Westphalian system
The principle developed in Europe after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, based on the state theory of Jean Bodin and the natural law teachings of Hugo Grotius.
[3] A series of treaties made up the Peace of Westphalia, which has been considered by political scientists to be the beginning of the modern international system,[4][5][6][7] in which external powers should avoid interfering in another country's domestic affairs.
Recent scholarship has argued that the titular Westphalian treaties in 1648 actually had little to do with the principles with which they are often associated: sovereignty, non-intervention, and the legal equality of states.
[12] Nonetheless, "Westphalian sovereignty" continues to be used as a shorthand for the basic legal principles underlying the modern state system.
Since neither the Catholics nor the Protestants had won a clear victory, the peace settlement established a status quo order in which states would refrain from interfering in each other's religious practices.
It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other's domestic affairs and checking each other's ambitions through a general equilibrium of power.
Article 2, Clause 4 reads: All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.After the end of the Cold War, the United States and Western Europe began talking of a post-Westphalian order in which countries could intervene against other countries under the context of human rights abuses.
Much of the literature was primarily concerned with criticizing realist models of international politics in which the notion of the state as a unitary agent is taken as axiomatic.
[30] In a 2008 article, Phil Williams links the rise of terrorism and violent non-state actors (VNSAs), which pose a threat to the Westphalian sovereignty of the state, to globalization.
[36] By this view, it has been argued that no sovereignty exists and that international intervention is justified on humanitarian grounds and by the threats posed by failed states to neighboring countries and the world as a whole.
[citation needed] Although the Westphalian system developed in early modern Europe, its staunchest defenders can now be found in the non-Western world.
The presidents of China and Russia issued a joint statement in 2001 vowing to "counter attempts to undermine the fundamental norms of the international law with the help of concepts such as 'humanitarian intervention' and 'limited sovereignty'".
[37] China and Russia have used their United Nations Security Council veto power to block what they see as American violations of state sovereignty in Syria.
