Westphalian sovereignty

Westphalian sovereignty, or state sovereignty, is the principle in international law that each state has exclusive sovereignty over its territory. The principle underlies the modern international system of sovereign states and is enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which states that 'nothing should authorise intervention in matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.' According to the idea, every state, no matter how large or small, has an equal right to sovereignty. Political scientists have traced the concept to the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years' War. The principle of non-interference was further developed in the 18th century. The Westphalian system reached its peak in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it has faced recent challenges from advocates of humanitarian intervention.The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight. It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other's domestic affairs and checking each other's ambitions through a general equilibrium of power. No single claim to truth or universal rule had prevailed in Europe's contests. Instead, each state was assigned the attribute of sovereign power over its territory. Each would acknowledge the domestic structures and religious vocations of its fellow states and refrain from challenging their existence. Westphalian sovereignty, or state sovereignty, is the principle in international law that each state has exclusive sovereignty over its territory. The principle underlies the modern international system of sovereign states and is enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which states that 'nothing should authorise intervention in matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.' According to the idea, every state, no matter how large or small, has an equal right to sovereignty. Political scientists have traced the concept to the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years' War. The principle of non-interference was further developed in the 18th century. The Westphalian system reached its peak in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it has faced recent challenges from advocates of humanitarian intervention. The Peace of Westphalia is considered by political scientists to be the beginning of the modern international system, in which external powers should avoid interfering in another country's domestic affairs. However, recent scholarship has argued that the Westphalian treaties actually had little to do with the principles with which they are often associated: sovereignty, non-intervention, and the legal equality of states. For example, Andreas Osiander writes that 'he treaties confirm neither 'sovereignty' nor anybody else's; least of all do they contain anything about sovereignty as a principle.' Others, like Christoph Kampann and Johannes Paulmann argue that the 1648 treaties in fact limited the sovereignty of numerous states within the Holy Roman Empire and that the Westphalian treaties did not present a coherent new state-system, although they were part of an ongoing change. Yet others, often post-colonialist scholars, point out the limited relevance of the 1648 system to the histories and state systems in the non-Western world. Nonetheless, 'Westphalian sovereignty' continues to be used as a shorthand for the basic legal principles underlying the modern state system. The applicability and relevance of these principles have been questioned from the mid-20th century onward from a variety of viewpoints. Much of the debate has turned on the ideas of internationalism and globalization, which conflict with Westphalian sovereignty. The origins of Westphalian sovereignty have been traced in the scholarly literature to the Peace of Westphalia (1648). The peace treaties put an end to the Thirty Years' War, a war of religion that devastated Germany and killed 30% of its population. Since neither the Catholics nor the Protestants had won a clear victory, the peace settlement established a status quo order in which states would refrain from interfering in each other's religious practices. Henry Kissinger wrote: The principle of non-interference in other countries' domestic affairs was laid out in the mid-18th century by Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. States became the primary institutional agents in an interstate system of relations. The Peace of Westphalia is said to have ended attempts to impose supranational authority on European states. The 'Westphalian' doctrine of states as independent agents was bolstered by the rise in 19th century thought of nationalism, under which legitimate states were assumed to correspond to nations—groups of people united by language and culture. The Westphalian system reached its peak in the late 19th century. Although practical considerations still led powerful states to seek to influence the affairs of others, forcible intervention by one country in the domestic affairs of another was less frequent between 1850 and 1900 than in most previous and subsequent periods. After the end of the Cold War, the United States and Western Europe began talking of a post-Westphalian order in which countries could intervene against human rights abuses in other countries. Critics have pointed out such intervention would be (and has been) used to continue processes similar to standard Euro-American colonialism, and that the colonial powers always used ideas similar to 'humanitarian intervention' to justify colonialism, slavery, and similar practices. China and Russia have thus used their United Nations Security Council veto power to block what they see as American actions to violate the sovereignty of other nations. The end of the Cold War saw increased international integration and, arguably, the erosion of Westphalian sovereignty. Much of the literature was primarily concerned with criticizing realist models of international politics in which the notion of the state as a unitary agent is taken as axiomatic. In 1998, at a Symposium on the Continuing Political Relevance of the Peace of Westphalia, NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana said that 'humanity and democracy two principles essentially irrelevant to the original Westphalian order' and levied a criticism that 'the Westphalian system had its limits. For one, the principle of sovereignty it relied on also produced the basis for rivalry, not community of states; exclusion, not integration.' In 1999, British Prime Minister Tony Blair gave a speech in Chicago where he 'set out a new, post-Westphalian, 'doctrine of the international community''. Blair argued that globalization had made the Westphalian approach anachronistic. Blair was later referred to by The Daily Telegraph as 'the man who ushered in the post-Westphalian era'. Others have also asserted that globalization has superseded the Westphalian system.