Sovereignty and the Personality of the State

n international law, states are assumed to be persons by virtue of being bearers of rights and obligations. This chapter provides a brief genealogy of the person of the state. It shows how the concept of sovereignty — first understood as supreme and indivisible authority within a given polity — helped early modern authors to account for the temporal continuity of states, and also allowed them to attribute rights and obligations to such fictitious entities. It then shows how this conception of sovereignty was instrumental when attributing a capacity for autonomous action to the natural person of sovereign, and how the subsequent redefinition of sovereignty in terms of external independence helped to relocate that capacity to the state as a whole. Finally, it describes how this view of the state as an independent entity came to constitute the baseline for the theory of recognition, according to which states take on their personality as a consequence of being recognized as persons by other states.