Post-Westphalian Order
Context
Claire Vergerio:
"The conventional narrative associates international order with the existence of a system of sovereign states, but the alternative story suggests that the post-1648 period was characterized by the resilience of a diversity of polities. In the case of the European continent, the most obvious such polity was the vast Holy Roman Empire, which continued to experiment with complex arrangements of layered sovereignty until its collapse in 1806. The comparative stability of the post-1648 period may therefore have had more to do with the continued diversity of polities on the continent than with the putative emergence of a homogenous system of sovereign states. Some scholars have looked beyond Europe’s borders and already noted such patterns of stability through diverse forms of political organization in other regions of global empire-building, such as Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman in their study of the Indian Ocean, International Order in Diversity (2015). This period thus suggests that an international system in which power is shared among different kinds of actors might in fact be relatively stable.
Even thinkers in tune with limitations of the nation-state cannot seem to free themselves from the statist straitjacket of the contemporary political imagination.
Second, taking the alternative story seriously forces us to rethink how we talk about the influence of non-state actors in the present."
(https://bostonreview.net/politics/claire-vergerio-beyond-nation-state)
Description
Claire Vergerio:
"The Westphalian order refers to the conception of global politics as a system of independent sovereign states, all of which are equal to each other under law. The most popular story about this political system traces its birth to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, follows its strengthening in Europe and gradual expansion worldwide, and finally, near the end of the twentieth century, begins to identify signs of its imminent decline. On this view, much of the power that states once possessed has been redistributed to a variety of non-state institutions and organizations—from well-known international organizations such as the UN, the EU, and the African Union to violent non-state actors such as ISIS, Boko Haram, and the Taliban along with corporations with global economic influence such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon. This situation, the story often goes, will result in an international political order that resembles medieval Europe more than the global political system of the twentieth century.
Commentators disagree about the significance of this “post-Westphalian” order, and whether it is desirable for international organizations to intervene in states’ affairs is on its own a great source of debate. Yet there is widespread agreement about the events of the story that have taken us to the present moment. The Westphalian conceit, in short, forms the descriptive foundation of dominant analyses of global politics."
(https://bostonreview.net/politics/claire-vergerio-beyond-nation-state)
Discussion
Debunking the Westphalia myth
"The nation-state is not so old as we are often told, nor has it come to be quite so naturally!"
Claire Vergerio:
"Generations of international relations students have absorbed the idea of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia as a pan-European charter that created the political structure that now spans the entire globe: a system of legally (if not materially) equal sovereign states. Along with this political structure, this story goes, came other important features, from the doctrine of non-intervention, respect of territorial integrity, and religious tolerance to the enshrinement of the concept of the balance of power and the rise of multilateral European diplomacy. In this light, the Peace of Westphalia constitutes not just a chronological benchmark but a sort of anchor for our modern world. With Westphalia, Europe broke into political modernity and provided a model for the rest of the world.
Over the last few decades, scholars working on the history of international order—in a variety of disciplines, including global history, international relations, and international law—have shown that this traditional account is not only false but diametrically opposed to historical reality. In fact, the single most famous debunking exercise, Andreas Osiander’s “Sovereignty, International Relations and the Westphalia Myth,” turns twenty this year. As these scholars emphasize, the treaties of the Peace of Westphalia, which put an end to the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) that devastated Europe, make no mention of state sovereignty or of non-intervention, let alone a desire to reorganize the European political system. Far from enshrining the principle of religious tolerance known as cuius regio eius religio (“whose realm, his religion”) that had been put in place with the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, these treaties actually overturned it, finding that it had been the cause of instability. The treaties also make no mention of the concept of the balance of power. In fact, the Peace of Westphalia strengthened a system of relations that was precisely not based on the concept of the sovereign state but instead on a reassertion of the Holy Roman Empire’s complex jurisdictional arrangements (landeshoheit), which allowed autonomous political units to form a broader conglomerate (the “empire”) without a central government.
Part of the current confusion stems from lumping together all the major peace treaties signed in 1648 under one name. What we have come to call the Peace of Westphalia actually designates two treaties: signed between May and October 1648, they were agreements between the Holy Roman Empire and its two main opponents, France (the Treaty of Münster) and Sweden (the Treaty of Osnabrück). Each treaty mostly addressed the internal affairs of the Holy Roman Empire and smaller bilateral exchanges of territory with France and with Sweden. (In addition to these two agreements there was also another treaty of Münster, signed in January, between the Spanish and the Dutch to put an end to the Eighty Years’ War, but this earlier agreement had almost no substantive link with the treaties of the Holy Roman Empire.)"
