I would like to thank the editors of Perspective on Politics for organizing this Critical Dialogue. Glenda Sluga’s characteristically generous and thoughtful review of Westphalia from Below raises many good points, only some of which I can address in the available space.
First, Sluga highlights a central (negative) purpose of the book; dismantling the mythical interpretation of Westphalian sovereignty that has presented an inaccurate and highly problematic understanding of the normative foundations of the international order. That this is a present-focused problem, as much as a narrowly historical one, is a case made with specific reference not only to the problematic idea(s) of international intervention on the grounds of humanitarianism but also mass atrocity prevention and, more broadly, human rights promotion. Gareth Evans, a tireless champion for human rights both in his political praxis and academic writings, and largely because of the importance and clarity of his work, bears the brunt of some of my stronger critiques. Evans, along with other prominent norm entrepreneurs, including then-UN secretary general Kofi Annan, sought to reimagine sovereignty at the turn of the twenty-first century away from an “absolute” conception allegedly enshrined in seventeenth-century Europe, which for several hundred years had privileged normatively unaccountable sovereigns. Evans refers to this traditional form of sovereignty as a “license to kill.” This was the launching point of the Responsibility to Protect concept that, as Sluga well knows, goes far beyond military intervention and reflects a broader global political commitment toward, in Evans’s famous formulation, “ending mass atrocities once and for all.” As a starting point for discussions on how to improve and somehow regularize responses to mass atrocity, this mythical version of the foundational meaning of sovereignty was profoundly unhelpful. The authentic meaning of Westphalian sovereignty— as I tried to show in Westphalia from Below—held out the possibility of a much more positive approach.
This brings us neatly to the second (positive) point. As Sluga identifies, the “Westphalian moment” embeds the creation of Euro-world order in international accountability, a nascent concept of community, and a necessarily universal sense of dignity. In particular, it was mediated through a lay neo-Stoicism that became a kind of widespread communal property. The values and mores of this Westphalian epoch, so far as they survived the physical and cultural destruction of so much of Europe (and of so many Europeans), articulated a broad validation of the fundamental intrinsic worth of the human spirit as an individual, but much more importantly as a social being. As the safe moorings toward which the peacemakers were guided, this feeling undergirds the specific legal and political innovations concocted in Münster and Osnabrück. Sluga rightly hints that this insight potentially calls for a wider rewriting of the historical accounts of the diplomatic and political history of peacemaking and order-building processes of the 1640s. Suffice it to say here that, although not inimical to it, such a rewriting was not the purpose of Westphalia from Below.
Third, a concern shadowing both Glenda Sluga’s book and mine is how resources from alternative, historical ways of seeing, thinking, and doing “politics” can bear on our contemporary predicament of transition (or “decline”). In thinking about humanitarian intervention as an historically constituted practice, I hope what my work shows is that it can be compatible—both morally and politically—with the kind of emerging order that diffuses authority and (therefore) responsibility more broadly. Sluga rightly points to the tainted legacies of much European humanitarianism of the the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the perspective of truly global international relations, just as new problems and complications will arise, we can see possible forms of international intervention that are rooted more firmly in the region or locale.
I would like to thank Professor Sluga once more for her insightful and positive comments and to reiterate how valuable I found The Invention of International Order.
