BEYOND WESTPHALIA

4 BEYOND WESTPHALIA

6 At the core of both of these issues is a fierce debate about the future

7 of international politics. Often the protagonists are caught in two

8 minds. Most state actors are clear that there is a real need for a

9 formal procedure that would allow the international community to

30 engage in humanitarian intervention. Yet few are willing either

1 to give the UN the power necessary to formalize such a procedure

2 or to create the legal rules necessary to establish a right to intervene.

3 Exploring this dilemma really offers us a sense of the crossroads

4 that the international community is faced with. Similarly there

5 is near universal acknowledgement that poverty in the developing

6 world is not merely a matter of ‘bad luck’ but a problem that the

7 international community must address. Yet once again we find

that few are willing to either acknowledge the centrality of global

160 F ROM STABILITY TO JUSTICE ? poverty to the question of global justice or to deliver on the myriad

of promises made at grand summits of the leaders of the world’s wealthiest nations.

The question we intend to leave you with in this final chapter is not one that we expect you to answer right now. Rather it is one that you should think about throughout your academic career as students of IR and beyond. It is a question that can be put in any number of ways to suit any number of contexts. In this chapter we ask you to consider the following idea. Is the pressure on the international community to deliver justice on a global scale such that we should consider the state-centric ‘Westphalian model’ of international politics a thing of the past? You will come across this claim a lot in contemporary IR debates. It is not a claim that the nation-state is actually disappearing as a form of political community (much as the ancient Greek poleis or city states once disappeared). That would be too premature. Rather it is an argument that combines the following:

A factual claim – sovereign states are no longer autonomous in the way that they have been since Westphalia in that there are real limits to how a state can act internally and on the use of force as a tool of foreign policy.

A political claim – sovereign states are no longer the best way to manage those things that we believe to be the most important social challenges we face and so we need to imagine new political spaces that are global, regional and subnational.

A normative claim – we ought to (we have good moral and political reasons to) dramatically reorganize global politics to move beyond the states system.

Ultimately arguments of this sort, if they prove to be realistic, challenge us to develop new ways of thinking about the nature of IR and to imagine new structures of global governance. To approach this question is to consider the very nature of IR and your considered opinion on this question may well structure your own outlook on all of the many questions of world politics that you will study.

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