The Invisible Armada

2024/11/22

This is a little tune that the new Taiwanese president, who took office on May 20, 2024, never tires of making us hear: it is no longer necessary for Taiwan's independence to be the subject of a solemn proclamation, the Republic of China (ROC, the official name of Taiwan) being already an independent and therefore sovereign state. It is therefore useless to proclaim an independence that already exists in the form of an established sovereignty. This motif was already widely deployed under the previous presidency, that of Tsai Ing-wen, but it is, under the aegis of Lai, accentuated and, so to speak, made official - it is now set in stone in the official doctrine of the Taiwanese state.

The correlative, directly arising from this definition of independence as equal to sovereignty, finds its official formulation in the following statement, concerning the decisive question of relations between Taiwan and mainland China (the People's Republic of China): the ROC is not, as a sovereign entity, any more subordinate to the People's Republic of China (PRC) than the latter is to the former. Neither entity is subordinate to the other - this formula has now become, in the mouths of Taiwanese leaders from the pro-independence DPP party, just as invariable and sacramental as the one that establishes a chain of equivalence between independence and sovereignty. Unfolded and explained, it continues as follows: the ROC and the PRC are two sovereign and separate entities, entirely distinct. In other words, the general and principled motive of a single China, established at the basis of the mutual recognition agreements between China and the Western and other powers (notably Japan) in the 1970s, at the basis of its entry into the UN (and the Security Council), and more generally still, of its entry into the "concert of nations" - this motive is now in fact, whatever its variations and interpretations, implicitly proclaimed null and void by the present Taiwanese authorities.

Now, the only question under debate would then be whether we can consider that there are two "Chinas", one continental and one insular, distinctly separate, or whether we must definitively detach the sovereign entity "Taiwan" from the signifier "China". Deciding between these two options currently remains beyond the reach of Taiwanese leaders, or rather, it turns out on examination that the choice in favor of one or the other must remain permanently suspended, for reasons to which we will have to return. So, on the one hand, there is a frenzied "insularism", symbolized by the unofficial representation of the green island (the favorite color of the independentist movement), and on the other hand, the persistence of the official name - Republic of CHINA -, with its official emblem, which comes directly from the regime established by Chang Kai-shek, itself directly deriving from the eventful Chinese history of the 20th century - the proclamation of the Republic in 1911, the fight against the Japanese occupation, the civil war lost by the Kuomintang against the Chinese communists...

The two formulas that aim to give force of law to the current doctrine of the pro-independence movement in power in Taipei have the function, in particular, of casting a veil over the uncertainties, aporias, inconsistencies, and contradictions that constantly arise in the discourse of political elites and state officials whenever questions relating to the history of the island, its population, its status, and its prisms of identity are addressed. These statements have a primarily performative function: they aim to make prevail as truth above all suspicion and discussion what, in practice, is constantly denied by what constitutes the quintessence of the Taiwanese “problem”: the impossibility of making the complexities and paradoxes of the island, in its history as in its culture, coincide with any theoretical framework or conceptual apparatus of importation whatsoever – starting with the key notion, forged through the test of European and Western history, of the nation-state; The more Taiwanese independence activists harp on about the Taiwanese nation , the more the political and human reality of the island eludes and resists this projection.

The decisive moment of the discursive operation conducted by the new Taiwanese administration is therefore based on a distinct coup de force – the equivalence of the notions of independence and sovereignty. This is the basis of the boosted, doped independence storytelling that was put in place with the accession of the militant independence activist Lai to the supreme magistracy. However, the construction of this chain of equivalence whose nebulous outcome remains constant - Taiwan is not at all China while still being a bit of China (the Republic of CHINA ) - is based on an artifice sewn with white threads.

Indeed, Taiwan is an independent political power or entity, de facto, since Chang Kai- shek took possession of the island with the debris of his army and the administration that remained loyal to the "nationalists", after his defeat by the communist forces on the mainland. The real foundations of this de facto independence are easily verifiable: Taiwan has its own political system, its administration, all the elements that characterize a modern state, a currency, an army, a police force, a tax system, the inhabitants of this country travel abroad with Taiwanese passports, etc. Until the major turning point represented by the entry of mainland China led by the Chinese Communist Party into the international community, following in particular the establishment of diplomatic relations with the United States and the main Western powers, the Republic of China , withdrawn to Taiwan, continued, formally, to embody Chinese sovereignty and it is in this capacity that it sat at the UN.

