Westphalian Foundations of Modern International Relations, Global Politics and Global Security

What is global politics?

It is when a white man sends a black man 20.000 km. far away from home to kill a yellow man, while at home this white man is living on the land occupied from a red man

From 1989 onward, as a consequence of the dissolution of the bipolar world in global politics, Security Studies as an academic discipline re-born again its political importance. From the very traditional point of view, it was only the national-state to be considered as the reference object of the security issue that was usually to be obtained by military power[1] and diplomatic activity by the responsible government. According to some definitions, „Security…implies both coercive means to check an aggressor and all manner of persuasion, bolstered by the prospect of mutually shared benefits, to transform hostility into cooperation“[2] and „National security may be defined as the ability to withstand aggression from abroad“.[3] Nevertheless, collective security in global politics depends fundamentally on the very type of IR between the key actors in politics – the national-states. A modern form of IR and collective security was established after the Thirty Years War in 1648 by the Peace Treaty of Westphalia.

It is a big question if present days world lives in secure times. Usually, the people trust their own governments and institutions for the reason they somehow believe that they keep them safe and even prosperous. However, the current moment of global politics is very characterized by a pervasive worldwide sense of insecurity. There are, unfortunately, many places in the world in which people live under the constant threat of war, expulsion, destruction, rape, killing, shooting, being raped, robbed, terrorized or kidnapped (Kosovo, Somalia, Syria, Nigeria, Afghanistan, the USA, the EU, etc.). Security policy, especially by the states, is supposed to minimize or suppress insecurity. From the points of global politics and international relations (IR), at the time of the Cold War (1949−1989), the responsible institutions to cope with all forms of insecurity were the nation-states, two global military-political blocs (the NATO and the Warsaw Pact) and the only supranational security institution – the UNO. In many cases, security policies are founded on real military forces, which are prepared to act against the perpetrator of the international law and order. In principle, the state authority has to protect their own people against risk of different nature that is coming either from inside or from outside of the society. Nevertheless, the requirement that the state has to protect the citizens from the outside aggression is a cornerstone of security policy in general.[4] Security itself, is considered to be one of the crucial values in human life. Human security primarily means to be safe, or to feel yourself to be safe, from threats. It is, nevertheless, common attitude in the academic discipline of IR that the system of the relations between the nation-states is mostly responsible for the quality of preservation of global security what means that global security fundamentally depends on the type of IR which exists among the key actors in global politics – the (national- or other) states.

A modern system of IR, functioning from 1648 to 1945, has its historical roots in the Thirty Years War (1618−1648), that was concluded by the Peace Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This war can be named as the First Pan-European War, taking its scope, results and consequences for the European history in general. For 300 years, the principles of IR established by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia were respected as the fundamental framework of both world politics and global security.

The foundations of the Thirty Years War were dogmatic disputes between the rising movement and confessional philosophy of different types of Protestantism, at the time of Reformation, and on other hand Vatican. In essence, that was a clash of revolting European Protestants against the confessional authority of the Roman Catholic Church, that started in 1517 by Martin Luther’s (1483−1546) Ninety-Five Theses. In the consequent years, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and other theologians of Protestantism, created the groundwork of Reformation as a spiritual-philosophic challenge to Vatican’s domination over the West Europe. An additional fuel added to a popular dissatisfaction against Vatican became a widespread corruption by the Roman Catholic Church – a dissatisfaction which many European rulers and regional leaders exploited for the sake to realize their own personal ambitions. In some cases, the very personal reasons were the crucial motif to break with the pope as the king of England Henry VIII (1509−1547) did in 1534.[5] The claims of unchallenged spiritual-political authority over the Roman Catholic Europe by Vatican and the Holy Roman Empire (of the German Nation) brought extra personal-state’s reasons to many European kings and other feudal rulers (in the German case, for instance) to decide to break with the pope and to accept some type of the Protestant doctrine instead of the Roman Catholic one. However, on other hand, Vatican and its Roman Catholic client-monarchs of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy became extremely worried that the confessional fragmentation followed by the growing political autonomy of the (North) European rulers is fundamentally undermining the pope’s both spiritual and political authority in Europe, and therefore decided to crush these challenges by all means including and direct military intervention. Such Vatican’s policy finally culminated in the Thirty Years War (1618−1648).

The Peace Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 marks the start of the modern system of IR based on the foreign affairs between the states. The system is usually named as the Westphalian System of International Relations (WSIR), which gradually became up today spread over the world and consolidated as the state’s system with its anarchical inner structure, balances of power and power concern. However, most world states are not able to extract sufficient resources in order to wage some major wars and therefore to play a role of GP in global politics. That became informal reason to legitimize exactly only GP as a „world policemen“ what indirectly means that the world system of IR and global security is in essence of a multipolar nature with some extraordinary exceptions as it was, for instance, the case from 1991 to 2008 when only one hyperpower state (the USA) was a sole global policeman.

