Sovereignty, in classical terms, was the locus of final political authority within a bounded polity. Sovereignty for Hobbes must be unified in one person or assembly because divided authority leads to conflict and ultimately to civil war.

This was the view that formed the nation state after Westphalia.

Contemporary Western states now, however, face not merely external pressures but an internal fragmentation of authority.

This is the rise of ‘counter-sovereign enclaves’ that challenge the state’s monopoly over law and legitimacy. It signals a crisis of political authority. This fragmentation is driven and justified by a distinct elite formation often described, in various guises, as the ‘New Class’. Yet this is only one of several ‘Leviathans’ vying for power.

From the state to civil society a spectre is haunting Europe and the US. The crisis of sovereignty is inherent to liberal democracies.

There are five aspects to the emergence of counter sovereigns…

There is nothing new about the first aspect – ‘The New Class’. Milovan Djilas argued that communist systems produced a new class that controlled the state through administrative power, writing that ‘the new class is the real owner of nationalised property’. James Burnham anticipated a similar transformation in capitalist societies, where managerial elites displace traditional owners: ‘Ownership has been separated from control.’ The new administrators work as the ‘gatekeepers’ to institutional dominance. They control the inputs into institutions such as the Judiciary and the public sector. Whilst the sublime objects of ideology may differ in each regime (communism, liberalism), the output is a closed shop of cultural and democratic thought.

However, whilst the communist systems utilised a monopoly of force, the West is ‘hoist by its own petard’. Liberalism works by gathering together disparate groups according to the ideological ethos: individualism, gender, multiculturalism. It seeks to enhance its power through a wider morphing demographic. This utilisation of extremes means the centre cannot hold. This contains the seeds of its own destruction.

John Kenneth Galbraith extended this into the corporate sphere, describing the ‘technostructure’ that governs large organisations. Daniel Bell identified the cultural and epistemic dimension, arguing that post-industrial society elevates ‘the centrality of theoretical knowledge’.

These thinkers offered a single claim: modern societies are governed, not by traditional democratic majorities or property-owning elites, but by a knowledge-based administrative stratum whose authority rests on expertise.

Whilst this analysis may have been true during the ‘New Deal’ era, expertise has now been replaced by incompetence. The nature of liberal ideology and its constant mantra of diversity has meant the dysfunctional state abounds. Ideology replaces excellence and this wasteland of conformity is built on an inherent contradiction. This is the effect of ideology overtaking functionality and efficiency.

Contemporary elites privilege transnational norms over national authority, in that appeals to universal rights overtake the claims of democratic self-government.

The New Class is, by its nature, oriented toward abstract, extra national system management. This orientates itself to weaken territorial sovereignty, community and replace it with Human Rights Acts, International Law etc.

Counter-sovereignty is not accidental but systemic.

Managerial governance fragments authority into overlapping jurisdictions: supranational bodies, NGOs, courts, and identity-based claims. Burnham’s insight that control migrates from owners to managers is extended to the political realm, where sovereignty migrates from citizens to administrators. The result is a layered system in which no actor exercises final authority.

The vestiges of sovereignty, for example the ‘King’s Prerogative’ in Britain, is now open to ‘Judicial Review’ whereby unelected members of the Judiciary act Contra legem of the sovereign state.

How does counter-sovereignty emerge?

Counter-sovereignty operates in practice through migration and plural legal orders. Parallel communities challenge the state’s claim to sovereign power. These communities may be cultural, religious, or ideological, but they challenge national law.

Hence the presence in the US and Europe of expanding groups undermining consensus or community.

From Black Lives Matter to whispers of Islamic Shariah Law in Britain, native communities lose control of everything from immigration to economic policy.

The New Class facilitates this process by legitimising such fragmentation through legal and moral discourse.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted the political expression of this class in policy expertise and bureaucratic expansion. Moynihan’s concern with bureaucratic expansion becomes relevant here: policy is increasingly shaped by experts who treat sovereignty as a problem to be managed rather than a sacred principle of government. The entire remit of the administrative class depends on mediation, interpretation, regulation and a constant recirculation of the same failed policy material rather than direct political accountability. The myth of representative democracy is the perfect foil for the irascible, profit seeking elite.

There are a further four areas where counter sovereignty replaces the national state. Religious transnationalism, mass migration, supranational institutions, and digital sovereignty. Whilst the state/religion divide can always be difficult, it rarely, in modern times, becomes existential. Islam, in its political form, does it by asserting that divine or transnational religious norms outrank national legislation. Sovereignty is strained when ‘counter-sovereign communities’ expand inside the polity and refuse full integration into a common political authority. It is not a diminution of the validity of Islam, but a recognition of a clash of spiritual cultures. To recognise this within the state is not discriminatory but a merely functional analysis.

Mass migration, likewise, pressures sovereignty in the territorial and social register. A state remains sovereign only if it can decide who enters, who stays, and on what terms newcomers are incorporated into a shared civic order.

