The Mohammed cartoon fight isn’t about principles or values.

Some have rightly pointed out that the cartoon-linked violence challenges the sovereignty of the French government. The implications of this take are much more radical than typically understood.

Sovereignty is, in mainstream political science, nothing more than a monopoly on violence in a certain territory. Some thinkers like H.L.A. Hart claim that some principled form of ‘legitimacy’ is essential, but it couldn’t be clearer that legitimacy has nothing to do with the realities of international relations. Invoking legitimacy is nothing more than an excuse when one nation, often for excellent reasons, wants to interfere in the affairs of another. No one thinks the Chinese government isn’t sovereign because it couldn’t care less about the niceties of rights and consent and democracy and other sources of principled legitimacy. And indeed very few sovereign states are in full conformity with such principles.

How does this affect assessment of the cartoons crises?

For one thing, it’s clear the French reaction is not about freedom of speech. The French government prosecutes individuals for expressing mere approval of the killings — in some cases despite no allegation that the expression is incitement to violence. This of course violates free speech principles.

The reaction isn’t even about, in a strict sense, terrorism. The Bataclan massacre was terrorism in this strict sense. It targeted random civilians. The Nice killings were terrorism in the same sense. But the killing of Paty, which triggered the current French reaction, was not, strictly speaking, terrorism. It targeted a specific individual for something that individual had done. That’s not striking out at just any bunch of civilians, whatever they have done — an essential characteristic of genuine terrorism.

So suppose the French reaction is, in reality, only about sovereignty. The idea is simply that you can’t engage in violence; only the state can do that. It doesn’t matter whether you hate. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an enemy of French values. It doesn’t matter what your values are. It doesn’t matter whether you hold ‘separatist’ views. It doesn’t matter whether you’re intolerant. All that matters is that you don’t oppose the violence of the state — which looms behind the enforcement of its laws — with your own violence.

Seen from this perspective, France needn’t and shouldn’t be proclaiming its moral virtues, its principles, its values, its ideals. That’s not what the crisis is about. It’s about control of territory. You might well hold that, for some principled reason, a government shouldn’t have such control. But you have to expect that any government is going to enforce its sovereignty. And of course, as a matter of mere tactics, this will sometimes mean pre-emptive attacks on persons or institutions deemed a genuine threat to such control.

And in a crisis of sovereignty, governments always go overboard addressing perceived threats. It would be foolish to expect a government to do anything less.