Timo Miettinen

Shared Sovereignty as Freedom explores a simple but timely question: can sharing political power make communities more, rather than less, free? Contemporary debates often treat sovereignty as a fixed possession that states either retain or surrender. This project challenges that assumption by tracing an alternative European tradition in which political agency grows through cooperation, mutual obligation, and shared risk.

Focusing on political thought and institutional experiments from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the project examines philosophical works alongside peace treaties, federal charters, and constitutional texts. It shows how federations, confederations, and plans for lasting peace reimagined sovereignty as layered, reciprocal, and interdependent. Rather than viewing cooperation merely as a constraint on independent action, these traditions understood it as a means of creating new political capacities.

The project develops three concepts for understanding this history: relational freedom, layered sovereignty, and vulnerability-sharing. Together, they offer a new way to interpret European federalism and integration – not simply as limits placed on national authority, but as arrangements that can expand collective agency. By connecting historical research with contemporary political theory, the project provides fresh tools for thinking about democracy, legitimacy, and cooperation in an interdependent world.