ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the prevailing conception of rights in the eighteenth century, especially those relating to rights in the international arena, and describes the way rights were understood by intellectuals, statesmen, and politicians. It also discusses the rights of states and the conceptual and practical prescriptions they led to. The chapter points out that European diplomats and statesmen inhabited a normative community with common concepts and norms such as the reason of state and the balance of power, which shaped perceptions, reasonable interests, and morality as well as diplomacy, geopolitics, and wars. It demonstrates how the constitutive social rules and the discourse mentioned earlier were interpreted and applied by the actors within their social reality. The Westphalian society of states embodies the idea of states as the main subjects of the rules of international law and the exclusion of other actors from being subjects of rights.
