Politics & Power Quote by Ulrich Beck

The provocation here is the sly reversal: giving something up can be the way you keep it. Beck is playing with the psychological charge of the word "sovereignty" - a term that sounds like granite but, in practice, behaves more like a currency. In a globalized world, the old Westphalian fantasy of the self-contained nation-state is less a shield than a costume: reassuring in domestic politics, useless against cross-border forces that ignore flags.

"Apparent" does heavy lifting. Beck is saying much of what politicians defend as sovereignty is performance - border theater, rhetorical autonomy, symbolic control. The real question is capacity: can a state actually protect its citizens' welfare, regulate markets, curb emissions, manage migration, contain pandemics? If those problems are transnational, then insisting on unilateral command becomes a kind of self-imposed impotence.

The subtext is a critique of nationalist reflexes that treat pooled authority as humiliation. Beck reframes integration - the EU is the obvious case, but the logic fits treaties, courts, and regulatory regimes - as sovereignty's upgrade, not its surrender. You trade a visible badge of independence for leverage: shared rules, collective bargaining power, coordinated enforcement. The "loss" is mostly aesthetic; the "benefit" is operational.

Context matters: Beck's work on the "risk society" argues that modernity manufactures hazards (financial contagion, climate change, nuclear risk) that no nation can contain alone. His line reads like a warning to democracies addicted to sovereignty-talk: cling to the appearance, and you forfeit the substance.