Word of the week: Sovereign(ty)
National pride, data rights, citizens going their own way, and gold coins.
Here are some of the places I’ve seen sovereign or sovereignty in recent weeks:
“What is digital sovereignty and how are countries approaching it?” (World Economic Forum, January 10, 2025)
“Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored. . . . From this day on, the United States of America will be a free, sovereign, and independent nation.” (Trump inaugural address, January 20, 2025)
“Trump’s distorted view of sovereignty and American exceptionalism” (Carnegie Endowment, January 30, 2025)
“This is an attack on our sovereign identity, our independence from Washington.” (City & State New York, February 19, 2025, quoting New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s response to Donald Trump’s decreeing the death of Manhattan’s congestion pricing and declaring “LONG LIVE THE KING” on social media)
“Trump quietly plans to liquidate public lands to finance his sovereign wealth fund” (Center for American Progress, February 20, 2025)
“The absurdity of negotiating with Russia cannot be overstated. Russia invaded a sovereign nation. Russia is committing genocide.” (
, February 24, 2025)“The sovereign individual: Radical bible of tech’s ‘cognitive elite’” (The Nerd Reich, February 25, 2025)
“Reviving native food sovereignty” (Resilience, February 28, 2025)
And also on this San Francisco Arts Commission poster on San Francisco’s Market Street, one of six by indigenous Kichwa-Otavalo artist Marcelo Potosí.
Not to mention the several hundred SOVEREIGN brands and trademarks (chemicals, dentistry, freight logistics, et al.), sometimes spelled SOVRIN (global utility for self-sovereign identity) or SOVREN (Society of Vintage Racing Enthusiasts) or SOVRAN (IT services) or SOVRN (ad tech).
What do all these sovereigns have in common?
Not reign, as it turns out. Sovereign was borrowed in the 14th century from French soverain, which is derived from Latin super (“above”) and ‑ānus, which I’m sorry to say is just Latin for “of, or belonging to,” and is unrelated to the other anus, which means “ring or circle.” (Another word derived from superānus is soprano — the vocal range that sits above the others.)
The spelling of sovereign has varied a lot over the years — in the 17th century Milton spelled it sovran — and settled into its current orthography via folk etymology, influenced by the unrelated but not irrelevant word reign, because one meaning of sovereign is “ruler” or “monarch” (or even a supreme deity). Because we spell it with -reign, a lot of us have come to think of sovereign as having something to do with kings and queens, for better or for worse.
Wherever it’s found, sovereign connotes power and specifically autonomous power: the power to lead one’s own life or govern one’s own community or nation. The U.S. Constitution places sovereign power not in a monarch but in the American people. (This was, lest we forget, a radical concept in the 18th century.) Sovereignty — or a misunderstanding of sovereignty — was a justification for Brexit: “It was the greatest weakness of the Remain campaign that they failed to challenge Leave’s definition of sovereignty and explain that the reality of Brexit meant throwing control away, not taking it back,” wrote Nicholas Westcott, a retired British diplomat, in 2020.
The you’re-not-the-boss-of-me sense of sovereignty has found one of its more extreme — can I say flat-out bonkers? — expressions in the sovereign citizen (“SovCit”) movement that emerged in the 1970s in the U.S. and about which Wikipedia has this to say:
The sovereign citizen phenomenon is one of the main contemporary sources of pseudolaw. Sovereign citizens believe that courts have no jurisdiction over people and that certain procedures (such as writing specific phrases on bills they do not want to pay) and loopholes can make one immune to government laws and regulations. They also regard most forms of taxation as illegitimate and reject Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, and vehicle registration.The movement may appeal to people facing financial or legal difficulties or wishing to resist perceived government oppression. As a result, it has grown significantly during times of economic or social crisis. Most schemes sovereign citizens promote aim to avoid paying taxes, ignore laws, eliminate debts, or extract money from the government. Sovereign citizen arguments have no basis in law and have never been successful in any court.
I have a personal interest in SovCits, because I attended the trial of one such scofflaw back in 2018. The press delighted in calling him a “rogue yachtsman,” which sounds upscale and a little raffish, but in fact the fellow had been squatting for six months in his unpermitted, dead-in-the-water catamaran in the middle of San Francisco’s Aquatic Park Cove, where I frequently swim. He was spotted dumping raw sewage overboard — let me repeat, where I frequently swim. At his federal trial — the cove is part of the National Park Service — he represented himself, which went about the way you might expect. As SFGate put it: “During an hour of cross-examination, [the “yachtsman”] challenged the legality of the federal laws that govern the cove, challenged the way [the judge] ran her courtroom, demanded a jury trial, and ultimately refused to cooperate any further, citing an unspecified disability.” Despite all that he got off remarkably lightly, with a sentence of five years’ probation.1
There’s more than an echo of sovereign citizenship in the concept of the “sovereign individual,” which Gil Duran wrote about last week in his Nerd Reich newsletter. A 1997 book originally titled The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State presaged much of what we’re seeing in the halls of power today, Duran says: “The overtly prophetic book makes numerous predictions about the future, and several core themes emerge that continue to influence Silicon Valley's approach to politics, economics, and social organization. These key arguments reveal a terrifyingly anti-democratic vision dressed in the language of technological inevitability.”
And what about the other sovereigns on my bulleted list?
Digital sovereignty, sometimes called data sovereignty, “is the concept that data is subject to the laws of the country or region where it was generated.” (definition via IBM). For some companies, digital sovereignty is just one more burdensome legal-compliance requirement; for others, “data sovereignty is important to their customers, and therefore an asset to their business” — in other words, just another form of compliance (TechRadar). For many countries, digital sovereignty “is presented as an issue of national security” (Wikipedia).
Food sovereignty, as originally promoted by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina in 1996, sets itself against “Big Food.” The U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance puts it this way: “Food sovereignty is a movement growing from the bottom up, from the farmers, fishers, indigenous peoples and landless workers most impacted by global hunger and poverty. Food sovereignty goes well beyond ensuring that people have enough food to meet their physical needs. It asserts that people must reclaim their power in the food system by rebuilding the relationships between people and the land, and between food providers and those who eat.”
A sovereign wealth fund (SWF) is a state-owned investment fund, sometimes held by a central bank, that makes long-term global investments. “Sovereign wealth fund” was first used in a 2005 article, “Who holds the wealth of nations?”, in the Central Banking Journal. “Typically,” wrote the article’s author, Andrew Rozanov, “sovereign wealth funds are a by-product of national budget surpluses, accumulated over the years due to favourable macroeconomic, trade and fiscal positions, coupled with long-term budget planning and fiscal restraint.” Norway currently has the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund — US$1.744 trillion as of November 2024 — thanks to that country’s immensely profitable petroleum sector.
And one more thing
Attention Donald J. Trump: The USA has always been a sovereign nation. Let’s keep it that way, and quit kowtowing to oligarchs domestic and foreign.
For more on SovCits, see T.C. Boyle’s entertaining 2015 novel The Harder They Come, one of whose characters rejects the “U.S. Illegitimate Government of America”: “[S]he was a sovereign citizen, a U.S. national, born and raised, and she didn’t now and never would again acknowledge anybody’s illegitimate authority over her.”
More rabbit holes of doom. Did you read the thing here about der Drumpfenführer's plan to sell national parks in an effort to bypass the national debt and put together a "sovereign wealth" pile? Which would quite possibly end up invested in bitcoin?
No ifs, ands or butts about it, the anus info cracked me up. Then the behind the scenes story of the ass with the raw sewage? That was quite a tail to tell! In hindsight, the dude was a bum — and you got to the bottom of it. (Okay, I’ll stop!) 😂