After Chang Kai-shek (and thus the ROC) slammed the door on the UN in 1971, following the entry of the People's Republic of China into this arena, the situation changed abruptly: not only did the ROC lose, in the eyes of most states and nations of the world, its status as representative or incarnation of Chinese sovereignty, but it saw its diplomatic relations with all the countries that established them with mainland China being undone. This was the turning point. decisive where we see the de facto independence of the island being freed from sovereignty strictly speaking. Taiwanese independence is perfectly captured in its quintessence when it is commonly defined as de facto. This formula does indeed designate a tangible reality, a real status, that of a state power which, in fact, governs itself and is distinguished as such from any other. But this reality is defined precisely as a pure and simple state of things resulting from a fait accompli – at the end of the civil war, Chang Kai-shek and the remains of his power retreated to the island of Taiwan, once again an integral part of the Chinese Republic since 1946, and since, a few years later, the communists, victorious in the civil war, were unable to dislodge him.

The problem is that between this state of affairs, resulting from the chain of known circumstances, and the existence of a sovereignty properly speaking, legitimate in the eyes of the world, there remains, today as yesterday, a gulf that no rhetorical operation, however insistent, can fill.

Since the ROC left the United Nations and no longer maintains diplomatic relations with the vast majority of countries making up the international community, its situation has been constant, in its legal foundations: the ROC is not recognized as a sovereign state, an integral part of the international community – or rather it is only recognized, in a very residual way, by a handful of states scattered across all continents, none of them being a leading power. The ROC is not part of most of the international organizations attached to the UN, it is not a signatory to the major international conventions – even if it “recognizes” some of them. In major international sports competitions, its representatives compete under the baroque label of “Chinese Taipei”...

However, we live in a world where relations between peoples, nations and states are premised on the mutual recognition of sovereignties. In the massive absence of recognition of a collective entity (power) by the other sovereignties making up what is commonly called the international community, this entity does not itself have the status of a sovereignty. This is because there can be no incomplete or partial sovereignty; this follows from the primary definition of sovereignty according to the very philosophical and political tradition from which this notion is borrowed: as Bodin says in the Six Books of the Republic , "sovereignty is the absolute and perpetual power of a Republic". However, in a world that is fundamentally a composition of sovereignties , the recognition of a sovereignty by others is a primary element, constituting "this absolute character" of which Bodin speaks. In other words, and this is crucial, a sovereignty that is not recognized as such by the vast majority of other sovereignties is not simply a sovereignty that is more or less deficient or imperfect – it is not a sovereignty at all .

The notion of incomplete sovereignty is based on a contradiction in terms, it is an absurdity.

In the European philosophical and political tradition, in which the very notion of sovereignty is entirely enveloped, a threshold of modernity can be identified that is quite decisive: that on which the motif of the contract appears , which unfolds on the horizon of mutual recognition and commitment. Here a major bifurcation occurs, already announced by Machiavelli, according to which it is not enough for a power to assert itself by force, it must also be recognized, that is to say perceived as legitimate by other powers or entities, whatever they may be. Here we move from one domain or level of reality to another, from the world of force to that of law. The recognition of one power by another or others is what allows their relations to be inscribed in a contractual horizon – they are now entitled to establish pacts, treaties, to make commitments based on principles, elements of rights and also, a fundamental element, trust.

It is only in this horizon that sovereignty takes on its full meaning. It only becomes, in European history and then in that of the world, a principle of order, an instituting factor and a supposedly universal reference on the condition of being solidly arranged on this discursivity – a sovereignty exists strictly speaking only in its relation to others and it really exists only on the condition of being legitimized – but the very principle of legitimacy is that it is inseparable from recognition, which founds contractual forms – a self-legitimized sovereignty does not exist .

