The Sovereignty Revolution, completed shortly before four-term California senator Alan Cranston's death in December 2000, addresses the question of how governments, global alliances, and civil organizations can resolve global challenges effectively in light of globalization's challenge to state-power and the imposition of a shared risk. In order to address such issues as nuclear proliferation, genocide, and economic disenfranchisement, Cranston suggests a shift in the notion of national sovereignty, from one that sees nations as sovereign to one that acknowledges the primacy of individuals over the nation-state. In order to protect these sovereign individuals, Cranston suggests a greater role for transnational organizations such as the United Nations. The book also includes a preface by Alan's Cranston's daughter and the editor of his final work, Kim Cranston, and contributions, by Mikhail S. Gorbechev Jonathan Schell, Jane Goodall and Jonathan Granoff, which highlight the role that Cranston's ideas play in the contributors' own agendas.

Cranston begins by problematizing national sovereignty, pointing out that many of the bloody conflicts that raged at the time of the book's writing-in the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, China, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and elsewhere-are all related to issues of sovereignty: "the fires of passionate crusades to achieve, assert, or defend sovereignty…light up the night skies of our time like some giant uncontrolled forest fire raging all over the world (10)." Cranston-a longtime advocate of nuclear disarmament-points out that these struggles are especially problematic in a world in which the potential use of weapons of mass destruction demands that all nations cooperate in order to avoid a global catastrophe.

In order to suggest a revolution in the idea of national sovereignty, Cranston traces the evolution of the concept, from the time of the first humans to the formation of empires in which rulers were defined as sovereign by divine right and exercised limitless authority over their subjects. The Westphalian idea of national sovereignty goes back to 1648 and the end of the Thirty Years War, after which the sovereign equality of each ruler and state was recognized by the signers of the Treaty of Westphalia. A new stage in the history of sovereignty developed following the French Revolution, after which sovereignty became redefined as belonging to nations rather than to individual rulers.

Now it appears that the idea of sovereignty is changing and is now being located within each individual. Cranston traces this development to the drafting of the U.S. constitution in the late eighteenth-century and to the re-drafting of the French constitution in 1958. This definition of the sovereignty of individuals over nations is now found in the constitutions of almost one hundred nations, and gives Cranston the philosophical legitimacy to propose a formal structure of global governance that would override the sovereignty of individual nations in order to protect individuals.

Cranston thus puts forth a new agenda in order to protect this sovereignty that goes beyond the capacities of the Westphalian state. He believes that under the pressure of globalization, nations would be more protected and global problems dealt with more effectively if these nations relegated a limited amount of their sovereignty to an institution like the United Nations. He cites the United States and the European Union as examples of what is possible when small national groups abdicate some sovereignty to a larger institution, and claims that the failure of nations to pursue a global variant of these regional arrangements is withering away the sovereignty of smaller nations as they fail to control world events.

Cranston also states that it is at times necessary to completely ignore national sovereignty and intervene in nations if internal events-such as genocide or the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction-irrefutably threaten sovereign individuals or the global order. The problem is that there is no generally acceptable way for the world community to decide how to intervene, and therefore interventions in the past such as those in Somalia, Lebanon, and Bosnia have had mixed results. Ultimately, Cranston believes that the U.N. should be the institution in which nations would place more of their sovereignty, and outlines some proposals for strengthening the power of the organization. Such proposals include such as a new way of allocating representation; the curtailment of the use of veto in the Security Council; the addition of more nations to the permanent Security Council; the democratic election of U.N. representatives; an overhaul in the way the institution is currently financed; and the establishment of a permanent peacekeeping force.

The need to have a global system to defend individual sovereignty is becoming more urgent as globalization erodes the control that states can exercise within their national borders. Under these circumstances, no individuals and no nations are acquiring sovereign power; rather, forces in the global economy responsible to no one and transcending national sovereignty are transforming the world and the lives of individuals within it: "No conscious force is shaping the new worldwide society-no sovereigns ruling by divine right, no sovereign nations, no sovereign individuals (33)." Although there is an increasing need for institutions that can address global problems, global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the U.N. have proven themselves ineffective in doing so, as they lack a broad mandate and are limited in their power and resources.

Many scholars have observed the shift in national sovereignty that has occurred as globalization, the expanding non-governmental human rights and environmental sector, and ethnic conflicts shake up the Westphalian world order. Alan Cranston, as a statesman and thinker offers some possible ways that politics can be reformulated in order to address some of the new global challenges and resolve old tensions, looking towards a more peaceful international and transnational future.

Ellennita Muetze Hellmer, The University of Chicago

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