ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the history of the development of Europe's sovereign states with theoretical interludes, showing how this development could perfectly well be adapted to the needs of Europe's empires at the given moment. Empires have been continually present across or even formative settings for action in history. Instead of placing empires and sovereign states side by side in discrete historical periods with briefly overlapping phases, by taking seriously empires' capacity to shape historical change, we can grasp the extent of their historical primacy. The principle of a mutually recognized border is a cornerstone of the sovereign states' co-existence, and accordingly fundamental to what we normally take as the international system. The chapter examines the historical moment in the evolution of the European/Western international order: the twentieth-century reordering of international relations around the time of World Wars I and II.