The European System of Sovereign Nation-States Did not Consolidate Until the 19th Cy. !
Claire Vergerio:
"Until the nineteenth century, the international order was made up of a patchwork of polities. Although a distinction is often made between the European continent and the rest of the world, recent research has reminded us that European polities also remained remarkably heterogeneous until the nineteenth century. While some of these were sovereign states, others included composite formations such as the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, within which sovereignty was divided in very complex ways.
Indeed much of what we take for granted as the normal way of organizing the international system is of comparatively recent vintage. Sovereign statehood only became the default within Europe in the nineteenth century, with entities like the Holy Roman Empire gradually giving way to sovereign states like Germany. While often overlooked in this regard, Latin America also transitioned into a system of sovereign states during that period as a result of its successive anti-colonial revolutions. This system then became the default of the international order through decolonization in the 1950s through the 1970s, when independent sovereign states replaced empires worldwide. Throughout this transition various alternatives were considered, including—up until the 1950s—forms of federations and confederations that have since been largely forgotten. Over the past several decades, the state has not only triumphed as the only legitimate unit of the international system, but it has also rewired our collective imagination into the belief that this has been the normal way of doing things since 1648.
As late as 1800, Europe east of the French border looked nothing like its contemporary iteration. As historian Peter H. Wilson describes in his recent book Heart of Europe (2020), the Holy Roman Empire, long snubbed by historians of the nation-state, had been in existence for a thousand years at that point; at its peak it had occupied a third of continental Europe. It would hold on for six more years, until its dissolution under the strain of Napoleonic invasions and its temporary replacement with the French-dominated Confederation of the Rhine (1806–1813) and then the German Confederation (1815–1866).
The latter mirrored the Holy Roman Empire in many ways; it hardly looked like a nation-state at all. Much of its territory still overlapped—in so-called “pre-modern” fashion—with the territory of the Habsburg monarchy, another composite state that began its centralization process earlier than the Holy Roman Empire but did not look much like a nation-state either until the late nineteenth century. It solidified into the Austrian empire (1804–1867) and then the Austro-Hungarian empire (1867–1918), but the 1867 power-sharing deal granted Hungary considerable autonomy and essentially allowed it to run its own mini-empire. Meanwhile, to the south, what we think of as modern-day Italy was still a patchwork of kingdoms (Sardinia, the Two Siciles, Lombardy-Venetia under the Austrian Crown), Duchies (including Parma, Modena, and Tuscany), and Papal States, while territory further east was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. The map of Europe did not begin to look more like a collection of nation-states until the middle of the nineteenth century: Belgium and Greece appeared in 1830, while Italian and German unification were completed in 1871.
We are accustomed to thinking of Europe as the first historical instance of a full-blown system of sovereign states, but Latin America actually moved toward that form of political organization at just about the same time. After three centuries of imperial domination, the region saw a complete redrawing of its political geography in the wake of the Atlantic Revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Following in the footsteps of the United States (1776) and Haiti (1804), it witnessed a series of wars of independence which, by 1826 and with only a few exceptions, had essentially booted out the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Of course, Britain promptly gained control of trade in the region through an aggressive combination of diplomatic and economic measures often referred to as “informal empire,” but its interactions were now with formally sovereign states.
Over the remainder of the century, the sovereign federative structures that had emerged in the aftermath of independence—Gran Colombia (1819–1831), the Federal Republic of Central America (1823–1841), and the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata (1810–1831) collapsed through bloody civil wars that lasted for decades, pitting regions against centralized governments and including multiple attempts to reconstitute these larger political conglomerates. Thus, much as with Western Europe, the region did not stabilize into a system of nation-states that looks like its contemporary iteration until the end of the nineteenth century. It now seems possible to tell a relatively similar story about North America, as in historian Rachel St John’s ongoing project, The Imagined States of America: The Unmanifest History of Nineteenth-century North America.
Empires, of course, continued to thrive despite the growing popularity of nation-states. Until World War II the world was still dominated by empires and the heterogeneous structures of political authority they had created."
(https://bostonreview.net/politics/claire-vergerio-beyond-nation-state)