ABSTRACT
Contemporary globalized society in Europe and worldwide demonstrates the impossibility of conceptualizing power exclusively in terms of the institutional hierarchy of the nation state, its indivisibility and the ultimate decision-making power and enforcement of supreme will within a political community. Changes in the meaning and uses of control of both territory and inhabitants – these two definitional signs of sovereignty – significantly question state sovereignty and its functions. Power formerly associated with political sovereignty has become much more dispersed in society and stretches beyond the framework of a nation as the ultimate subject of sovereignty and the democratic nation state.
