Remembering—and Defending—The International States System

Abstract

IF THE HEDGEHOG KNOWS ONE BIG THING while the fox knows many things, as Archilochus said and Isaiah Berlin reminded us, then modern statesmen need to be both hedgehog and fox. As foxes we are doing well, but as hedgehogs we have forgotten our one big thing: the existence of an international system of states, the foundation on which world affairs have been organized and conducted for more than three centuries. Having forgotten this lesson of history, in recent decades we have allowed our international state system to be ignored, abused and stretched dangerously out of shape.Political systems are human creations that might have been formed other than they actually were in history. Their survival depends on how successfully they perform as systems and how well they are managed and maintained. There are legitimate academic arguments about whether our international system of states had a clear starting point or simply came of age over the course of several centuries. Similarly, it can be debated whether this system was in some sense natural or rational or whether the state became the basic unit simply because it seemed to work better than all other options.There is general acknowledgment, however, that out of the horrors of the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia in 1948, a new states system was born. world of Christendom transmogrified into a world of states. As an international system, it took hold in Europe and then, through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, gained acceptance on every continent of the world. elements of this system are few--conceptually clear, yet profound in their effect. There is the state itself as the building block of international affairs. There is international law, also emerging from the Thirty Years' War by way of Grotius's De Jure Belli ac Pacis of 1625. International conferences and the organizations they spawn have been a feature of the system. Norms, an unattractive word for a precious achievement, have provided the vital, substantive fluid for the system. Professional military and diplomatic services were essential from the earliest stages. And with the aim of controlling the religious sources of the terrible European wars of the 17th century, relations between the states of the system were to be conducted on a secular basis. An ambassador from a state with an established religion might be accredited to the government of a state with a different established religion, but in their international dealings both would feel an obligation to keep matters of faith out of their official business.With the creation of the United Nations after the Second World War, the international system of states seemed to take root in a permanent way. Declaring itself, in its own portentous style of capitalization, to be The World Organization, the UN was to be the unique, legitimizing mechanism of its member states, embodying and pursuing all aspects of the international states system. high years of decolonization, celebrated in graphic displays at UN headquarters in New York City, seemed to ratify this assertion as one colonial entity after another gained its independence in the 1950s and 1960s, became a new nation and took its seat in the General Assembly.But the Cold War decades did severe damage to the international system of states. United Nations was shouldered aside by the superpowers, both of which were coming to resemble empires more than states. Soviet Union pursued its ideological objectives through participation in the international states system, but that same ideology was violently opposed to it in every regard, and aimed to destroy and replace it with its own entirely different world order.The post-Cold War decade of the 1990s, which might have been expected to usher in an overhaul of the international system of states and a restoration to something like its former status, in fact brought further deterioration. President George H. W. …