Today, as the chanters in Prague told the police, the world sees what is going on. The cold print in the newspaper now has a human face in living color and in real time. It makes all the difference. The Kurds, for example, have suffered from subjugation on and off since the Arabs conquered them in the 7th century. But it was the images of horror on CNN last year that awoke the world to their plight in Iraq. Indeed the history of the last few years has seen the growing popular support for the rights of individuals in all nations against the prerogatives of sovereigns, wherever located.

Another aspect of sovereignty that is fading away is the power to issue currency and control its value. From the earliest times governments have wished to monopolize and control its value in the world markets. Of course the claims kings made about the worth of their currency did not always square with the facts. In the 17th century Amsterdam bankers made themselves unpopular in the royal chambers by weighing coins and announcing their true metallic value. But these bankers spoke to a small audience.

The regulation of money markets is the regulation of a society's resources in their most convenient and fungible form. In ancient Sparta the government forbade citizens any medium of exchange other than heavy bars of iron of little worth. The sons of Lycurgus correctly surmised that with such an inconvenient currency, complex commerce would be nearly impossible, and the citizens could concentrate on the manly art of war.

The more usual temptation, however, has been for governments to make currency lighter, hot heavier. Clipping coins or mixing silver or gold with dross metals is an ancient tradition. And when governments learned the wonders that could be worked by printing money, a whole new era opened up. Since paper money has no intrinsic value, only scarcity value, it was both easier (or so it seemed) and more imperative for governments to control its value. Since China first issued paper money in the 11th century, almost every sovereign in the world has experimented with flat money, often with disastrous results.