Völkerrechtliche Souveränität

Within the history of international law, »sovereignty« is inextricably tied to the notion of the state. As this article will show, this is not only the case with regard to its external dimensions, i.e. the relations of a sovereign state vis-à-vis other legal subjects. Rather, international law also had severe repercussions on the domestic dimensions of sovereignty, since the criteria a state had to meet in order to be recognized as »sovereign« by other international actors often changed with the transformations of sovereignty on the international level. This article traces the transformations of these criteria throughout the history of international law and shows that effective political control was never sufficient for an entity to be recognized as sovereign.