In this sense, there is no sovereignty that is entirely dissociated from a "fiction", that is to say from a story - but the characteristic of a story, of a "story" is to be shared/shareable. The story of the aspirant to sovereignty who goes around shouting "I am sovereign, I am sovereign..." and that no one listens to, and that no one takes up, such an autarkic story, unfit to fly "from mouth to mouth" (Walter Benjamin) is null and void. In other words: a fiction can only produce reality and especially, here, law, on the condition of becoming a shared story. The word fiction, in this full and positive sense, is not what opposes reality, it is what places the latter under the regime of law or right. But, once again, on the express condition that this fiction must be adopted by listeners who in turn become its narrators and that it thus comes to be authoritative and establish a reserve (“stock”) of legitimacy. In short, it is not enough to shout out loud "I am sovereign!" to create sovereignty, recognition must also follow - and it is this, precisely, which remains beyond the reach of the rhetorician - if he shouts in the desert, if his words fall into the void, if acts of recognition do not follow, nothing changes in his condition, he remains bound, indefinitely, to the fragile and uncomplete regime of the de facto.

It is precisely here that the opposition between de facto (independence) and de jure (sovereignty) takes on its full meaning. Today's Taiwanese leaders can say and do whatever they want, working tirelessly to fill the gulf that separates one from the other with sacramental formulas, the fact remains that a de facto sovereignty, based solely on the factuality of independence but devoid of international recognition and therefore of a distinct legal status in international law, is a UFO, it could not exist, strictly speaking.

We must pause here for a moment on the constitutive paradox of sovereignty as defined by the European philosophical and political tradition: it does indeed arise from the affirmation of a will, and therefore as such from a pure act by which a power emerges and asserts itself in the world, presents itself and intends to assert its rights in the eyes of the world. But on the other hand, in this same world where sovereignty can only exist under the regime of plurality, of multiplicity (the notion of a sovereign of the world having never been current and being inconceivable, this is moreover what distinguishes human sovereignty from divine sovereignty which, itself, is placed under the sign of the One), this sovereignty which asserts and declares itself (hence the importance of the proclamation of sovereignty) can only fully exist on the condition of being legitimized by others, who are equal to it in law, through a process of recognition.

Sovereignty is indeed, as Carl Schmitt stressed, a theological-political concept, human sovereignty being modeled on divine sovereignty, but at the same time, the former is radically distinguished from the latter by being subject to the regime of the multiple while the former is only conceivable, from a Western perspective associated with monotheism, if placed under the regime of the One. Even the sovereign of the Middle Empire (the Emperor of China) knows that his kingdom has an outside and that it does not coincide with the totality of the human world, he knows that there are, in this world , heterogeneous human worlds – the reason why he welcomes the learned Jesuit fathers from Europe to his court.

We can therefore clearly see here that, in the sovereign human condition, the absolute and the relative (the relational) are intertwined in the most paradoxical way possible. The absolute is everything that relates to the performative of proclamation and creation, everything that roots sovereignty in affirmation and fait accompli; the relative and related is everything that unfolds in the horizon of recognition, and therefore of legitimation. This tension covers that which exists between the time of appearing, of being born-into-the-world, which is basically that of the instant, and that of permanence, that of duration. These are two modalities of time which maintain between them the strongest tensions, tensions which we find in the destiny of all modern revolutions – the revolution-event, emergence, affirmation of a new force, and the revolution establishing itself as a power, authority, State, establishing itself over time, which always passes through the stage of its recognition by other sovereignties.

All the revolutions of the 20th century that were not short-lived flashes of brilliance experienced this process, starting with the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution.

In any case, in order to fully exist, a sovereignty cannot be satisfied with authorizing itself, asserting itself, declaring itself and proclaiming itself, in a world whose rule is not the juxtaposition of sovereignties as separate objects, but their perpetual interactions, in a reticular world where relations between sovereignties constantly oscillate between peace and war. In such a world, recognition can only be considered as a constituent element and not an accessory to sovereignty. Legal forms give recognition an explicit, contractual character, they tend towards precision, they have an instituting function – hence the importance of the standards and practices set and recognized by all the components of the international community – existence of embassies, exchanges of ambassadors, protocol – the whole domain of diplomatic rationality which makes it possible to codify relations between sovereignties (and not simply, as is commonly said, "States").

