Westphalian Order Research Articles

Westphalia Strikes Back: The 2018 Trade Wars and the Threat to the WTO Regime

The regime that has governed trade relations among the world’s largest economies since the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995 is now under threat. While WTO Members adopting trade-restrictive measures on doubtful legal grounds is not a novelty, two developments make the current crisis unique. First, Members are reacting to perceived WTO-inconsistent conduct by imposing countermeasures, based on their own assessment that the justifications put forward are ill-founded. Second, acting on long-standing grievances against activism on the part of the Appellate Body, the United States has blocked all appointments of new members to the organ. Under present conditions, by the time any panel reports concerning these disputes are issued the Appellate Body will be non-operational. These developments undermine the core bargain underlying the WTO regime: the commitment by sovereign entities to entrust decisions regarding permissible and impermissible conduct to authoritative decision-making and to react to other Members’ conduct only following an institutional authorization to do so, when, within the Westphalian international order, they retain the ability to react unilaterally. After reviewing the development of the multilateral trade regime, this paper examines how the 2018 trade wars represent a breakdown of this core commitment and will potentially lead to fragmentation of the WTO regime. Members seeking to preserve the regime are faced with a paradox: overcoming the United States’ block through non-consensual procedures would undermine another commitment: that of decision-making by consensus. Without an Appellate Body or an alternative arrangement to reconstruct an authoritative institution, the WTO regime may devolve into one of Westphalian, de-institutionalized dispute resolution.

Why Does the State Keep Coming Back? Neoliberalism, the State and the Archeon

In this essay I argue that the distinction between neoliberalism and the Westphalian order that is said to precede it (along with populism, authoritarianism and other contemporary phenomenon) are all facets of one and the same phenomenon: archism. Archism is a style of politics based on rule and division. Looking at the work of Derrida, Foucault and Benjamin, I examine the inner workings of archism and how it can be resisted. Above all, I consider the notion of the ‘archeon’; that privileged perch from which the state or law can judge without itself being subject to that judgment. The archeon, I argue is the central node of archism that allows itself to insinuate into any number of myriad forms without appearing to be the same phenomenon. By looking at the way Benjamin subverts the theological origins of the archeon with the idea of a God who abandons the position of judgment, I show a model for how to think differently about archism such that we do not seem eternally fated to choose between the same false dichotomies over and over again.

An Analysis of the Electronic Jihad's Activity in the Social Media Environment

The present text offers an analysis of the electronic jihad strategies based upon the Twitter campaigns of the Somali jihadi-Salafi group Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mudjahideen. The text builds on a post-structuralist conceptualization of temporality, which, when met with virtual environments, becomes a key source of power. The text first introduces a theoretical argument discussing the influence of temporality on the international system in order to apply the resulting conclusions towards an empirical analysis of the revisionist discourse disseminated by the selected extra-systemic actor. The aim of the text is to hint at the analytic potential of certain data collection methods that are employable in the environments of virtual social networks and consequently to demonstrate one of the possible methods of interpretation of such data. This method is inspired by a specific set of expressive devices which, in an apt way, connect the methodological approach with the interpretation of the revisionist world order discourse. The presented analysis in the context of the specific examined terrorist campaign illustrates a revisionist dynamic that is accelerated by the virtual domain and aims at disrupting the normative foundation of the Westphalian order.

An Epitaph for ISIS? The Idea of a Caliphate and the Westphalian Order

The project of restoring the Islamic caliphate has attracted considerable attention, and caused both hope and anxiety, since the Islamic State (IS) proclaimed a caliphate in 2014. The idea of a caliphate has a powerful attraction for many millions of the world’s Muslims, including those who emphatically disapprove of IS, and is sometimes viewed as a remedy for the marginalization and humiliation that the Muslim world has endured at the hands of the West. Thus, although the military defeat of IS seems likely at this point, a widespread desire for a restored caliphate will undoubtedly persist.On the other hand, prominent Western political leaders, diplomats and scholars have expressed severe forebodings about such a restoration. Among other causes for such concern is the fear that a restored caliphate would challenge, and might eventually overturn, the Westphalian system of state sovereignty, which is the legal basis of the current world order. From this perspective, a restored caliphate could pose a revolutionary challenge to a state-centric system of international law. Indeed, it might pose a more substantial threat to the Westphalian system than those that the Soviet Union or the Islamic Republic of Iran presented in their early phases.This paper explores whether the project of restoring a caliphate, if successful, would indeed have such a destabilizing effect. First, it considers the origins and self-understanding of the IS caliphate, examines IS’ historiographic narrative of Islamic expansion, greatness, decline and eventual renewal, and identifies structural reasons for IS’ probable failure. Then it examines the possibility of what has been called a “Great Power” caliphate, i.e., a restored caliphate in a major Muslim state, such as Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan or Indonesia. Here too, it is argued, the Westphalian Order would probably prove to be resilient enough to withstand a challenge.