The practical implementation of the principles of the 1648 Peace Treaty of Westphalia became, however, contradictory in its nature as they were, in essence, opposing each other to the level not to be finally compatible. The WSIR created after 1648 an anarchic world and power politics based on competition by GP for global hegemony. The established principle of state’s sovereignty in 1648 directly implied the practice of realpolitik, what meant that political actors (states) can freely struggle for realization of their own national interests without any restrictions as any kind of world government did not exist to control and restrain them.

As self-interest motivates states, it became very difficult to reach an agreement between them for the reason that often some interest of one state is not compatible with the interests of other(s). Therefore, usually, governments do not judge objectively in the case of conflict, which state is aggressor and which state is a victim, and rather side with those who can help them to accomplish their own policy goals. For the same reason, states create and join the military-political alliances, which are of shifting nature. One of the fundamental results of the principles established by the 1648 Peace Treaty of Westphalia was that states were seeking for the balance of power in IR as a mechanism for global or regional security and, subsequently, the existence of the system of alliances became for many states precondition to keep the balance of power. Both, alliances and balancing of power in global politics made IR extremely complicated. These complex and contradictory forces governed IR and global politics from 1648, and contemporary international politics is not immune to the basic principles of world politics established by the Peace Treaty of Westphalia:

Sovereignty of the state.
Inviolability of the state borders.
Non-interference into the inner affairs of the other states.
Balancing of power.
Power politics.
Realpolitik.
Making alliances.
Keeping a collective security.

References:

[1] Alan Collins (ed.), Contemporary Security Studies, Oxford−New York, Oxford University Press, 2007, 2.

[2] Edward A. Kolodziej, Security and International relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 25.

[3] Giacomo Luciani, „The Economic Content of Security“, Journal of Public Policy, Vol. 8, № 2, 1989, 151.

[4] Mary Kaldor, Iavor Rangelov (eds.), The Handbook of Global Security Policy, First edition, Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014, 1−2.

[5] Др Иванка Ћуковић Ковачевић, Историја Енглеске. Кратак преглед, Шесто издање, Београд: Naučna knjiga, 1991, 98−100. The king required divorce from his wife Catherine of Aragon by the pope as she was not able to gave birth to his male heir of the throne. As the pope rejected this requirement, the king broke with Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church by providing in 1534 a legislation according to which, Henry VIII became Supreme Head of the English Church. That was the beginning of the introduction of Protestantism in England, regardless to the fact that Henry VIII personally remained conservative in doctrine by still believing in the Roman Catholicism but without the pope. He retained „the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ granted him by the pope in 1521 for his treatise against Luther [Dr Alan Isaacs et al (eds.), A Dictionary of World History, Oxford−New York, Oxford University Press, 2001, 275].

Prof. Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović

www.global-politics.eu/sotirovic

sotirovic@global-politics.eu

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.

Donate to Support Us

We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

[wpedon id=”4696″ align=”left”]

Save

READ MORE!

A Croatian Role in the Destruction of Yugoslavia in the 1990s (III)

Part I, Part II Territorial imperialism of the HDZ’s Croatia The fact was that all ultranationalistic parties and organizations in the 1990s struggled for the creation of a Greater Croatia according to the principle of the ethnographic, historical and even natural rights. In all of those concepts, Bosnia-Herzegovina was seen as an integral part of united Croatia. There were, in principle, two concepts of united Croatia: A minimal concept of Croatia within the borders of the Banovina Hrvatska as it was in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1939−1941 (when a Greater Croatia as a separate and autonomous administrative territory became a state ...

Neoliberalism and the Globalization of War: America’s Hegemonic Project

Тhe world is at a dangerous crossroads. The United States and its allies have launched a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The US-NATO military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.America’s hegemonic project is to destabilize and destroy countries through acts of war, covert operations in support of terrorist organizations, regime change and economic warfare. The latter includes the imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms ...

CIA Discovered Who Helped Hitler to Win Elections in Germany and to Become a Chancellor in 1933

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement! Donate to Support Us We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations. [wpedon id="4696" align="left"]

The U.S. War Crime North Korea won’t Forget

North Korea cheered this month when a man with a knife and a history of violent behavior slashed the face of Mark Lippert, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea. The attack in Seoul was “a knife shower of justice,” North Korea said, praising it as “deserved punishment for warmonger United States.” If that sounds mean-spirited, consider this: For years, North Korea has taught schoolchildren to bayonet effigies of U.S. soldiers. Under its young dictator, Kim Jong Un, the government has suggested it was prepared to nuke Washington, Austin and Southern California. More than 40 years ago, Kim Il Sung, the “Great ...

