Idiot alert

The idiot is me (the grammatical error registers the idiocy at another level).

Preface: I've been feeling the urge to confess. The following wasn't what incited the urge, or the error to be confessed, but it's pressing, nonetheless.

Confession: I am shockingly ill-informed about basic aspects of political science. Like, it's really hard for me to grasp that anyone would think or have thought in terms of Westphalian sovereignty. It makes absolutely no sense. That is, it doesn't account for power in the world. Nor does it even account for power in the world in which was ostensibly dominant--the Cold War. I just can't even fathom that this has been the dominant way of thinking in international relations. Paul has been convincing me that it has been (to save me from publishing something inane). But I just don't get it at all--there can't have been a Cold War (division of spheres, MAD, Iron curtain) and a supposition of Westphalian sovereignty. But, apparently the rest of the discipline has long thought otherwise.

Maybe this is the result of a background in Marxism--class struggle, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, workers of the world, and all that. Or maybe it's just plain idiocy.

Probably the latter.

Comments

[Slavoj]

"Like, oh my god, can you believe that some people actually believe that there was a 'Vietnam War,' or that people 'vote' or that actual 'states' exist?? [hehe, titter titter] And can you believe that some kids actually listen to bands like U2 and Coldplay and Nickelback instead of all the bands we listen to until the jocks find out about them. Oh well, I guess we're the big losers and lame-os. [hehe titter titter]"

[Jodi]

the comment doesn't make sense or fit; the Viet Nam war is evidence against the dominance of westphalian sovereignty (as are transnational movements, such as the one in opposition to the war). Similarly, the presence of states does not immply the non-existence of non-state. With regard to voting: people vote in all sorts of non-state based election.

or maybe you mean your comment to be funny?

[Craig]

I assumed the comment was from our old friend...

[Jodi]

yes, a certain charm...

[PabloK]

Jodi,

You're right to say that certain perspectives in IR that lay claim to Westphalian sovereignty as descriptively true in a very hard sense (i.e. NO transnational movements, NO intervention, etc.) are false, both theoretically and descriptively.

But in more general terms, the 'Westphalian supposition' is not that strong. To me (as someone 'of' the field of IR) it means little more than at a certain period (scholars disagree over whether it was actually Westphalia that was the watershed or the Treaty of Utrecht, the Treaty of Augsbury, etc.), political power in the European heartland developed into a kind of agreement that each ruler would be left to govern as they pleased within their territorially-defined units. Hence the formal birth of the State as an "organised monopoly of legitimate violence" (and every term in that phrase is contested) and the idea of an inside/outside distinction (total sovereignty within borders, none outside).

That there have been Empires and wars and transnational movements and 'humanitarian interventions' since Westphalia does not mean that the state system is not the basic governing system in international politics. Speaking as devil's advocate, could you even say that 'the US' invaded 'Vietnam' if Westphalia was not the background practice by which we made sense of war and peace?

The real issue is not 'Westphalia' but political realism, which is the much harder set of claims that actual-existing politics is governed more by 'anarchy' and 'self-help' than hegemony or unipolarity, as well as the various coding systems for war and peace that predominate in the US (such as the Correlates of War Project) which are incapable of measuring superpower-backed coups, proxy wars and the like.

But even self-described realists are not settled on these questions. There is ongoing on work on 'hierarchy within anarchy' and plenty of acknowledgment of globalisation, trans-nationalisation and the like. It is just accompanied (often rightly) by warnings not to overstate the case and an insistence that states are still what international politics is about.

If you are interested [and as uninformed as you say :P], you might want to check out Justin Rosenberg's 'The Empire of Civil Society' (Verso, 1994) and Benno Teschke's 'The Myth of 1648' (Verso, 2003), both of which give an accessible treatment of these issues from Marxist standpoints. R.B.J. Walker's 'Inside/Outside: IR as Political Theory' (Cambridge, 1992) is also very good but more 'critical theory' than Marxism

P

[Jodi]

PabloK --thanks for the cites and for your remarks; I wrote this because I'm reviewing a book that positions its argument as a post-Westphalian intervention. Given what you've said, it seems like a stronger point (on the part of the author) would have engaged political realism.