This does not mean that all migration is destructive. It means that massive, poorly governed migration tests administrative capacity, welfare systems, policing, and the cultural preconditions of democratic trust.

There’s the rub.

An indigenous community losing trust in the state compounds the problem. This is ultra visible in Britain where illegal immigration, smuggling networks, and hostile actors are exploiting migration routes to destabilise the nation.

Populism is a response to the attack on the nation state.

Carl Schmitt noted that a sovereign state must be able to exercise the ‘exception’; that is act on border controls without international legal jurisdiction.

‘The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything.’ – Carl Schmitt, Political Theology.

Likewise, supranational institutions pressure sovereignty in the juridical and political register. They do not abolish the nation state, but they dilute its status as the final decision-maker. In the European context, this happens through shared rule, regulatory supremacy in some domains, courts, fiscal constraints, and common border or asylum frameworks. The problem is not cooperation as such. The problem appears when accountability remains national while effective decision power migrates upward or outward. This is visible in Britain’s constant battle with immigration and trade rules with the EU. That is why the sovereignty debate has returned: citizens still blame national governments for outcomes they do not fully control. The EU works as a supranational arbiter of liberal modes; rewarding the good and punishing the evil.

Power now runs through infrastructure as much as through law. Digital sovereignty sharpens this counter-sovereign pressure because critical data, cloud services, AI models etc depend on foreign entities and foreign jurisdictions. Again, a state may retain formal sovereignty while losing operational autonomy.

The European Commission’s 2025 Digital Decade package states that ‘persistent strategic dependencies threaten the EU’s economic security and technological sovereignty’, especially in semiconductors, cloud and data infrastructure, and cybersecurity technologies. It therefore urges renewed action on ‘technological sovereignty’. But for the EU as a bloc, within EU law, sovereignty today has an infrastructural dimension. A state that cannot secure its data, communications, identity systems, payment rails, or defence software stack is only partly sovereign, even if its borders are intact. Digital autonomy outsourced to the Mandarins in Brussels.

Border control follows from this. Border control is not about exclusion. It is the visible proof that political membership is governed, not a free for all. If the border becomes porous in practice, the public infers that the state lacks either capacity or will. It lacks the ‘exception’. So the problem is more than migration numbers. It concerns the credibility of sovereign jurisdiction.

A border that can be crossed but not governed weakens confidence in every other promise of the state.

The same can be said with a nations approach to defence: outsource at your own peril. Germany’s and Europe’s military dependency exposes the hardest edge of the sovereignty problem. A polity is not fully sovereign if its ultimate security guarantee rests elsewhere. Europe has moved to reduce that dependency, but official EU and Nato documents still show the scale of the gap. In March 2025, the European Council stated that Europe ‘must become more sovereign, more responsible for its own defence and better equipped to act and deal autonomously’. In October 2025, it added that the Union must reduce ‘strategic dependencies’, close capability gaps, and strengthen the European defence technological and industrial base. Nato’s 2026 update shows progress in spending, with all Allies meeting or exceeding the earlier 2 per cent benchmark in 2025 and European Allies and Canada reaching 2.3 per cent of combined GDP. But higher spending does not erase dependence on US enablers such as intelligence, air and missile defence, lift, command-and-control, and the nuclear umbrella. The EU Military Committee forum paper makes the same point in diplomatic language when it says improved burden sharing is ‘a necessity’ arising from current geostrategic conditions.

The conclusions for the above counter-sovereign trends are complex.

First, sovereignty in the West is no longer only constitutional. It is territorial, digital, demographic, and strategic.

Second, different pressures require different responses: counter-terror capacity, admission controls for immigration, withdrawing from supranational governance, a national industrial and technological policy for digital dependence, rearmament for military independence.

Third, the key political danger is not any one pressure in isolation but their cumulative effect: citizens begin to believe that their state can neither decide nor protect. Once that belief hardens, populist forces gain momentum. Declining civil sovereignty leads to antisemitism and other forms of scapegoating across ideological divides. The polity becomes marked by distrust, fragmentation, and recurring crises of authority.

The crisis of sovereignty is existential since elites use ‘Counter Sovereigns’ as a strategy for governance; a divide and rule mission. Consequently, you have eroding citizenship marked by liberal democracies sponsoring bad actors.

Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, a liberal German legal scholar and constitutional theorist, is known for his ‘Böckenförde dictum’. It encapsulates the dilemmas of the modern state:

‘The liberal, secularised state lives by prerequisites which it cannot itself guarantee.’

Brian Patrick Bolger He has taught International Law and Political Philosophy at Universities in Europe. His articles have appeared in leading magazines and journals worldwide in the US, the UK, Italy, Canada, etc. His new book, ‘Nowhere Fast: Democracy and Identity in the Twenty-First Century’ is published now by Ethics International Press. He is an adviser to several Think Tanks and Corporates on Geopolitical Issues