Equality without Sovereignty

It is the purpose of the three following chapters to sketch out a concept of equality in international society that can overcome the drawbacks of sovereign equality while retaining the egalitarian core of the principle. It is the task of this chapter to investigate how equality in international society can be separated from sovereignty and what could be gained from doing that. The chapter starts with an investigation of the two central concepts of the contemporary consensual view about equality in international society, sovereign equality and equality before the law. Sovereign equality regulates the equal rights of states in the UN context, and equality before the law has long been regarded the minimal principle of equality in international society. The chapter reiterates and develops some of the critical arguments raised in the previous chapter but also vindicates a more egalitarian theory of equality in international society. The task is to begin to formulate a minimal principle of equality that is more inclusive than is equality before the law and that does not view equality as just a corollary to sovereignty. A first step in that direction is to disentangle equality from sovereignty, beginning with Hans Kelsen’s criticism of sovereign equality that was already launched in 1944 in response to a proposal by the three powers at the Moscow Conference.