The Religious Roots of Modern International Relations

Abstract

The Protestant Reformation was a crucial spring of modern international relations. Had it lever occurred, a system of sovereign states would not have arrived, at least not in the form or at he time that it did at the Peace of Westphalia. This is the counterfactual the author seeks to sustain. He first advances an elaborated but qualified defense of the conventional wisdom that Westphalia is the origin of modern international relations. He then accounts for how Protestant deas exerted influence through transforming identities and exercising social power. Structural heories, emphasizing changes in material power, are skeptical of this account. The author roots lis empirical defense of ideas in the strong correlation between Reformation crises and polities' interests in Westphalia. A description of the historical causal pathways running from ideas to political interest then follows. Germany and France are brought as cases to illustrate two of these pathways. Finally, the author shows the evidentiary weakness of alternative structural material explanations.