Westphalian Sovereignty - Modern Views On The Westphalian System

Modern Views On The Westphalian System

The Westphalian system is used as a shorthand by academics to describe the system of states which make up the world today.

In 1998, at a Symposium on the Continuing Political Relevance of the Peace of Westphalia, the then 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 2000, Germany's Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer referred to the Peace of Westphalia in his Humboldt Speech, which argued that the system of European politics set up by Westphalia was obsolete: "The core of the concept of Europe after 1945 was and still is a rejection of the European balance-of-power principle and the hegemonic ambitions of individual states that had emerged following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, a rejection which took the form of closer meshing of vital interests and the transfer of nation-state sovereign rights to supranational European institutions."

In the aftermath of the 11 March 2004 Madrid attacks, Lewis ‘Atiyyatullah, who claims to represent the terrorist network al-Qaeda, declared that "the international system built up by the West since the Treaty of Westphalia will collapse; and a new international system will rise under the leadership of a mighty Islamic state".

It has also been claimed that globalization is bringing an evolution of the international system past the sovereign Westphalian state.

Benedict Anderson refers to putative “nations” as "imagined communities."

Others speak favorably of the Westphalian state, notably European nationalists and American paleoconservative Pat Buchanan. Some such supporters of the Westphalian state oppose socialism and some forms of capitalism for undermining the nation state. A major theme of Buchanan's political career, for example, has been attacking globalization, critical theory, neoconservatism, and other philosophies he considers detrimental to today's Western nations.