ABSTRACT
The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 is routinely cited as the ‘event’ which marks the emergence of the modern sovereign state. From this point on, so the story goes, states are freed from religious and imperial rule and now provide the basis for their own authority. In doing so, they ground the existence and authority of international law. This event thus looms large in the international legal memory as its foundational moment. However, the notion that the Peace marked a decisive break between
medieval notions of political authority and the modern states system has been called into question. The debate is keenest in the field of international relations. For Stephen Krasner, the ‘widely held view among international relations theorists and international lawyers which sees Westphalia as a major, perhaps a decisive, break marking the transition from the medieval to the modern world’ – a world now divided into sovereign states – ‘is wrong’ (Krasner 1993: 235, 238). As Krasner points out, political entities with more or less exclusive control over defined territories existed well before the Peace, and medieval forms of political authority – including authority exercised by the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy – continued well after it (Krasner 1993; see also Beaulac 2004). Responding to this debunking of the conventional view, Daniel Philpott has attempted to ‘rescue’ the ‘prestige of Westphalia’ by once again establishing its place at ‘the origin of modern international relations’ through an ‘updated defense, more subtle and qualified than the conventional wisdom’ (Philpott 2001: 76-77). Philpott accommodates the existence of elements of sovereignty prior to Westphalia by characterizing it as ‘the consolidation, not the creation ex nihilo, of the modern system’, and those medieval forms of authority which persisted after Westphalia as ‘anomalies’ (Philpott 2001: 77).
