script enacted whenever powerful actors deem it useful.
international institutions are fundamentally less institutionalized and path dependent than
domestic institutions. As Krasner says,
Compromising the sovereign state model is always available as a policy option
because there is no authority structure to prevent it: nothing can preclude rulers
from transgressing against the domestic autonomy of other states or recognizing
entities that are not juridically autonomous.
Krasner argues that because there is no institutional hierarchy of authoritative rules at the
international level, rulers will always be faced with situations in which different rules
apply, and power and interest are most likely to determine how they act. Rulers will
voluntarily or involuntarily abandon the institution of sovereignty as incentives and
relations. Yet the international system is more institutionally developed than Krasner
allows, and these institutions do affect the rights and powers of state sovereigns in
important ways.
Recently sovereignty has been challenged de jure in ways that are undermining
the basic and traditional powers of sovereigns. Material power alone cannot explain why
states are changing the boundaries of the core institution that provides order and protects
their rights internationally. Moreover, these changes have not only domestic but
international consequences for states. One area in which the boundary of state
sovereignty has been most changed is human rights. The creation and expansion of the
38
Stephen D. Krasner, “Westphalia and All That,” in Ideas and Foreign Policy, ed. Judith Goldstein and
Robert O. Keohane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
39
Stephen D. Krasner, “Rethinking the Sovereign State Model,” in Empires, Systems and States: Great
Transformations in International Politics, ed. Tim Dunne and Ken Booth Michael Cox (Cambridge/New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
40
Krasner (2001).
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Convention