The questions of legal intervention in international security turn on matters of compact theory: whether the people of a state are denied constitutional avenues of redress, so that popular sovereignty cannot have a political effect, and thus can enlist foreign assistance (as the French assisted us) is a notion quite at odds with European ideas of popular sovereignty (in which the state embodies that sovereignty).

DEFINE: Contrasts American compact theory—where sovereignty resides in the people and can be alienated—with European views where the state embodies sovereignty.

Philip Chase Bobbitt, Philip Chase Bobbitt - Refl…, loc. 314