First, to be picky, it’s the Peace of Westphalia, not the Treaty of Westphalia, since there was more than one treaty. Second, students of int’l relations who are aware of what the Peace of Westphalia did and did not establish (b.c in some cases said students have taken the trouble to read the relevant literature and/or the texts of the treaties of Munster and/or Osnabruck) may still use “Westphalian sovereignty” as a shorthand phrase even while realizing that it has, on many accounts, rather little to do w the Peace of Westphalia. This is what, for ex., Krasner does in Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy.

On the more substantive pt in the ‘In the Provinces’ comment about the connection betw modern sovereignty and democracy: yes, I think that is a pt worth making.

This comment does not address the OP itself, which regrettably I don’t have time to do just now.

What made modern sovereign states were the American and French Revolutions, and here’s where the problem lies. Sovereignty was connected with democracy and the will of the nation. And such sovereign nation-states remain the way democracy is exercised in the contemporary world. Larger governmental units, whether the UN or the EU (to say nothing of now defunct polities like the British Empire or the USSR), are characterized by their lack of democracy and democratic legitimacy. Of course, this connection of sovereignty and democracy can be used, and has been, to justify gross human rights abuse up to and including genocide. But until some way is found to create democratic legitimacy across a wider unit than the nation state, this will remain a chronic problem.

Just so! A low-interest intellectual account whose capital builds up bit by bit.

Anyhoo, I’m just now reading Harrison White’s Identity and Control, in which he’s talking about “the Sargasso Sea of social obligation and context,” which strikes me as a vivid metaphor for the kinds of stuff you’re getting at in all these posts working through a reorientation of activism toward the fullness of complexity. Cheers!

This domain of political / moral theory seems analogous to me to the kind of medicine that prescribes antibiotics for every sniffle and the kind of pesticidal monoculture that ends up collapsing bee colonies and such. There’s a lot to appreciate about the sovereignty / disembedding agenda in actionable simplification. But it works very badly as description, so the prescriptions it gives off tend to run us into all sorts of troubles.

I also question whether the intrusion into the sovereign affairs of one state by another is sufficiently comparable to the violation of sovereignty perpetrated by illegal immigrants to justify the ‘pox on both houses’ construction. The fundamental difference between governmental and individual action, between policy and reality, seems much greater than you’ve allowed. In short, I think Westphalian consistency is greater on the left – which tends to more procedural literalism – than on the right, and liberal interventionism tends to be based on principles like supranational rights rather than on loyalty to allies, demonstrations of power, or protection of economic resources. Not sure that’s a virtue, given that I agree that westphalian sovereignty is a weak description of the way the world works, but, as they saying goes, it’s an ethos.

Well, now you have done it. After nearly seventy years of study and design I have developed solutions for almost everything except international relations. Somehow it just slipped my mind, or perhaps I suppressed it. Now, because of you, I have to come out of retirement and decide how the humans of this world should treat each other, and how to make them actually follow my rules. Instead of a new paradigm I have to design a new calculus. Thanks a lot.