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From antagonistic autonomy to relational autonomy: A theoretical reflection from the southern cone
Latin American Politics and Society, Spring 2003 by Russell, Robert, Tokatlian, Juan Gabriel
It is completely different to point out, as many analysts have, that "a state may lose its autonomy while maintaining its sovereignty" (Thompson 1985, 197). In this case, autonomy is employed in the sense of a condition (one that is either diminished or lost), whereas sovereignty is understood in terms of international law (that is, mutual recognition and legal equality of states). In a study on international relations and world politics in the early 1970s, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye concluded,
the impact of transnational relations creates a control gap between the aspirations for control over an expanded range of matters and the capability to achieve it. The problem is not a loss of legal sovereignty but a loss of political and economic autonomy. (Keohane and Nye 1973 393)
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There can even be cases of "failed states" that conserve a nominal degree of sovereignty. This is the situation of many African states, such as Burundi, Congo-Zaire, Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Sudan, to name just a few, which cannot even control their own territory but nevertheless conserve a formal sovereignty; that is, they are recognized by other states, they belong to international organizations, and they have representation abroad.
Another source of confusion is the treatment Robert Gilpin has given to the link between "national autonomy and globalization" in his recent text The Challenge of Global Capitalism, in which he states, "those who argue that globalization has severely limited economic sovereignty appear to believe that governments have previously possessed considerable autonomy" (Gilpin 2000, 316-17). It is worth observing that both terms, sovereignty and autonomy, are employed in a single paragraph in which the same meaning is assigned to each; that is, the state's ability to control its national economy. It would have been clearer to state that globalization, from the vantage point of some authors, severely limits national autonomy in the definition of economic policies.
To avoid this type of confusion, it is necessary to reserve the concept of sovereignty for use in the legal sphere and that of autonomy for the public realm. Consequently, it seems both clearer and more useful to apply the concept of autonomy strictly in terms of its meanings as a condition and an objective national interest. Its meaning in the sense of a principle or right is less comprehensible than that of "Westphalian-Vattelian" sovereignty; the latter immediately conjures up a legal image, particularly that of the rule of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other states.
In 1930, when the Mexican secretary of foreign relations, Genaro Estrada, presented his doctrine proclaiming that recognition of a government should be automatic regardless of its origins, he had Mexico's sovereignty in mind more than its autonomy. His concern was to prevent the United States from using nonrecognition to meddle in that country's internal affairs, as it had done during the Mexican Revolution (Borja 1997, 322).
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