ABSTRACT
The seventeenth century saw the effective establishment of a Europe of legitimately
independent states that recognized each other as such. They still felt themselves to be
parts of the wider whole that had been Latin Christendom, and the interaction between
them was now such that each state, and especially the more powerful ones, felt obliged to
take account of the actions of the others. They recognized that, since the medieval
restraints had disappeared or become irrelevant, new rules and procedures were needed to
regulate their relations. In Hedley Bull’s terms they needed to constitute a new
international society.1 The European society of states evolved out of the struggle between
the forces tending towards a hegemonial order and those which succeeded in pushing the
new Europe towards the independences end of our spectrum. The decisive feature of this
process was the general settlement negotiated in Westphalia at the middle of the century
after the exhausting Thirty Years War. The Westphalian settlement was the charter of a
Europe permanently organized on an anti-hegemonial principle. It also affected the
growth of national consciousness, which was in due course to transform the relations
between the European states, and the role played in the ordering of Europe by states on
its periphery. Europe’s ‘colonial’ expansion landward and overseas, and the consequent
expansion of the European system worldwide, requires a separate examination, and is
discussed in Chapter 19.
