Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth.

The 350th anniversary of the Peace of Westphalia in 1998 was marked by a flurry of conferences and publications by historians, but it was largely ignored in the discipline of international relations (IR). This oversight is odd because in IR the end of the Thirty Years' War is regarded as the beginning of the international system with which the discipline has traditionally dealt. Indeed, the international system has been named for the 1648 peace. [1] For some time now, this "Westphalian system," along with the concept of sovereignty at its core, has been a subject of debate: Are the "pillars of the Westphalian temple decaying"? [2] Are we moving "beyond Westphalia"? [3]

In this debate, "Westphalia" constitutes the taken-for-granted template against which current change should be judged. I contend, however, that the discipline theorizes against the backdrop of a past that is largely imaginary. I show here that the accepted IR narrative about Westphalia is a myth.

In the first section of the article I discuss what this narrative says about the Thirty Years' War. In the second section I discuss the alleged link between 1648 and the creation of a new, sovereignty-based international system. In the third section I discuss the Holy Roman Empire--with which, though this is seldom noted, the Peace of Westphalia was almost exclusively concerned. In the process it will become clear that "Westphalia"--shorthand for a narrative purportedly about the seventeenth century--is really a product of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century fixation on the concept of sovereignty. I conclude by discussing how what I call the ideology of sovereignty has hampered the development of IR theory and by suggesting that the historical phenomena analyzed in this article may help us to gain a better theoretical understanding of contemporary international politics.

The Thirty Years' War and the Problem of Hegemonial Ambition

According to the standard view, the Thirty Years' War was a struggle between two main parties. On one side were the "universalist" actors: the emperor and the Spanish king, both members of the Habsburg dynasty. Loyal to the Church of Rome, they asserted their right, and that of the Pope, to control Christendom in its entirety. Their opponents were the "particularist" actors, specifically Denmark, the Dutch Republic, France, and Sweden, as well as the German princes. These actors rejected imperial overlordship and (for the most part) the authority of the Pope, upholding instead the right of all states to full independence ("sovereignty").

Quotes showing the prevalence of this view in IR are easily adduced. David Boucher states that the settlement "was designed to undermine the hegemonic aspirations of the Habsburge," [4] Hedley Bull says that it "marked the end of Habsburg pretensions to universal monarchy." [5] According to Graham Evans and Jeffrey Newnham's Dictionary of World Politics, the settlement "marked the culmination of the anti-hegemonic struggle against the Habsburg aspirations for a supranational empire." [6] For Kal Holsti the war was mainly fought over "religious toleration ... and the hegemonic ambitions of the Hapsburg family complex." [7] According to Michael Sheehan, the peace "refuted the aspirations of the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire to recreate a single Christian imperium." [8]

Albeit widely shared, this interpretation is dubious. It hinges on the notion that the Habsburgs were a threat to the "nascent" individual states. [9] But, quite apart from the fact that most of the states in question had been around for a long time, neither their survival nor even their independence was at stake in this war. None of the actors fighting the Habsburgs went to war for defensive purposes, as I show in the remainder of this section. [10]