Sovereignty Was Never Pure: A Reflection on Introduction to Global Affairs, Module 1: What an Introductory Module Gets Right, and Where Krasner, Mearsheimer, and Nationalism Theory Complicate It

Module 1 of Introduction to Global Affairs — a Council on Foreign Relations Education module delivered through Arizona State University's Universal Learner Courses — teaches a version of the sovereignty-versus-globalization tension that has become the standard entry point for undergraduate international relations: sovereignty as a state's authority to govern itself free of outside interference; globalization as a set of technological, economic, and political forces that increasingly place that authority under strain; and a set of concrete cases — Catalonia's independence referendum, economic sanctions, the postwar liberal order, constructive and destructive nationalism — that make the tension legible. This paper argues that the module's account is a genuinely useful entry point and, on its own terms, correctly identifies real phenomena. It also argues that three bodies of established scholarship complicate the account in ways worth stating plainly rather than leaving implicit: Stephen Krasner's argument that sovereignty has never been the clean, unconstrained condition the "erosion" framing implicitly assumes it once was; John Mearsheimer's argument that the postwar liberal order was neither as international nor as liberal as its name suggests, and was structurally destined to unwind rather than eroding by accident; and the broader theoretical literature on nationalism, where the module's constructive/destructive framing collapses a genuine and unresolved debate about what nations actually are into a single moral axis. None of this makes Module 1 wrong for its purpose. It suggests that the purpose — a clear, pedagogically necessary entry point — is different from, and should not be mistaken for, the state of the actual scholarly argument.