Donald Trumpenstein: Self-Proclaimed “Cop of the World”

History has repeatedly demonstrated the need to view with the greatest skepticism U.S. imperialism’s justifications for its endless wars and interventions. Need we mention the 1964 U.S.-manufactured Tonkin Bay incident, wherein a virtually non-existent Vietnamese navy was accused of attacking a U.S. destroyer? That false flag pretext was employed to launch the Vietnam War, during which four million Vietnamese were slaughtered in a 10-year U.S. conflagration verging on genocide. Or the more recent Iraq “weapons of mass destruction” lie that resulted in the U.S. murder of 1.5 million Iraqis? Even if the latest sarin gas accusations against Syrian President Bashar Assad should ...

Close Bondsteel in Kosovo!

Rising tensions in the global relations and hotbeds of old and new crises call for unity and efforts of all peace forces for closing foreign military bases, particularly U.S. and NATO foreign military bases, around the globe. The peace forces are obligated to send a clear message that U.S. and NATO foreign military bases represent the tools of hegemonism, aggression, occupation and that as such must be closed.Peace and inclusive development, elimination of hunger and misery require redistribution of spending for maintenance of military bases in favor of development needs, education, and health services. After the end of the Cold ...

Fallujah: A Symbol of US War Crimes

No city in Iraq is more symbolic of the criminal consequences of the US invasion of Iraq than Fallujah. Prior to 2003, the 300,000-strong, prosperous, predominantly Sunni Muslim community on the Euphrates River, one of humanity’s oldest continuous urban settlements, was known as the “city of mosques.” After 13 years of destruction at the hands of the US military and its client state in Baghdad, it is today a labyrinth of ruins, a city of the dead.Following weeks of air strikes by US, British and Australian bombers, a combination of Iraqi government forces and Shiite militias is reportedly on the ...

Crazed Washington Drives the World to the Final War

John Pilger is the kind of well-informed, hard-hitting journalist with gobs of integrity that no longer exists in the Western mainstream media. He has the most distinguished career of all in the business. In the article below he brings stunning information to one of my own themes–the creation by Washington and its NATO vassals of an artificial reality consisting entirely of propaganda into which Washington has placed the entire Western world and all outside who inspire to be part of it. Westerners live in The Matrix, and the presstitutes keep them there. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and ...

Five Myths about American Indians

Thanksgiving recalls for many people a meal between European colonists and indigenous Americans that we have invested with all the symbolism we can muster. But the new arrivals who sat down to share venison with some of America’s original inhabitants relied on a raft of misconceptions that began as early as the 1500s, when Europeans produced fanciful depictions of the “New World.” In the centuries that followed, captivity narratives, novels, short stories, textbooks, newspapers, art, photography, movies and television perpetuated old stereotypes or created new ones — particularly ones that cast indigenous peoples as obstacles to, rather than actors in, ...

U.S. Infowar: Kosovars, Kosovo, Kosovans, Serbian Albanians, Croatian Serbs, Bosnians…

The U.S. government and U.S. media explained the mass murders of Kosovo Serbs, Roma, and other Kosovo minorities as “revenge murders”. They were “revenge attacks”. The expulsion of over 250,000 Kosovo Serbs, Roma, Gorani, and Jews was simply censored and deleted using the infowar technique of Emphasis. These infowar techniques have no basis in criminal law and violate fundamental values and tenets of morality and ethics. The U.S. rationale was spurious: Because Yugoslav police were defending themselves and Kosovo civilians against what the U.S. State Department itself declared were “terrorists”, the Albanian Muslim population of Kosovo had some sort of right ...

Noel Malcolm: “Kosovo – A Short History”, 1999. A History Written With an Attempt to Support Albanian Territorial Claims in the Balkans (Third part)

Prof. Djordje Jankovic, Ph.DFaculty of PhilosophyBelgrade UniversityMiddle Ages in Noel Malcolm’s Kosovo: A Short History and Real FactsBefore presenting the interpretations of the mediaeval past of Kosovo and Metohija in Noel Malcolm’s work, one should be aware of the tasks set by the author before writing the book. That way, the acrobatic handling of the evidence which he uses or does not use will become clearer. In the introductory text, ten pages long, he clearly presents his political and ideological position. They are as follows (p. XXXIV-XXXV): “Kosovo” is one of the cultural crossroads of Europe – which is wrong; ...

America’s “Humanitarian War” against the World

The following text is a point by point thematic summary of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky‘s presentation at the Science for Peace Conference, Academy of Sciences, Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur, 15-16 August 2016.IntroductionHistorically, science has supported the development of the weapons industry and the war economy. “Science for Peace” indelibly requires reversing the logic whereby commissioned scientific endeavors are directed towards supporting what President Eisenhower called “The Military Industrial Complex”.What is consequently required is a massive redirection of science and technology towards the pursuit of broad societal objectives. In turn, this requires a major shift in what is euphemistically called “US Foreign Policy”, namely ...

