Perforated Sovereignties: Towards a Typology of New Actors in International Relations

Abstract As managers of economic, social, cultural, and environmental affairs, non-central governments in North America and Western Europe, especially in federal or regionalized systems, have been increasingly induced to react to events abroad and respond to or initiate various contacts with foreign centres of economic, cultural, and political influence. These contacts involve not only immediate neighbours across sovereign frontiers - such as northern Swiss cantons, the West German Land of Baden-Württemberg, and French Upper Alsace (Regio Basiliensis) - but also distant centres of industrial or investment power. In 1985, for example, twenty- nine US states had fifty-five permanent offices in seventeen foreign countries (eighteen US states had their separate missions in Tokyo) while only four states had overseas representation in 1970. (In Chapter 10 Earl Fry lists and analyses numerous other US state initiatives abroad.) In addition, eighteen US port authorities and cities had their representatives in Europe, ranging from Alabama’s Port of Mobile to the Texas Port Authority of Corpus Christi. Six Canadian provinces (Alberta, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec, and Saskatchewan) have established forty-six permanent missions in eleven foreign countries: as the Feldmans point out in Chapter 7, the Canadian provinces’ commitment to defend their interests ‘beyond Canadian borders challenges the conventional concept of sovereignty and the federal view of a national monopoly in foreign policy’.