Counterpoint: The Westphalia Overstatement.
By International Social Science Review
- Release Date: 2005-09-22
- Genre: Social Science
Description
Westphalia is no more. This is not the result of any one particular cause, but an acknowledgement that the conceptualization of 'the Westphalian state system' is a pedagogical oversimplification that is based on flawed assumptions. By referring to modern politics as "Westphalian," international relations specialists employ a term that no longer provides an accurate view of history and is incompatible with the two primary ideologies of international relations, namely, realism and international liberalism. The great Wesphalian overstatement no longer serves as the progenitor of our descriptive map of the Western world, if it ever did. Westphalia has been seen as epochal for many scholastic disciplines, but none so much as international relations. Leo Gross, for example, refers to this treaty as the first "World Charter," a precursor to the United Nations and other European attempts to establish a world order of sovereign states. (1) This inaccurate perception of history has codified many mistaken assumptions within the lexicon of international relations, and is responsible for keeping the discipline from understanding globalization and other postmodern twenty-first century trends.