In the absence of these formal recognition procedures, a given sovereignty is not bound by any convention or obligation towards a power or entity whose legitimacy it has not recognized. This is the reason why France, Great Britain, the United States, (etc.) considered themselves, after the overthrow of the Tsarist regime, to be entitled to send expeditionary forces to the territory of Russia to support the White armies – these nations did not recognize the Bolshevik government and therefore considered this de facto power to be illegitimate. This is the reason why Serbia today refuses to recognize independent Kosovo – in doing so, it reserves the right to intervene by all possible means, including armed ones, in the event of open conflict between the Albanian majority and the Serbian minority on this territory. Kosovo is, like Taiwan, in fact, an "independent" state, although very dependent on its protectors (NATO, the European Community, the United States, etc.), but, in the absence of its formal recognition by a significant part of the international community, including heavyweights such as Russia and China, its sovereignty remains contentious, floating, its status is still undetermined, in the absence even of a seat at the UN. Definitely, as previously emphasized, there is no such thing as unfinished sovereignty. A sovereignty that lacks even "a little something" is not sovereignty.

What is true here of Kosovo is a fortiori true of Taiwan – it is not a "little something" that is missing, but rather that essential link that is international recognition, including (unlike Kosovo) that of the main states making up the hegemonic Western bloc (or rather “arrangement”). This is probably the reason why there are no treaties of mutual assistance, particularly military, between the ROC and the countries which, however, are increasingly vocal in their role as its protectors, formally and publicly binding on its signatories, treaties whose classic version is the pact established between France, Great Britain and Poland on the eve of the Second World War and whose existence automatically led to the intervention of the first two alongside the latter when the latter was attacked by Nazi Germany; this is because, since the ROC is only a reality, a "de facto" power, the aid given to it can only be of the same kind - material, military, political, diplomatic - all of which falls short of the formal act that a formal treaty, pact or alliance would constitute. This is because the signing of such a legal act would automatically have the value of recognition of the sovereignty of the ROC, in violation of the generally accepted principle of one China, a principle to which they formally subscribed when they established diplomatic relations with the PRC. Such an infringement would then constitute a casus belli, deliberately provoked by the powers supporting Taiwan, with mainland China.

This is why all the aid given by the Western camp to Taiwan continues to be itself de facto in its very principle. Which also makes it fragile – it is not based on any formal, long-term commitment. Hence the moral panic that seized the Taiwanese independence elites when Trump, during one of his usual uncontrolled vituperations, declared that the support given to Taiwan by the United States could be called into question if the Taiwanese state and taxpayer do not agree to dig into their pockets in return. The syndrome of the abandonment without notice of Taiwan by the most powerful of its protectors, as it then developed, is the direct consequence of the necessarily informal nature of the support provided. It points to the real status of the ROC in this configuration: not that of an ally of the United States but rather that of a protégé, a proxy , a client. In other words, if the United States were to engage politically and militarily in a conflict with China in which Taiwan would be the stake, it would simply be because it considers the island as a private hunting ground, an advanced bastion in the China Sea, for reasons of strategic opportunity – not at all by virtue of a contract linking two sovereignties. We are here in the realm of power relations, not in that of an order based on any form of law whatsoever.

It is this massive evidence that the intense discursive confusion implemented by the Taiwanese independence leaders aims to mask when they put forward the chain of equivalence to which they intend to give force of law: independence, sovereignty, self-determination, non-subordination... It is true that this sophistry is deployed in a generally favorable context where international law is constantly undermined and flouted by both the barons and the spoiled children of hegemony (the United States and Israel first and foremost) and where, as a result, the milestones set by this law have ceased to be solid points of reference recognized by all - where sovereignties are trampled by those who can afford and where the resolutions adopted by the international community are either ignored or applied in one direction, in favor of the "sanctions" adopted by the masters of the game; This world, ever more openly emancipated (for the worse) from the rules supposed to found the international order, is also one in which we are witnessing the rise of supra- or extra-state mega-entities, transnational economic powers boosted by the new capitalism, political, economic and military power blocs such as the European Union or NATO. The growing affirmation of these new power sets (the war in Ukraine is, in its essence, a military conflict between Russia and NATO rather than a war between neighbors or so-called hereditary enemies) tends to make the question of sovereignty nebulous. The abandonments, frank or hidden, of sovereignty are multiplying, everything happening as if the present world were engaged in a process of returning to this sort of state of nature where only power relations exist – here not between individuals but rather power blocs.

