In the 21st century, the assessment of sovereignty is increasingly approached through resilience: the decisive factor is the capacity by which state institutions remain functional amid external shocks and threats, ensuring the implementability of decisions and a minimum of rule-of-law legitimacy.

A core concept of modern state theory and international law — one of the most defining and most severely stress-tested — is sovereignty, which, in our current understanding, refers to the ultimate source of supreme state authority and expresses our basic knowledge about the scope and effectiveness of that authority. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, however, the conditions for governance organized within the framework of the classical territorial state appear to be changing drastically, since the international system’s multipolarization, the densification of global economic interdependencies, and the information space mediated by digital infrastructures and platforms create new power relations that fundamentally transform our understanding of sovereignty and the areas in which it manifests — namely the so-called essential state functions. This process does not merely signify a shift of power from one state to another, but a change in the nature of power itself, in which traditional hierarchies are being replaced by network structures. Realignments of recent decades — such as the expansion of the BRICS+ group, strengthening of China’s role in the world system, or the “awakening” of the Global South, combined with the consequences of Globalization 4.0 — particularly the growing global role of multinational and transnational corporations, the expansion of the digital sphere, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the impact of global supply chains on national economies — compel us to interpret, and where necessary reinterpret, the concept of sovereignty, including the scope and enforcement of essential state functions, in light of the changed environment.

The vulnerability of global supply chains — previously exposed by the COVID‑19 pandemic, the Red Sea crisis, and, most recently, the now topical possibility of the Strait of Hormuz being closed — together with transnational flows of energy, capital, and data, and the threats emerging in cyberspace, make visible the separation of jurisdiction from effective control: the state may remain legally competent within its own territory, while its ability to enforce regulation and manage risks becomes materially constrained.

The central question, therefore — now even more than ever — is whether sovereignty is primarily a question of law, that is, a normative status that structures the recognition of the state, the internal constitutional order, and legitimacy, or rather a question of fact, describing the state’s actual capacity to govern, the implementability of decisions, and its resilience against external dependencies. In reality, these two approaches do not exclude but mutually presuppose each other: constitutional authorization to exercise state power (and, as a requirement, to perform essential state functions) can endure only if it is underpinned by institutional capacity — real ability to act — whereas mere de facto control, without a legal framework, inevitably leads to a deficit of legitimacy.

Consider, for example, the problem of “failed states”, where recognition of “legal sovereignty” becomes an empty phrase in the absence of effective control.

The conceptual genealogy of sovereignty began as a response to the problems of early modern state-building, where the question was at once one of legitimacy and governance: how can the sovereign’s (the ruler’s) power be justified, and under what institutional conditions is the sovereign capable of maintaining legal order and public order? The multi-layered and personal character of the medieval politico-legal order — feudal relations, the papacy’s and the empire’s universalist claims — kept the question of the “final word” permanently open, and competition over competences took shape in the legal language and practice of a complex system of immunities and exceptions.

Jean Bodin formulated sovereignty, as it were, against this chaotic system, as an essential quality of the res publica: an “absolute and perpetual” supreme power, where the sovereign is the one who, independent of other secular powers, is able to make generally binding norms and holds the ultimate guarantees of war and peace, taxation, and the prerogative of mercy. Bodin, however, did not equate sovereignty with unlimited arbitrariness; his acknowledgement of constraints of natural law and of “fundamental laws” that secure the durability of the political community indicates that the absoluteness of sovereign power means the absence of a worldly superior, not lawlessness.

Although the Peace of Westphalia is often treated as the exclusive origin of the modern state system, it in fact rather fixed and symbolized the effort to clarify competences, while also containing the seeds of the later principle of non-intervention. The classical formation of sovereignty thus already anticipated today’s dilemma: on the normative side it meant the claim to ultimate decision-making authority; on the factual side it meant bringing together the conditions of governance. Over the past centuries, sovereignty has not disappeared but has undergone continuous shifts in emphasis, as, among other things, theories of princely supreme power were placed within democratic frameworks of legitimacy through the social contract and popular sovereignty.

Thomas Hobbes made the unity of the decision-making center a condition of order and security; John Locke emphasized the purposiveness of authorization and the limitability of government; and Rousseau assigned sovereignty to the people conceived as the general will. In this way, sovereignty became a rational embodiment of legitimacy, while at the same time creating a persistent tension between authorization originating in the political community and the actual decisions produced within state institutions. The emergence of the constitutional state sought to harmonize this tension on two planes: on the one hand stands constituent power as the ultimate authorization; on the other stands the system of constituted powers, where the separation of competences and judicial review constrain the exercise of public power substantively and procedurally. In this understanding, sovereignty is no longer boundlessness, but the possibility of legitimate and controlled public authority.

In the twentieth century, nation-state development and the ideal of self-determination during decolonization further nuanced the picture, highlighting the possibility of a separation between de jure and de facto sovereignty, where acquiring international-legal status did not always go hand in hand with the immediate establishment of an effective constitutional order.

