Inalienability of Sovereignty

Inalienability as a characteristic of sovereignty is referred to with respect to the State. It means that the State cannot cede any of its essential elements without self-destruction. If sovereignty is transferred or given away, the very essence of the State and its personality is jeopardized and compromised. Sovereignty and the State stay together. Thinkers like Rousseau and writers like Lieber have upheld the inalienability of sovereignty. Inalienability of sovereignty from the state has been summarized by Lieber succinctly when he says that ‘Sovereignty can no more be alienated than a tree can alienate its right to sprout, or a man can transfer his life or personality to another without self-destruction.’³³ Rousseau had upheld the same view when he said that power, not Will, could be transferred. If we look at the nature of social contracts formulated by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau in the context of the creation or transfer of sovereignty, we can say that for Hobbes, sovereignty came into being only when a sovereign was created by the people and it did not exist in the state of nature. So there cannot be a question of the transfer of sovereignty. For Rousseau, however, sovereignty continues to be held by the General Will and there is no question of alienability. For Locke, the surrender of certain rights to the State other than the rights to ‘life, liberty and property’ did not mean the transfer of supreme power held by the people. Locke argued that people retained supreme power.

Permanence or Perpetuity of Sovereignty

The characteristic of permanence or perpetuity is a necessary supplement of the characteristics of inalienability. If sovereignty is inalienable, it must be permanent. Permanence or perpetuity stands for the quality whereby the sovereignty of the State continues as long as the State itself exists or vice-versa. Bodin treated perpetual power as one of the elements of sovereignty. For Hobbes, as long as the sovereign existed, the commonwealth continued and by challenging or resisting the sovereign, individuals would compromise the commonwealth itself. However, as we have seen above, Hobbes’s formulation confuses the State and the government. As we have seen while discussing the characteristic of indivisibility, to understand the characteristic of permanence, we must differentiate between sovereign power and the government. While the State along with sovereignty is permanent, its expression through government in the form of an assembly of persons, a body of executives or a single person is subject to change. Changes in government do not lead to a change in sovereignty. This is because the change of the government from one to another merely reflects a shift of power from one to another, while sovereign power remains immutable and the sole source of power for the outgoing as well as the incoming governments.

However, permanence should not be interpreted to mean that sovereignty is eternal. In cases where the State ceases to exist due to loss of independence, cessation of territorial boundary to another State or due to coming under colonial relationship, sovereignty is also lost.