The least of the paradoxes is not that those who are the most ardent activists in the service of this regression are the same ones who never cease to shelter their policy of power games and faits accomplis behind the invocation of the international "order", of international law1. It is precisely in this organized chaos, where all the founding markers of the international order tend to fade away that it is important to restore the meaning of the notion of sovereignty - which does not mean making it a fetish or a magic potion 2. But it remains a fact: it is, from the 17th century, on a system arranged in sovereignties that the European order was built, and, by extension, the world order. Of course, in its very genesis, this order is biased mainly due to the constitution of the European colonial empires and then the rise of US imperialism. But the demand of colonized peoples and national minorities to self-determination as it emerged powerfully in the 20th century, combined with the accession to independence of the former colonies, places the question of sovereignty at the center of the game, relaunches it as a unit of account of power and a factor of production and stabilization of the international order.

In the countries of the Global South, the former colonies, sovereignty remains what opposes dependence or subalternity in all their forms. It is not primarily about States, but about peoples. It is also not for nothing that we have seen the emergence in recent decades and in a context of recurring energy crisis, of a notion such as that of "energy sovereignty". In a world where the former colonized countries frequently defined today as "dependent" countries are more often than not subject to the injunctions of the IMF and the World Bank to have their populations undergo drastic "austerity" mesasures, being deeply “endebted” to the Global North, it is important that the notion of sovereignty, that of peoples in priority, remains a primary regulatory factor in what is increasingly struggling to present itself as an "international order".

What matters first and foremost, contrary to what constitutes the hobby horse of the declinist sovereignists of post-imperial Western powers (now relegated to the second league) such as France or Great Britain, is not the rescue of the sovereign prerogatives of the fallen empires, but rather the defense and affirmation of the sovereignty against all odds of the former colonized and subalternized peoples. This is why the trafficking in false intellectual (conceptual) currency that Taiwanese independence leaders are engaging in today around the signifier "sovereignty" must be firmly fought. Counterfeiting is here not put at the service of the emancipation of the people but on the contrary of their subordination – Taiwan is less and less a sovereign entity and more and more openly a protectorate of the United States, with the aggravating circumstance that this situation, this real status of the island does not arise from a coup de force or a fait accompli imposed by an invader or a powerful neighbor but rather from the will of the governing elites. The aspiration to sovereignty does not inspire those who, day after day, huddle more tightly under the umbrella deployed above their heads by their powerful protector.

It would be futile to argue here that these reflections remain confined within a strictly Eurocentric framework. It is not we who, in this case, project categories from the tradition of European political philosophy onto an "other world", it is the Taiwanese independence activists, as they come from a completely different cultural tradition, who have the word sovereignty constantly on their lips and do their best to turn it to their advantage. It is they who proceed to these borrowings without hesitation or scruples, with a view to giving a basis to their ambitions not only in the present, but in the face of History. It is they who do their hasty shopping, in English, in this European tradition and who recycle its elements for their own ends, not without having distorted them to the point of making them unrecognizable; this, to the extent that these state elites are, in Taiwan, subservient to the United States and, more generally, to the Western hegemonic bloc, are deeply acculturated, devoted to mimicry, to such an extent that they are no longer in a position to nourish any autonomous reflection whatsoever, no more in Chinese than in English. Sovereignty, in their mouths, becomes a pure gimmick , an element of language and not a factor of intelligibility – effective sovereignty is the last of their concerns, their obsession, it is a separation as radical as possible from China, at any price – first and foremost that of a total subservience to another master, the United States, the Western bloc. In truth, sovereignty, properly speaking, is not their problem, in no way. Their ambition, intrinsically fantastical, is to make Taiwan pass from one world to another, challenging both history and geography. The mantras about sovereignty are entirely placed at the service of this magical operation – to tear Taiwan away from its history and geography and transport it into the enchanted waters of Western democracy and white liberal civilization and economy.