The process of globalization often presents sovereignty not as a legal category but as a “performance”, examining whether the state is actually able to regulate and enforce its decisions in an economic and technological space organized across borders. Economic and financial integration, capital mobility, and global supply chains create an environment in which the problem of sovereignty is typically not the absence of competence, but the limited effectiveness of exercising competence. (Consider, for example, negotiations around the global minimum tax, where states, in defending their sovereignty, are compelled to give up part of their autonomous tax policy within the OECD tax reform framework.)

Regulation is shifting in part from formal state legislation toward broader international coordination and forms of integration, where recommendations, technical standards, and market pressures may determine the conditions of compliance. In this context, transnational corporations, such as Big Tech giants, which are not subjects of state sovereignty in the classical sense, are nonetheless able to influence its de facto enforcement through their economic power, technological “ownership”, and control over data and platform ecosystems. When a platform adopts global rules for content moderation, it effectively assumes a quasi-legislative role that often clashes with national jurisdictions. Private control over critical infrastructures — such as cloud services or digital payment systems — has in our time become one of the most sensitive points of digital sovereignty (especially in Europe), because access may be conditioned on technical terms while the implementation of state regulation remains limited. (The European GAIA‑X project seeks to respond to precisely this challenge by attempting to create European data and cloud sovereignty.)

International law functions as an ambivalent framework for these processes: it simultaneously protects states’ sovereign equality and their claim to non-intervention, while also imposing limits through undertaking obligations. In the modern environment, the instruments of intervention have diversified, since economic, informational, and technological pressure is often harder to fit into classical categories, generating disputes over legal qualification and possible responses. The expansion of the circle of subjects of international law and the enhanced role of international organizations have also meant that, in certain areas, the exercise of state public authority can no longer be seen as a “closed space”, and sovereignty has thus acquired a dimension of responsibility as well. In contemporary practice, limiting sovereignty often appears not in military but in economic and legal tools — for example, in sanctions against Russia, export controls, and extraterritorial law enforcement, which, while leaving de jure status intact, narrow de facto room for maneuver. Particularly instructive is U.S. restrictions on semiconductor exports, which show how technological dominance can become an instrument for constraining sovereignty vis-à-vis global competitors.

The challenges of the twenty-first century — e.g. global economic dependencies, digital infrastructures, hybrid threats, and the norm competition of a multipolar order, etc. — can be understood as “stress tests” of sovereignty, in which the factual dimension, control, and resilience gain prominence. Strategic dependencies place sovereignty in an “access” dimension: the performance of public functions may depend on whether the state can diversify its sources of supply or build crisis-management mechanisms. Digital sovereignty in this environment becomes a functional concept, denoting the state’s capacity to advance public interest through control over data, platforms, and standards. “Data governance” (such as the GDPR), the protection of critical digital infrastructures (such as the NIS2 Directive), and platform regulation (for example, the Digital Services Act) are all new arenas of sovereignty, where technological dependencies and the risk of vendor lock-in directly affect decision-making autonomy. Hybrid threats and cybersecurity challenges further nuance the picture, since sovereignty can be impaired as a matter of fact during cyber conflict as well, while the conditions for a legal response remain debatable and open to question. In this “gray zone”, the actual content of sovereignty takes shape in defensive capabilities, incident response, and the resilience of critical systems.

Finally, we should not forget that the return of multipolarity and great-power competition to the world system makes sovereignty a relational concept, where room for maneuver is measured in alliance ties and in the deliberate management of dependencies — especially for small and medium-sized states, which often try to avoid one-sided vulnerability through “hedging” strategies, balancing among different centers of power.

In conclusion, sovereignty today can no longer be defined as an exclusive alternative between a question of law and a question of fact, because it is conceptually dual in nature: it denotes both the state’s legal status and legitimacy and the empirical capacity by which it can give effect to its decisions. (Perhaps this distinction has heretofore always existed only in the minds of a particular group of constitutional and international lawyers, but it is now out in the open through practice.)

In legal terms, sovereignty is a condition of predictability and legal certainty, which, through constitutionalism, binds public authority to responsibility and guarantees; in factual terms, it is manifested in governance capacity and the management of dependencies. The intersection of the de jure and de facto dimensions can yield different types of statehood, where both internationally recognized but weak state capacity and an increasing ability to enforce decisions through consciously shared competences may be present. In the twenty-first century, the assessment of sovereignty is increasingly approached through resilience: the decisive factor is the capacity by which state institutions remain functional amid external shocks and threats, ensuring the implementability of decisions and a minimum of rule-of-law legitimacy. Sovereignty, therefore, is not merely an abstract claim of “ultimate supreme authority”, but a description of the real conditions of governance — conditions that can be grasped adequately only by considering legal status and factual capability together in today’s changing world order.

Norbert TRIBL is an attorney-at-law (barred in 2023) and a senior lecturer at the International and Regional Studies Institute, University of Szeged. He is also student of economics, finance and accounting. He received his PhD in law in 2020, for his thesis on the applicability of constitutional identity in the European supranational space. As a university lecturer, he teaches State Theory and Constitutional Law. From 2025, he is a member of the European Group of Public Law.