African politicians identify hard-won independence with an almost absolute right to sovereignty. To regard the world as a conglomerate of states with absolute internal authority and only limited, subjective options for external negotiations is not an African tradition, but an old European concept of thoughts.
It goes back as far as Thomas Hobbes with his teaching of the religiously infallible state. In trying to withstand the demands of the Vatican, the state in the 17th /18th centuries took over the idea of being absolute and infallible. Liberalism established itself inherently linked to the idea of the sovereignty of the state — not only in Europe 200 years ago, but also in Africa in the last 50 years.
Till today the relationship between the people, the state and the law is highly contested. Harvard Professor Richard Tuck keeps emphasising that the liberal ideas of human rights and democracy are based on concepts of the law which have repressive external effects.
Thomas of Aquinas didn’t have this problem. To him a right is a pure expression of reason which every human being, every society utilises to fulfill its purposes. Such purposes are just natural. Thus, a right exists without being granted by an authority.
The theologian Oliver O’Donovan therefore concludes that the fundamental binding substance of the world is not the government but the law (The Desire of Nations). “Right-ful” relations create legal institutions, not the other way around.
In this sense the excessive demands for sovereignty by Africa’s liberation movements should be questioned by a concept based on the natural law with its Christian roots in the definition of the human person and the human society. Liberal contractualism is not an alternative.
Andreas Peltzer, Windhoek
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