It would be fully justified to argue that after leaving the UN and ceasing to be, globally, recognized by the international community, this recognition having massively passed to the side of the Chinese mainland regime, Taiwan has become a downfallen sovereignty – as there have been so many in the course of modern history. The forfeiture of a sovereignty can occur in various circumstances – the classic form being a war lost by a sovereign against another sovereign and the effect of which is to release its subjects from the commitment made to it; it is in fact that the defeated sovereign is no longer able to respect the contract made with them – it is no longer in a position to protect them and ensure their existence.

In other circumstances, the loss of sovereignty can result from a civil war – that of the Spanish Republic overthrown by Franco; or even from systemic upheavals – those which led to the disappearance of the USSR, to that of the GDR absorbed by the FRG, to the break-up and demise of the Federation of Yugoslavia. In the case of the ROC, it will be noted that this loss has been the delayed, deferred consequence of the defeat of the Kuomintang during the Chinese civil war: it is with delay that the international community and in particular the Western powers take note of the victory of the Chinese communists and draw the consequences which derive from it, bow to the verdict of History – but they end up doing so, as they did previously in the case of the Russian Revolution.

Of course, in this configuration, the picture is complicated by the fact that the legal fiction of a legitimate China embodied, represented by this residual China (that is, in reality, on the ground, the ROC withdrawn into the Taiwanese bastion) had been maintained for several decades. But this fiction lags behind real History, its perpetuation was based on political calculations and opportunities whose context was the Cold War, the struggle led by the West in East Asia against global communism. Once this fiction has been undone, when it appeared that “the king is naked”, that the ROC could no longer claim to embody "China" in the eyes of the peoples and nations of the world, all that remained was a residue of sovereignty - a territory confined to an island and its dependencies, a land, sea, and air space with an indeterminate status, completely floating in the eyes of international law, like the Republic of Northern Cyprus (in fact a protectorate of Turkey) or like Somaliland (the affinity between Taiwan and this de facto independent territory being sanctioned by the existence of phony diplomatic relations between the two). Or again, if we wanted to take the rapprochements and comparisons to their logical conclusion, we could say: Taiwan is a sovereign state like Guantanamo is a part of the United States : an entity, a territory, a real space, but with a more than nebulous status from the point of view of the norms of international law, a pure state of fact. Taiwan, in this sense, is a “de facto sovereignty” – but between the fact and the law or the norm, the hiatus is glaring here.

As Hobbes points out in Leviathan (ch XXIX, §23), a sovereignty that has been defeated, whether as a result of internal dissension or external war, can never be remade . If, therefore, a “Taiwanese” sovereignty were one day to emerge, coinciding in every way with Taiwan as a space and a name, it would then be appropriate for it to be the object of an entirely new creation, a pure act of will – not a relaunch, restart, but an absolute beginning, in an entirely new situation – resulting from a new roll of the dice. In this sense, the continuity of the ROC designation is a trompe-l’oeil – since it lost its status as the legitimate incarnation of “China” in the eyes of the international community, the ROC is, literally speaking, only a shadow of itself . If a sovereignty were to emerge that would coincide with what is today subsumed under the name of Taiwan, then it would be appropriate for it to start from scratch and be the subject and matter of a creation, a proclamation in the form of a sharp break with the past.

