ABSTRACT
The notion of a decisive break between medieval religious space and modern geopolitical space at Westphalia, however, is questionable. Rather than a clear and clean rupture, the already existing relationship between the secular and spiritual, the territorial and the ecclesiastical was re-organized and re-conceptualized at Augsburg, Westphalia and numerous other historical moments since. Medieval religious notions
were re-cycled into the emergent mythology of a diversity of European states, each of which claimed variations on heavenly inspiration, providential blessing and/or divine leadership. Rather than geopolitical traditions and religious traditions being at odds, they are more often than not deeply interwoven and mutually constitutive. Normative and spiritual vertical hierarchies of sacred space justified imperialistic and worldly horizontal hierarchies of geopolitical space. The historical development of the modern state system in Europe and its violent imposition across the globe saw multiple and complex (con)fusions of geopolitical and religious discourses (Cosgrove 1999). The overseas expansionism of the European empires into the Americas, Asia and later Africa was in significant part driven by religious motivations and sanctioned by the Church. In numerous cases the pioneers of imperialist encounter and conquest were men belonging to religious orders such as the Jesuits. Puritan jeremiads and religious zeal helped establish the meaning of America (Campbell 1992). Notions of providential will and divine destiny were vital elements in the nineteenth-century conquest of the American West (Stephanson 1995).
