alain wijffels One might object that most polities, in European history and around the world, have been conceived around the notion of a supreme power, and that supreme power was most often also a central power. However, if we look at European history since the Second Middle Ages (i.e. from around the eleventh century onwards), we notice that sovereign power was not always the same as a central or exclusive power. What is today regarded as devolution (or whatever the phrase used in different countries) is often a way of reconstructing (sometimes along different geographical or functional lines) a more diffuse notion of multi-layered and fragmented sovereignty which existed before the attempts to streamline the state structure along the exclusive principle of central supreme power. At the risk of over-simplifying the case (as in the diagram of Fig. 1): one may argue that during the Second Middle Ages, the prevailing paradigm of political power was one of concurrent or competing sovereignties, not only in each individual territory, but also through trans-jurisdictional corporations and networks.7 By the sixteenth century, a new paradigm was taking shape: that of exclusive sovereignty, i.e. where all legitimate power within a territory was concentrated into one body, usually (but not necessarily) amonarch.8 Towards the end of the eighteenth and by the beginning of the nineteenth century, that paradigm of exclusive sovereignty was maintained, but it Robert 2012, pp. 65-66, may be regarded as various forms of the general de-centralisation process in political governance during the second half of the twentieth century. In the case of the European Union, diverging dynamics have been at work: its main challenge may be said to have sought a state structure which departed from the state structure of the nation-state, without any pre-conceived model. On the Western tradition of complex unions, see the by now classical analysis of Forsyth, Murray 1981. 7 Throughout the Second Middle Ages and Early-Modern Times (and also later, especially in non-Western societies), the development can be followed not only in domestic public law, as the expression of “internal sovereignty”, but also in international public law, since the autonomous actors often also appeared in international relations, and could therefore claim a degree of “external sovereignty”. 8 Even in some complex polities where the “sovereign” was not a physical monarch, the attributes of the early-modern sovereign can be recognised in the rulers of the entities of such complex polities. Perhaps one of the most telling illustrations is the position of the territorial princes in Holy Roman Empire. Even the staging of their quasi-sovereignty, for example the Versailles-like palaces (though built on a smaller scale) reflected in many cases the French model of exclusive (and absolutist) sovereignty within their territory. 35
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