignty in modern day Britain.

La présente étude se propose de revisiter la doctrine classique des droits fondamentaux des États, et cherche à vérifier si c’est à raison qu’elle fut rejetée, ou si elle trouve désormais quelque environnement juridique plus favorable à son redéploiement. Opposés trait pour trait aux droits dits relatifs ou accessoires qui trouvent leur source dans le droit conventionnel et coutumier, les droits de conservation, de souveraineté, d’égalité, de respect et de commerce, sont conçus comme fondamentaux dans un sens évidemment matériel – ce sont des droits constitutifs de l’État-nation et, inversement, des droits dont l’aliénation totale ou partielle anéantirait ou diminuerait la personnalité de l’État qui y consentirait –, mais également dans un sens formel – la violation d’un droit fondamental étatique emportant des effets juridiques spécifiques comme la nullité des traités et le recours à la guerre. Or, en raison de la contradiction entre l’horizontalité de l’ordre juridique international et la fondamentalité des droits étatiques, ainsi que du fondement très individualiste de la doctrine, celle-ci subit les attaques des écoles positivistes et néo-naturalistes durant l’entre-deux-guerres, et finit par être absolument rejetée au sortir du deuxième conflit mondial. Prenant toutefois acte du regain d’intérêt doctrinal que suscitent les droits étatiques, tant en droit international qu’en droit de l’Union européenne et en droit constitutionnel, dans le contexte d’une société internationale qui a beaucoup évolué, il s’agit de vérifier si certains droits étatiques, prétendus fondamentaux, répondent bel et bien aux critères matériel et formel de la fondamentalité d’un droit. Dans une perspective fédéraliste, c’est-à-dire d’une protection institutionnalisée des droits étatiques, les États obtiennent-ils par exemple une garantie de leur droit à la survie dans le cadre des Nations Unies ou d’un droit au respect de leur identité nationale dans le cadre de l’Union européenne ? Dans une perspective étatiste, c’est-à-dire d’une protection unilatérale des droits étatiques, si les internationalistes classiques théorisent à raison que l’aliénation des droits souverains et des droits identitaires portent atteinte à la qualité d’État-nation, la garantie de tels droits ne relève-t-elle pas alors davantage de l’ordre juridique national que de l’ordre juridique international, auquel il n’échoit pas de protéger l’État contre lui-même / This thesis revisits the classical doctrine of fundamental rights of States, and attempts to determine whether it was rightly rejected, or if it could now be redeployed within a more adequate legal framework. In contrast with the so-called relative or accessory rights, which find their source in customary and conventional law, the rights to self-preservation, sovereignty, equality, dignity and mutual commerce are conceived as fundamental in a material sense – because they are inherently linked to the Nation-State and, conversely, a Nation-State could not dispose of them without affecting its statehood –, but they are also conceived in a formal sense – because their violation implies specific legal effects as the rights of the affected State to invoke invalidity of rules found in contradiction of them and, ultimately, to resort to war. In that respect, while classical internationalists hand down to posterity a notable theory of fundamental rights of States, they paradoxically claim to deploy it in the international legal order, which is radically horizontal. Therefore, somehow resisting from doctrinal attacks, the theory of fundamental rights of States was finally abandoned in the second half of last century. Nevertheless, acknowledging the renewed doctrinal interest in state rights, both in international law, in European Union law and in constitutional law, in the context of an evolving international society, the point is to question whether these states’ rights meet the materiel and formal criteria of the fundamentality of rights. In a federalist perspective, namely an institutional protection of state rights, do States obtain, for instance, a protection of their right to survival within the United Nations and a protection of their right to respect for national identity within the European Union ? From a statist point of view, namely a unilateral protection of state rights, if classical internationalists correctly theorize that the alienation of sovereign and identity rights undermine the quality of a Nation-State, does the protection of such rights fall within the international legal order or rather within the national legal order ?