Submitted by: Diorella Velasquez

Public International Law

Atty.Bagares

The End of State as We Knew it?

The Author discusses the concept of Sovereignty and the various historically and
philosophical theories that tried to define the concept of sovereignty. The article cites several
concepts such as nominalism, the Thomistic approach and Judeo-Christianitys influence on
societal transformation that paved the new ideas about human nature and society that gave rise to
political science, and disciplines that eventually replaced theology as social theory. Here the
author juxtaposition of Aquinas and Dooyeweerd, the Thomistic approach viewed that good is
good not because god commands it but because he had to command the good, this view posits
that God himself is subject to law, this view conceived that states are grounded in the nature of
human beings and society. in the nominalists as state by Dooyeweerd God could just as well
have willed an egotistical moral law instead of the 10 Commandment. Dooyeweerd rejected the
Roman Catholic .
A discussion on the influence of nominalism in theorizing sovereignty in the
modern era as seen in Carl Schmidt , the author discussed Schmidts view that there can be no
law limiting the discretion of the ruler to decide the point, or to declare who is an enemy of the
state and who is not; in other words, the ruler is the law herself. Koskenniemi the Author of the
Gentle Civilizer expresses that States are treated as individuals in International law
The author also discusses Chaplins criticism of Dooyewereds argument that
there never has existed a state whose internal structure was not in the last analysis, based on an

organized armed power, at least claiming the ability to break any armed resistance on the part of
the private organization within its territory. Chaplin argues that it is clearly not the case that all
states do in fact need to coerce most people physically in order to enforce them to obey its laws.
In many states most people obey the laws of the state for reasons other than physical
compulsion.
Anne-Marie Slaughters Disaggregated State is a contemporary international law
theory that the author discusses. Slaughter advances the concept of an disaggregate state which
she described as like the globe shouldered by Atlas at the Rockfeller Center in New York
she presents her argument .. a world of government networks would be more effective and
potentially more just world order than either what we have today or a world government in
which a set of global institutions perched above nation-states enforced global rules. The author
notes that Slaughter failed to take into account that in todays world , people and government
around the world cannot do without global institutions to solve collective problems that can only
be addressed on a global scale, and that she seems to only have a vague notion of states as she
confuses the state with governmental institutions. The author commended her though for
bringing into light empirical data about how various individual government institutions now
interact with their counterparts abroad in a network of networks.
These varying views authors, philosophers and scholars demonstrated that until
now, there definitive concept of what a state is, at least in the realm of international law, author
closed the article by stating that Slaughter is not the first, nor will she be the last to declare the
death of the state , for as long as theorist insists on certain untheorized theory of state without
state-ideas