In this study I will present two approaches to the issue of sovereignty. The first one is the “Bataillian” approach. This “non-do-ut-des” logic should avoid the utilization of the energy in excess in destructive initiatives such as wars and it can paradoxically facilitate a long term recovery to ordinary economic logic – as the Marshall plan did. Among the federalists’ proposals, similarly, there are transfer of “energy” from better-off countries to worse-off ones by means of fiscal transfers and the centralized sharing of credit risk. However, the problem with this type of general economy is that the factors quoted to jus- tify the unsustainability of traditional economic reciprocity are not inherent to human nature but produced by historical and contingent asymmetries, due to political decisions. This means that Bataille’s “general economy” would simply be the expression of the awareness of contingent needs, distorted by historically determined relations of force which is not necessarily able to aim at a maximization of well-being within an exchange economy.