Fabrizio Mejía Madrid: Sovereignty

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One of the great lessons for humanity is that national sovereignty is an obsolete conceptsaid a political scientist from Georgetown University at UNAM a year and a half ago. Just two months ago, the general secretary of the PRI said on the Senate platform, because she is also a senator: Sovereignty is not an absolute value, nor is it a religious dogma. In the 21st century, sovereignty has limits. A few days ago, a former legislator who was caught collecting an elderly pension that he had voted against, predicted: Trump is the hope of Mexico.

All of these attacks have been subdued by the manifestation of popular sovereignty in the formation of the Executive and Congress and, therefore, in the force that allows President Claudia Sheinbaum to set the scope of national sovereignty and her State. From those who proposed kneeling in front of the one who is not yet the acting President of the United States due to a threat of tariffs, to those who begged for military intervention in Mexico, the opposition came across one of the characteristics of sovereignty: that it appears as a will general, both when legislating and when defending against a foreign agent. How does it appear?

Before answering that question, I allow myself to remember Rousseau’s famous image of the general will, which is neither a political majority nor divisible into powers. It is known as the image of Japanese charlatans and says: But since our politicians cannot divide sovereignty in its principle, they divide it in its object; They divide it into strength and will; in Legislative Branch and Executive Branch; in rights of tax, justice and war; in internal administration and in power to deal with foreigners; They no sooner confuse all these parts than they separate them. They make the sovereign a fantastic being, made up of related pieces; It is as if man were made up of many bodies, of which one had the eyes, another the arms, another the feet, and nothing else. It is said that the charlatans of Japan tear a child to pieces in full view of the spectators, and then, throwing its limbs into the air one after the other, they cause the child to fall back to the ground alive and whole.. What Rousseau is explaining is that there is real power that flows through the State, that is, sovereignty when it is linked to a legitimate source, the people. It is not, as its critics would like, just something that is said in constitutions to make them democratic. It’s not just a matter of strength either. It is a claim against something or someone who wants to reduce it.

What we have seen in the first days of Claudia Sheinbaum’s government is precisely the manifestation of sovereignty, which is a form of power – different from authority, laws, or force – that appears when it comes to limiting external powers: in the face of privatization, market dogma, autonomous agencies, media minorities, international panels, foreign agencies, the elected president of the United States. It is remarkable to observe the restitution of the State in real time, after a period in which it was dismantled, reviled as obsoleteand its sovereignty was divided like the body of the Japanese child.

Sovereignty is something that can be defended only when there is consensus. That is why we had six-year periods in which the presidents were official CIA informants or, later, unwilling doormats. Sovereignty cannot be exercised when it is not possessed. It is the source of political and moral authority. Without confusing it with mere force or law, sovereignty is a strategic instrument to unite what is with what should be. It is invoked when there is a danger of a reduction in the power of the State or when another agent, private or foreign, wants to increase that power at its expense. It is a strategy to allocate power.

The history of popular and national sovereignty is the very substance of the history of Mexico. Defense against the colonial elites became facing the invasions of France and the United States. The fight against the Porfirista oligarchy established the scope that popular self-determination had against those who sought to limit it, such as the oil companies.

That history, that of the efforts to give content to sovereignty, does not embody a conceptual confusion or that we have been talking about something that does not exist or is obsoletebut rather its conflicts and outcomes have a historical depth that emerges in situations like the ones we live in, with all the sense of historicity of the present, as a bridge between popular and national sovereignty. Without being an intangible theory or a substance that has such or such features, sovereignty is made of history. It is material. Appears. We can witness it in the intersection between legitimate and illegitimate powers. It is nothing more than rhetoric: its exercise requires popular consensus and the political emotions that derive from it. It is the feeling of historicity in the present.

At least since Hidalgo’s Cry of Independence, sovereignty represents a principle of unity that brings together the multiplicity of powers within the political sphere, dispelling the fragmentation of authority by tracing its traces to a point of common origin. That point is the popular irruption. The town of 1810 is not the same as the town of 1857 or 1910, but it is its geological layer that we call sovereignty today.

Today is, there is no doubt, the tidal wave of votes and the participation that millions of us have in this new transformation process. It is a political unit, not a sociological one. The people are not the population. People are those who define themselves as such in the conflict against the elites. In Mexico, this conflict is not about identity, as in Europe and the United States, but about social classes. This explains how the European and American corporate media were amazed by President Claudia Sheinbaum’s letter to Donald Trump: after all, sovereignty still existed somewhere in the world, and the State was not a 20th century junk.