Negotiating Sovereignty in German History—Historiographical Challenges

ABSTRACT

This article introduces a special issue on the politics of sovereignty in German history. Historical work provides an important corrective to understand the current discursive resurgence of sovereignty. Historians (and other scholars) should treat sovereignty not as a factual description of the world, but rather analyze it as a rhetorical claim to assert power in territorial, political, economic, legal, and cultural disputes. Much of the power of sovereignty lies in the power to define its boundaries, whether geographical or conceptual. German history offers a particularly fruitful route to historicize the concept, as Germany is arguably both a paradigmatic and a special case in the history of sovereignty. From late-nineteenth-century colonialism to contemporary disputes around gambling restrictions, German discourse on sovereignty has intertwined with and challenged international understandings of sovereignty together with neighboring concepts, such as independence, autonomy, supreme authority, and control. In the twentieth century, perhaps no country experienced stronger affirmations of both sovereignty and the necessity to integrate into inter- and supranational structures than the country at the center of the two world wars and subsequently divided during the Cold War.