Key Points

• The Peace of Westphalia was the first explicit expression of a European society of states which served as a precedent for all subsequent develop­ments of international society.

• That international society displaced and suc­ceeded the medieval Respublica Christiana.

• It was the external aspect of the development of modern secular states which had to find an orderly and legitimate way to conduct mutual relations without submitting to either superior authority or hegemonic domination from abroad.

• It was the first completely explicit international society with its own diplomatic institutions, for­mal body of law, and enunciated practices of pru­dential statecraft, including the balance of power.

The Globalization of International Society

The spread of European political control beyond Europe which began in the late fifteenth century and only came to an end in the early twentieth cen­tury proved to be an expansion not only of European imperialism but also, later, of interna­tional society (Bull and Watson). The history of modern Europe is—in very significant part — a his­tory of political and economic rivalry and partic­ularly war between sovereign states. European rivalries were conducted wherever European ambi­tions and power could be projected — i.e. eventually on a global scale. European states entered into com­petitions with each other to penetrate and control economically desirable and militarily useful areas in other parts of the world. Until the nineteenth century large-scale wars were fought by those states outside Europe. Non-European territories and pop­ulations came under the control of European gov­ernments by conquest or occupation, and were sometimes transferred from one European state to another as happened in the case of French Canada which the British annexed at the end of their suc­cessful Seven Years War with France (1756-63). However, a 'remarkable achievement' of the nine­teenth-century Concert of Europe — a balance of power coalition originally formed by the great powers that defeated Napoleon (Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia)—was their avoidance of war in the course of their competitive expansion outside Europe — in marked contrast to 'the incessant acts of war against each other overseas in previous cen­turies' (Watson 1992: 272). International law, diplomacy, and the balance of power thus came to be applied around the world and not only in Europe or the West. By the late nineteenth century even isolated and previously inaccessible continents, like the interior of Africa, were under the jurisdic­tion and manipulation of European powers.

Not every non-Western country fell under the political control of a Western imperial state. But those countries which escaped were still obliged to accept international law and follow the diplomatic practices of international society. The Ottoman empire (Turkey), which geographically and ethni­cally was a partly European state, had for centuries been in close contact with European states but had never accepted the conduct requirements of inter­national society. Instead, the Ottomans insisted on treating European states on their own Islamic terms. Although for several centuries the Ottoman empire regularly intervened in Europe with the aim, usually, of undercutting their Habsburg ene­mies, they held aloof from the conventions of Christian and later European international society with regard to which, as Moslems, they considered themselves superior. At the height of their power between the mid-fifteenth century and the turn of the seventeenth century the Ottomans were able to dictate terms to European states. By the mid-nine­teenth century, however, they had long been in decline and were obliged by what were now clearly superior European powers to accept international law and other dictates of Western states. Japan elected to do the same a little later although with­out the same compulsion and humiliation. Japan successfully acquired the persona and substance of a modern power and by the early twentieth century had defeated the Russian empire in a major war and had become a colonial power herself. China was subjected to extensive territorial encroachments by European states, the United States, and Japan, and did not acquire full membership in international society until 1945 at which time China became a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Most other non-Western political systems were not able to resist Western imperialism and lost their independence as a result. That proved to be the case throughout South Asia, South-East Asia, most of the Middle East, and virtually all of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.

The second stage of the globalization of interna­tional society was via reactive nationalism and anti-colonialism. In that reaction indigenous political leaders made claims for decolonization and inde­pendence based on European and American ideas of self-determination. That involved a further claim for subsequent equal membership of a universal international society open to all cultures and civi­lizations without discrimination (Jackson 1990). That 'revolt against the West', as Hedley Bull put it,

Box 2.7. The Right of Self-Determination

The principle of legitimacy that sanctioned decolo­nization was spelled out in the celebrated 1960 UN General Assembly Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (Resolution 1514) which declared not only that 'all peoples have the right to self-determination' and thus membership of international society but also that 'the further continuation of colonialism ... is a crime which constitutes a violation of the Charter of the United Nations'.

was the main vehicle by which international soci­ety expanded after the Second World War. In a short period of some twenty years, beginning with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, most colonies in Asia and Africa became sovereign states and full members of the United Nations. European decolonization in the Third World more than tripled the membership of the society of states from about 50 to over 160.

The final act of European decolonization which completed the globalization of international soci­ety was the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of the cold war. Here self-determination was based not on overseas colonies but, rather, on the internal borders of the former Russian (Tsarist) empire which the communists took over and pre­served after their revolution in 1917. Those old Russian imperial frontiers thus became new international boundaries. The dissolution of the Soviet Union together with the simultaneous breakup of Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, and Czecho­slovakia expanded the membership of interna­tional society to well over 180. Today, for the first time in world history, there is one continuous inter­national society of global extent—without any intervening gaps of isolated aboriginal government or imposed colonial jurisdiction and also without any external hegemons—based on local territorial sovereignty and a common set of rules the most important of which are embodied by the United Nations Charter.