Writing Sovereign Identities: Wilson Administration Intervention in the Mexican Revolution

One of the most paradoxical aspects of the literature on international relations is that it proposes to establish its grounds in what is in practice an open question state sovereignty. The presumption that the problem of state sovereignty is already solved appears to be a necessary precondition for any theorizing about international relations, in part because the presumption is indispensable to any claim to a clear distinction between domestic and international spheres and, hence, to the pretense that international theory has a domain to call its own.1 To be sure, when confronted by questions of state sovereignty, international relations theorists readily admit that the precise character and status of the sovereign state remains rather fuzzy, an admission that has been made with increasing frequency as the state has come under more intense academic scrutiny.2 Yet, however essentially contested the meaning of state sovereignty is in international relations, the status of the sovereign state as the fundamental reference point in international relations theory is arguably essentially uncontested.3 Although acknowledging the ambiguity of the meaning of state sovereignty, international relations theorists defer questions of meaning (in effect, affirming a specific meaning, however temporarily) in favor of pressing on to investigate serious questions of international relations, all the while referring back to the sovereign state as an already settled question. This leads to two typical embarrassments for theorists of international relations. The first is a