Nations Unchained: Revolution, Empire, and the Collapse of the Westphalian Order

ABSTRACTI examine transformations of “world orders,” of the basic norms governing relations between powers and between powers and peoples. I present three historical transformations of the world order: First, the transformation at the end of the eighteenth century of the Westphalian or Vattelian order in Europe based on the equality of states and the balance of power, into a world order based on nationalism and imperialism. Second, the transformation in the aftermath of World War II in which imperial domination was rejected, national self-determination affirmed, and territorial acquisition by force outlawed (what I call “1945 rules”). Third, the present collapse of 1945 rules in the face of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. I assess these transformations with help from Nicholas Onuf and the English School of International Relations.

Whither Westphalia?: Sean McFate’s The Modern Mercenary

In his 2014 publication The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What they Mean for World Order , Sean McFate uses the concept of “neomedievalism” to conclude that private military companies (PMCs) will play a dominant role in a twenty-first century characterized by decline of the Westphalian order. The book valuably depends on both McFate’s research and personal experiences with DynCorp International to support its conclusions. Yet, McFate’s dependence on neomedievalism and case studies of Liberia and Somalia fall prey to misattribution and selection bias, in turn weakening McFate’s valuable investigation of PMCs.

Tokugawa, Romanov, and Khmer: The Politics of Trade and Diplomacy in Eighteenth-Century East Asia

Although the “seclusion” paradigm has lost much of its influence, it continues to shape our understanding of Japan. An example is the historiography of Japanese-Russian relations, specifically the Russian Empire’s 1792–1793 mission to Japan to request trade. Ronald Toby sees this as the origins of Tokugawa isolation. We can instead think of Tokugawa policy as a lull between two eras of globalization: Japanese integration into the Chinese diplomatic order and modern integration into the European Westphalian order. The Tokugawa curtailed foreign relations, but maintained a range of commercial relations with a range of non-state actors. Thus, the shogunate was determined not to engage Russia in full, state-to-state diplomatic relations. But it was willing to allow more limited, non-diplomatic trade relations. This distinction was lost on the Russian delegation, who understood relations with Japan in more starkly dichotomous terms. For the Russians, trade was linked to state power. For the Tokugawa, trade could be separated from sovereign authority.

The collapse of the material foundations of Westphalian International Law

This article corresponds to a diagnosis that affirms the collapse of the material foundations of coercive power, the hard constraints of any political direction that seeks to reform of international regulation. It takes the matter within the broad parameters associated with International Law derived from the Treaty of Westphalia, including some of its developments. The evolution of International Law is addressed through the perspective of Strategic Studies to show how the Westphalian order was consistent with then-current underlining strategic, tactical and logistical realities, and then proceeds to demonstrate how those underlining realities have changed. The contrast between current International Law and current strategic, tactical and logistical realities exposes the former as fundamentally at odds, with the latter, which is an untenable situation. Failure to directly address those inconsistencies in an intellectually sustained effort tends to perpetuate a state of affairs in which International Law will be redefined exclusively by the decisions of the powerful and the arbitrary rule of the stronger.

The World Order and a New “Behemoth”

The emergence of “Islamic State” or “Daesh”1 as abbreviation of “Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham” in Arabic now poses a strategic challenge to the international community. Given a number of emerging issues such as “war” in the eastern states of Ukraine and assertive actions of China in East Asia, it requires a sober reflection on strategic thinking before embarking upon any tactical and operational measures vis-à-vis these challenges.This article treats the critical value of the Westphalian order based on a sovereign state system by distinguishing three challenges we face at this juncture: namely Daesh, Russia, and China and suggests ways to fight Daesh from a strategic point of view.