However, the double game of the Taiwanese independence leaders is flagrant here: they never stop mimicking the rupture while playing the game of institutional continuity to the full, that is to say, by relying on the illusory continuity attached to the name of the ROC, they never stop affecting to adorn themselves with new clothes where, for the most part, they act in practive as the heirs of the founders of the Taiwanese entity, themselves adorned with the finery of the Republic of China. They take great care not to delete the constitution of the ROC any more than its institutions, nor its administrative structures, they spare its emblems and symbols, they are content to laboriously put into circulation a victim[ization] storytelling of the years of the dictatorship and to move the statues once still omnipresent of the Generalissimo to depots, pleasure parks and other museums located a good distance from the places of power. But the syndrome of the empty place is omnipresent, where, as in the former USSR and former socialist countries, the orphaned bases of their statues are multiplying: it is not enough to burn in effigy the image of the founding father (there is no sovereignty without a foundation, real or symbolic, associated with images and stories) to equip oneself with a new foundation. It is not enough to tirelessly condemn the Kuomintang (now a senescent opposition party) to the pillory to erase the reality of a State and a legitimacy that owe everything to the accident historical by which this party became the master of the island and the founder of the entity (the power) of which the DPP independentists are today the vicars. This is the reason why the current leaders of the country are absolutely incapable of putting in place a roman national, a national novel (a story of the past validated by the authority and capable of bringing together the different opinions and sensibilities crossing the population3) and must therefore be content with this motley assembly of key words and language elements that they repeat over and over.

Sovereignty is a concept borrowed from theology (or rather copied from theology) but which, to become practical, must be put into story(ies) and image(s) and become as such a powerful creative fiction – not only a bearer of meaning, but an instrument for transforming reality. The sovereign, whatever its species, must always be imaged, it has one or more faces, it has a body; the modalities of this putting into story and image are variable, they are placed under all sorts of regimes – from the sacralization of the body of the absolute monarch to the imagery of popular sovereignty, the infinite games of the One and the multiple. In modern democracies, as Claude Lefort has shown, we are witnessing a process of disconnection of the symbolic institution of power from particular bodies, the bodies embodying sovereignty become ephemeral and profane 4.

It remains, however, that sovereignty cannot do without characters, it passes through fiction and this does not go without characters or protagonists – as such, it is a great story that runs throughout the modern history of the West; a story that is by no means uniform or homogeneous, the regimes of sovereignty experiencing marked discontinuities throughout this history. But what remains constant is the positivity of fiction producing reality. Fundamentally, sovereignty is a dynamic concept that sets in motion a powerful fiction, which rearranges the world of the living, the relationship between rulers and governed - the link is clearly established from Hobbes' Leviathan to absolute monarchy.

When Taiwanese independence leaders speak of the island's independence-sovereignty, they are talking about a completely different type of fiction, a fiction that has to be understood in a much less advantageous sense - that of a cosmetic intended to make the reality of things past and present totally unrecognizable. The fictions they produce are purely propagandistic, based on an unscrupulous rewriting of the past, in general as well as in detail. They select the facts at their convenience, retaining those that serve their cause, discarding the others, subjecting those they retain to all the distortions that suit them (on the conditions under which China became a member of the UN and the ROC left it, in particular). We are moving from a regime in which sovereignty is a "grand narrative" to another in which it is an opportunity to "tell stories" - in the sense of lying brazenly in order to give authority and substance to the most perfect misuse of this term - a fictitious sovereignty, a sovereignty not even on paper, a flatus vocis intended to conceal a real situation of proxy , protégé and subordinate that is ever more obvious. A self-proclaimed sovereignty that eats out of the hand of a constantly hegemonic and conquering sovereignty is anything but sovereignty.

(to be continued)

1 See on that the article “De l''ordre fondé sur des règles' “ by Anne-Cécile Robert, Le Monde diplomatique, November 2024 – or how the sa-called RBO (rules-based order”) set by the “victors of history” tend to replace international law.

2 In former colonies and dependent countries, and generally in the Global South, Foucault's famous analyses in which he contrasts the traditional regime of sovereignty, of legal form, with the modern regime of power whose horizon is biopolitics and the government of the living, these analyses fall into disarray. Foucault's problematization of these questions suffers from his Eurocentric "bias" - the issues of governmentality are, in these "other" spaces in which the harm inflicted by colonization remains current, intertwined with the issues of sovereignty. It is no coincidence that the question of sovereignty is at the heart of the contemporary confrontation between China and the West, particularly over Taiwan.

3 Suzanne Citron: Le mythe national – l'histoire de France revisitée, Editions de l'Atelier, 2008.

4 Claude Lefort: Essais sur le politique , Editions du Seuil, 2001.