“The traditional principle of sovereignty which plays a central role in the foreign policies of all states, is now increasingly counteracted by the growing facts of interdependence…” Discuss. (1995)
Sovereignty, theorised by Jean Bodin and institutionalised at Westphalia (1648), claims supreme and exclusive authority over a territory. The statement captures the mid-1990s debate. The WTO had just been founded and the Maastricht Treaty had created the European Union, so a principle of law appeared to be colliding with a fact of economics. The tension is real, but interdependence has reshaped sovereignty rather than defeated it.
Why sovereignty is central to foreign policy
- It underpins sovereign equality and non-intervention (UN Charter, Articles 2(1), 2(4) and 2(7)) and gives weak states their main legal shield.
- Post-colonial states guard it most closely. India’s Panchsheel (1954), non-alignment and later strategic autonomy all treat it as a first principle.
How interdependence counteracts it
- Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye (Power and Interdependence, 1977) showed that sensitivity and vulnerability to others’ decisions limit what any government can do alone.
- Economic integration. Capital mobility, global production chains and WTO disciplines constrain tariffs, subsidies and monetary choices. India’s 1991 balance-of-payments crisis showed how external markets can force domestic reform.
- Pooled authority. The European Union shares law-making through qualified-majority voting and a common currency.
- Transnational problems such as climate change, pandemics, terrorism and cyber threats demand regimes like the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement.
- Normative interdependence. Human-rights treaties and the Responsibility to Protect (2005) make sovereignty conditional on how a state treats its people.
Why sovereignty survives
- Stephen D. Krasner (Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, 1999) separates interdependence, domestic, Westphalian and international legal sovereignty. Interdependence erodes mainly control over cross-border flows, while legal sovereignty is intact and the number of recognised states keeps rising.
- Abram Chayes and Antonia Handler Chayes (The New Sovereignty, 1995) redefine sovereignty as status: membership of the regimes that govern international life. Ceding a competence by treaty is itself a sovereign act.
- Kenneth N. Waltz (“The Myth of National Interdependence”, 1970) argued that great powers are less interdependent than the rhetoric suggests, and that they manage interdependence rather than submit to it.
- Interdependence is asymmetric. Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman (2019) show that states controlling financial and information hubs weaponise it. Interdependence thus becomes an instrument of sovereign power rather than its rival. The burden falls on weaker states, which Marxist and dependency theorists had long argued.
- Re-territorialisation. Tariff wars, export controls, investment screening, data rules such as the Reserve Bank of India’s payment-data localisation mandate (2018) and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (2023), and Brexit’s “take back control” show states reasserting control.
India’s practice
India chooses its interdependencies by partner. It left RCEP in 2019, judging that exposure to Chinese manufacturing was a vulnerability. Since 2022 it has signed trade agreements with the UAE, Australia, EFTA and the United Kingdom, and on 27 January 2026 it concluded negotiations with the European Union. It stays outside the NPT and the ICC. When Iran restricted Hormuz passage in March 2026, India, which had drawn about 45% of its crude through the strait, turned to its “41-plus suppliers”: vulnerability managed by diversification. This is selective interdependence in the service of sovereignty.
Conclusion
Interdependence has turned sovereignty from an absolute, territorial wall into a bargaining resource that states pool, trade and reassert. It counteracts sovereignty’s autonomy far more than its authority. States, above all strong ones, still decide how far to be interdependent, so the principle is being renegotiated rather than retired.