Nations Unchained: Revolution, Empire, and the Collapse of the Westphalian Order

This paper examines transformations of “world orders,” of the basic norms governing relations between powers and between powers and peoples. I present three historical transformations of the world order: First, the transformation at the end of the Eighteenth Century of the order in Europe based on the equality of states and the balance of power, into a world order based on nationalism and imperialism. Second, the transformation in the aftermath of World War II in which imperial domination was rejected, national self-determination affirmed, and territorial acquisition by force outlawed (what I call “1945 rules”). Third, the present collapse of 1945 rules in the face of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. I assess these transformations with help from Nicholas Onuf and the English School of International Relations.

Germany in a Changing World

Germany in a Changing World

Human Rights and States of Emergency: Humanitarians and Governmentality

This essay diagnoses how humanitarian non-governmental organisations are filling a sovereign vacuum created ironically by governments outsourcing their governing functions; this outsourcing marks a transformation of the Westphalian order of states. The proliferation of non-state actors facilitates the politicisation of human rights around how to recognise who or what is a human being endowed with natural rights, and who is a terrorist or outlaw. By tracing the connections between human rights and governmentality, I contend that human rights advocates must acknowledge that their cosy relationship with powerful militaries has resulted in humanitarian interventions using the language of rights to justify neocolonial projects that often intensify human suffering. Humanitarianism may function as a deterritorialised form of governmentality that offers a theatrical illusion of protection and security, while undermining their possibilities structurally. Indeed, I demonstrate how powerful states not only use human rights and humanitarian legitimations for their particularist geopolitical and economic ends, but also direct humanitarian NGOs strategically by proxy for their own interests.

The End of Geography: The Changing Nature of the International System and the Challenge to International Law: A Reply to Daniel Bethlehem

This article responds to Daniel Bethlehem’s assertions that globalization is diminishing the importance of geography, and thereby challenging the Westphalian order on which international law is constructed. It contends that international law does not take geography as it is but actively creates and sustains a state-based geography. It argues that the challenges Bethlehem identifies are not new but are inherent in international law’s efforts to impose a state-based order on a global world. The question is not whether international lawyers will respond to these challenges, but how they will respond. Will they follow Bethlehem in reinforcing a statist order, or will they place sovereignty of states in the service of the global human community?

The Entrapment of Africa within the Global Colonial Matrices of Power

This article deploys world-systems analysis and the concept of coloniality to examine the experience of the African people within the modern world-system since 1492, a date that figuratively marks the birth of the modern world-system and its shifting international orders. Africa’s experience is contextualized within six international orders: the post-1492 order, the Westphalian order that emerged in 1648, the post-1884–1885 Berlin consensus, the post-1945 United Nations normative order, the Cold War epoch that ended in 1989, the current neoliberal dispensation as well as the post 9/11 anti-terrorism and securitization. While Africans have actively contested Euro–North American hegemony throughout these periods, they have not yet succeeded in breaking the strong global technologies of coloniality that continue to prevent the possibilities of African agency. This is why this article ends with a call for deepening the decolonization and deimperialization of the international order in the twenty-first century.

Ordinary Sovereignty

Over fifteen years have passed since Michel-Rolph Trouillot issued his critical call for the renunciation of Haitian exceptionalism. Trouillot's principled argument remains as urgent today as when it was first written, if not more so. Particularly in the wake of the 2010 earthquake, Haiti continues to be portrayed as extra-ordinary: exceptionally tragic, remarkably resilient, singularly radical. This essay expands Trouillot's arguments and extends his critical stance to another trope of exceptionalism in Caribbean studies: that of political sovereignty. It examines how Caribbean spaces that trouble the Westphalian order are cast as exceptions, and, following Trouillot's lead, it attempts to discern the political and intellectual perils of this casting. Echoing Trouillot, the essay calls for us to reimagine Caribbean social and political processes as ordinary—that is, to place them within their historical and geopolitical coordinates. Moreover, it urges us to shift our gaze away from the odd to the production of the norm, the universal, and the unmarked—not as transcendental principles but as localized fictions that don the mask of transcendence.