** FILE ** President Bush declares the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast, in this May 1, 2003 file photo. Democratic congressional leaders on Tuesday, May 1, 2007 sent Iraq legislation setting timetables for U.S. troop withdrawals to President George W. Bush and a certain veto. On the fourth anniversary of the president's "Mission Accomplished" speech, Senate Majority Democratic Leader Harry Reid said that Bush "has put our troops in the middle of a civil war. A change of course is needed." (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The Role of 9/11 in Justifying Torture and War

The words “possible criminal actions” by CIA employees are used in the report.The terms unethical and immoral are mentioned. The criminality of those who ordered these actions at the highest levels of government, however, is not acknowledged.The actions directed against alleged jihadists are categorized as ineffective in the process of revealing intelligence. This in itself is a red herring. The objective of torture was not to reveal intelligence.What of course is not acknowledged is that the alleged terrorists who were tortured were framed by the CIA.Known and documented the Al Qaeda network is a creation of US intelligence.The jihadists are ...

Why didn’t Washington Dissolve NATO after Collapse of USSR?

NATO has expanded dramatically after the collapse of its primary rivals, the USSR and the Warsaw Treaty Organization, Canadian Professor Michael Jabara Carley notes, posing the question whether NATO was founded as a defensive or an offensive alliance.The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance aimed against the Soviet Union, was established on April 4, 1949; and only seven years after the formation of NATO the Warsaw Treaty Organization was established bringing together eight nations (versus 15 NATO member-states).So, who was the real “aggressor”? What alliance was an offensive one?“There has been much discussion recently of NATO in the mainstream and alternate media. Why was ...

On Which Principle Ukraine’s Borders are Formed?

The German occupation forces were those who have been the first to create and recognize a short-lived state’s independence of Ukraine in January 1918 during the time of their-own inspired and supported anti-Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917−1921. As reoccupied by the Bolshevik Red Army, the eastern and southern parts of the present-day territory of (a Greater) Ukraine joined in 1922 the USSR as a separate Soviet Socialist Republic (without Crimea). According to the 1926 Soviet census of Crimea, the majority of its population were the Russians (382.645). The second-largest ethnic group were the Tartars (179.094). Therefore, a Jew V. I. ...

Athens Massacre of 1944: Britain’s Dirty Secret of Winston Churchill

“I can still see it very clearly, I have not forgotten,” says Títos Patríkios. “The Athens police firing on the crowd from the roof of the parliament in Syntagma Square. The young men and women lying in pools of blood, everyone rushing down the stairs in total shock, total panic.”And then came the defining moment: the recklessness of youth, the passion of belief in a justice burning bright: “I jumped up on the fountain in the middle of the square, the one that is still there, and I began to shout: “Comrades, don’t disperse! Victory will be ours! Don’t leave. ...

NATO’s Destruction of Serbia and Where are Serbia, China and the West Today?

It was NATO’s first out-of-area operation, against its own Treaty and without a UN mandate. On March 24, 1999.Independent Kosovo was established – against UN SC resolution 1244. Thanks to the Clinton administration and Madeleine Albright. CNN’s Amanpour endorsed it generously on TV with her State Department husband, James Rubin, a chief operator in the non-negotiations at Rambouillet. And TIME of course knew the truth too.Serbia suffered tremendously from the 78 days of indiscriminate, hard bombing. I know because I was there.Finally, Serbia and its president Milosevic was threatened with total destruction of Belgrade. And gave in.Western hubris after the ...

Putin’s New World Order

Is Vladimir Putin the most popular Russian leader of all time? It certainly looks like it. In a recent survey conducted by the All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center, Putin’s public approval rating soared to an eye-popping 86 percent, which is twice that of Obama’s when he left office in 2016. And what’s more surprising is that Putin’s popularity has held up through a severe economic slump and nearly two decades in office. Unlike most politicians, whose shelf-life is somewhere between 4 to 8 years, the public’s admiration for Putin has only grown stronger over time. And the phenom is not limited to Russia either. According to a recent survey by the pollster YouGov, “Putin is the third most admired man in Egypt, the fourth in China, ...

The USA from 1776 onward

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement! Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest. Donate to Support Us We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations. [wpedon id="4696" align="left"]

The 1967 Obsession, Trump and Trivia

I arrived in Jerusalem last night and as always during the weeks between mid-May and mid-June the media is full of romanticized memories. Within these weeks are the two most siginicfant dates in modern Palestinian history: May 1948 when Palestine was conquered and renamed Israel, and June, 1967 when the Israeli army completed the conquest of Palestine by taking East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. For Palestinians these dates bring back bitter memories, but for Israelis the memories are sweet – those were the days when we were young and brave and innocent. Vintage photos of soldiers at the newly conquered ...