The Peace of Westphalia (1648) established the principle of territorial sovereignty and mutual non-interference that defines the modern state system. Sovereignty means exclusive authority within borders and non-subordination to external authority. This principle remains foundational to IR but faces challenges from humanitarian norms, transnational actors, and transnational issues.
From your study of the state and sovereignty, you understand that sovereignty refers to supreme authority over a territory and population — no higher political authority exists within that space. And from realism in IR, you know that the international system is anarchic: sovereign states recognize no superior authority above themselves. The Westphalian state system is the historical and institutional foundation for both of these ideas, and understanding it clarifies why the modern state system has the particular structure it does.
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) ended the Thirty Years' War, which had devastated central Europe partly because religious authority — Catholic and Protestant — could claim jurisdiction across political boundaries. Princes and emperors, popes and church councils competed for authority over the same territories. The Westphalian settlement established the principle *cuius regio, eius religio* — whoever rules the region determines its religion — effectively stripping external religious authorities of the right to intervene in a ruler's domestic affairs. Two principles crystallized from this settlement: territorial sovereignty (rulers have exclusive authority within defined borders) and non-interference (states have no right to intervene in each other's internal affairs).
These principles became the legal and normative bedrock of international society. Recognition of sovereignty is the price of admission to the international system — it is what makes a polity a "state" rather than a rebel province, a tribal territory, or a colonial subject. The system is self-reinforcing: states have strong interests in defending the non-interference norm because it protects their own sovereignty even when they might prefer to violate it against others. This explains why even powerful states often invoke sovereignty norms in international forums while pursuing strategic interests that quietly undermine them.
The Westphalian system faces two types of challenges today that reveal its tensions. From above, institutions like the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and international human rights law claim authority over how states treat their own citizens — suggesting that sovereignty is no longer absolute. From below, secessionist movements, failed states, and non-state actors (corporations, NGOs, terrorist networks) challenge the assumption that states are the only relevant actors. The concept of sovereignty as responsibility — the idea that states that fail to protect their populations or commit atrocities forfeit non-interference protections — directly challenges classical Westphalian logic. These tensions reflect genuine conflicts between competing values (self-determination, non-interference, human rights protection) that the state system must continuously negotiate rather than resolve.
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