The Scandinavian International Society by Laust Schouenborg

The English School approach to International Relations (IR) has long been associated with their unique blend of normative and empirical enquiry. Their ‘showcase’ concept was of course that of ‘International Society’, which (in the context of the Cold War) provided an alternative account of international politics, which was purportedly characterised by (timeless) anarchy and a struggle for survival. Since then, one of the core themes of research by English School scholars has included the analysis of the historical evolution of International Society. Key scholars such as Martin Wight and Hedley Bull engaged in the research of the origins of the Westphalian international order and its gradual expansion that resulted in the emergence of global International Society. The culmination of this endeavour was the landmark study, The Expansion of International Society (Bull and Watson, 1984). One of the key criticisms to emerge from these works was the now familiar charge of Eurocentricity, which pointed out to the English School’s complacency with regard to the role that imperialism played in the expansion of International Society (Keene, 2002; Suzuki, 2009). One could also add to this the criticism of ‘tempocentrism’, which reconstructs ‘all historical systems so as to conform to a reified and naturalised present’ (Hobson, 2002, p.9). It could be argued that this has resulted in European International

Turkish Nation State System in the Context of Sovereignty

In this article, I have tried to analyze Turkey's participation, following the collapse of the Ottoman state, into the European centered International state system. The article also examines the change in Turkey's different polity, sovereignty, national building-identity, economy, democracy, law and order, and national and international law. The first part covers the emergence, development and expansion of the Westphalian Order. After the Imperial wars, and the end of the colonial era, the coming of the new postcolonial members also enhanced the international system of states as the center of global order, adopting the sovereign nation state system in their international institutions too. Later on, as a result, the expansion of international society promoted internationalization, regionalization, globalization and a post-Westphalian order in Europe. In a nutshell, in Turkey, the history of the classical national, state, and popular, democratic and pluralist sovereignty discussions have also been elaborated in legal texts up to the present day.

EWU-Krisenmanagement: Warum die Politik auf dem richtigen Weg ist

Summary With troubles in the European Monetary Union (EMU) showing great persistence, the emergency measures and ad-hoc crisis management of European authorities has been subject to harsh criticism. The current fierce debate among economists and the broad public has given rise to two camps advocating fundamentally different approaches how to exit the sustained crisis. While according to the Integrationists′ view, the only viable way to get rid of pressing debt problems and to restore confidence in the Euro area lies in a common guarantee for national debt obligations, so-called Minimalists advocate a strict return to the cornerstones of the Maastricht Treaty, in particular strict compliance with the debt and deficit limits laid out by the Treaty as well as a credible application of the ‚no-bail-out‘ rule. However, in their pure form, both strategies do not serve for a timely and effective crisis management as they either require a level of supranational integration that - given the still prevalent Westphalian order - cannot be attained in the short run nor is it on the agenda of European policy, or essentially deny the significant flaws within the EMU architecture that failed to prevent current fiscal woes. The current crisis management of European authorities has followed neither of the two extremes but has taken a viable middle-of-the-road approach that resulted in useful and necessary repairs to the institutional architecture of the Euro area, most notably the establishment of the commonly guaranteed stability mechanisms EFSF and ESM as well as the first steps taken towards a European banking union. Hence, in contrast to most observers, we argue that the European authorities, by operating a prudent stepby- step approach, are on the right track towards solving the current crisis. As a result, European Central Bank could move back to its original approach of monetary policy.

God vs. Westphalia: radical Islamist movements and the battle for organising the World

AbstractThis article presents the operation ofal-QaedaandHizb ut-Tahrir, two of the most radical Islamist movements, through the lens of the relationship between religion as an organising principle for world politics and the state-based logic. It examines these groups in the context of repeated attempts by religious actors throughout history to render religion the dominant and constitutive element in world politics. Prior to the Peace of Westphalia, religion had a critical role in shaping the political landscape, but Westphalia relegated religion to a secondary position. While it accepted religion's role in the domestic affairs of the units in the international system, the Westphalian order kept religion subordinated to the logic of the state system. But religion maintained its ability to provide an alternative organisation for world politics. Whileal-QaedaandHizb ut-Tahrirare highly unlikely to bring about systemic change, their ascendance should remind scholars that the existing order is not inevitable and that the resurgence of religion in international politics also involves the resurrection of interpretations of religion that compete with and challenge the logic of the state-based system.

Performing International Systems: Two East-Asian Alternatives to the Westphalian Order

AbstractThis article provides a framework for the comparative study of international systems. By analyzing how international systems are framed, scripted, and performed, it is possible to understand how interstate relations are interpreted in different historical periods and parts of the world. But such an investigation also has general implications—inter alia for a study of the nature of power, the role of emotions in foreign policymaking, and public opinion formation. Case studies are provided by the Sino-centric, the Tokugawa, and the Westphalian systems. As this study shows, the two East Asian systems were in several respects better adapted than the Westphalian to the realities of international politics in the twenty-first century.