The Westphalian myth: what the Peace of 1648 did and did not create

Almost every introductory course in international relations (IR) begins with a date: 1648. The Peace of Westphalia, the treaties of Osnabrück and Münster that ended the Thirty Years’ War, is usually said to mark the start of the modern system of sovereign, territorial and legally equal states. Scholars speak of the “Westphalian order”, “Westphalian sovereignty” and, more recently, a “post-Westphalian” world.

For postgraduate students, the most useful thing to learn about this story is that it is largely wrong, and that understanding why it is wrong reveals a great deal about how political science builds its founding narratives.

The conventional account

In the standard version, Europe before 1648 was a hierarchical, overlapping order dominated by two universal authorities, the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) was a religious conflict that destroyed that order. The settlement then established three principles: territorial sovereignty (each ruler has supreme authority within defined borders), non-intervention (no outside power, including the Pope, may interfere in a state’s internal affairs, especially religion), and the legal equality of states. Leo Gross’s influential 1948 article in the American Journal of International Law called Westphalia the “majestic portal” through which the world passed from the old order to the new.

This account became standard in realist and neorealist theory. Kenneth Waltz’s anarchic system of “like units” makes most sense if one assumes that sovereign states existed from a clear starting point.

The revisionist challenge

Since the late 1990s, historians and IR scholars have taken that account apart. Their main arguments are these.

First, the treaties do not say what they are supposed to say. Andreas Osiander’s 2001 article in International Organization is the essential starting point. He shows that the treaties do not mention sovereignty as a general principle, and that their main purpose was to preserve the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, not to dissolve it. The German princes gained a confirmed right to make alliances, but explicitly not against the Emperor or the Empire. The Empire remained in existence until 1806.

Second, non-intervention was not established. If anything the opposite was. Sweden and France became guarantors of the Imperial constitution, with a treaty right to intervene in German affairs. Religious arrangements inside territories were frozen at a “normative year” (1624) and protected by external guarantees, which limited rulers’ freedom over religion rather than confirming it. Stephen Krasner’s Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (1999) uses this point to argue that sovereignty has always been a norm that powerful states both claim and break.

Third, the chronology is wrong. Derek Croxton (1999) shows that contemporaries did not see 1648 as a constitutional turning point. The ideas associated with sovereignty developed over a longer period, from Jean Bodin in the 1570s through Hobbes and on to Vattel in the eighteenth century. Daniel Philpott (2001) argues that the Reformation was the real “revolution in sovereignty”, with Westphalia only confirming changes already under way.

Fourth, the material basis is missing. Marxist IR scholar Benno Teschke (2003) argues that the states of 1648 were still dynastic, “absolutist” property arrangements. Territory was owned by ruling families and passed through marriage and inheritance. Modern sovereignty, in which territory belongs to an impersonal state separate from its ruler, depended on the capitalist transformation of property relations that came later, first in England.

Why the myth survived

If the evidence against the conventional story is so strong, why does it persist? There are three reasons that are worth thinking about.

First, disciplines need founding stories. IR became an academic field in the twentieth century and needed a clear origin to justify its focus on the state. A single treaty date serves that purpose better than a gradual, messy process.

Second, the myth reflects a European viewpoint. It treats the European state system as the template for the world and other political orders as pre-modern or exceptional. The tribute system centred on China, Islamic empires and the mandala polities of Southeast Asia described by O.W. Wolters all organised authority differently. They were not simply earlier stages on the way to Westphalia. Recent “Global IR” scholarship, associated with Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, makes this point strongly.

Third, the myth is useful in current debates. People who argue that sovereignty is eroding because of globalisation, humanitarian intervention or the European Union need a stable “Westphalian” baseline to measure the decline. If that baseline never existed, the story of decline loses much of its force.

Why it matters for students in Southeast Asia

For students in Indonesia and the wider region, this debate has practical relevance. ASEAN’s commitment to non-interference is often described as “Westphalian”. But the norm developed in a specific post-colonial context. It was a defence against great-power intervention during the Cold War, not an inheritance from seventeenth-century Germany. Understanding it as a product of decolonisation rather than of 1648 changes how one evaluates it. It also explains why the norm has proved flexible in practice, for example in ASEAN’s handling of Myanmar after 2021.

Questions for seminar discussion

• If the Peace of Westphalia did not create sovereignty, when, and through what processes, did the territorial state become the dominant political form?
• Is Krasner right that sovereignty is “organized hypocrisy”? What would a non-hypocritical sovereignty look like?
• How should IR theory treat non-European political orders, such as Southeast Asian mandala states, that were not “proto-Westphalian”?

References and further reading

• Croxton, D. (1999). The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the origins of sovereignty. The International History Review, 21(3), 569–591.
• Gross, L. (1948). The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948. American Journal of International Law, 42(1), 20–41.
• Krasner, S. D. (1999). Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy. Princeton University Press.
• Osiander, A. (2001). Sovereignty, international relations, and the Westphalian myth. International Organization, 55(2), 251–287.
• Philpott, D. (2001). Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations. Princeton University Press.
• Teschke, B. (2003). The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations. Verso.
• Wilson, P. H. (2009). Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War. Allen Lane.
• Wolters, O. W. (1999). History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (rev. ed.). Cornell University Southeast Asia Program / ISEAS.
• Acharya, A., & Buzan, B. (2019). The Making of Global International Relations. Cambridge University Press.