The changing
structure of European order poses, for any student of international relations,
some fundamental questions about the evolution of world politics. Concepts of European order and of the European
state system are, after all, central to accepted ideas of international
relations. Out of the series of conflicts and negotiations—religious wars,
coalitions to resist first the Hapsburg and then the Bourbon attempt at European
hegemony—developed ideas and practices which still structure the
contemporary global state system: the equality of states; international law as
regulating relations among sovereign and equal states; domestic sovereignty as
exclusive, without external oversight of the rules of domestic order. The
‘modern’ state system, modern scholars now agree, did not spring
fully-clothed from the Treaty of Westphalia at the close of the Thirty
Years' War; it evolved through a succession of treaties and conferences,
from 1555 to 1714. It remains acceptable, nevertheless, to describe the European
state order as built around the Westphalian system.
EPILOGUE The Contemporary Global State System