CIAO DATE: 06/05

Westphalia in Europe as West Failure Abroad?: A Comparative Study of the Fate of the Nation-State in Non-Europe

Abstract

Conventionally viewing the state as a black box and focusing almost exclusively on its outward orientation, the Westphalia paradigm, I argue, has outlived its purpose and may even be misleading when applied to the more porous and democratic state today. Rather than measure state viability in terms of power balances abroad, three constituent elements extracted from the Westphalia literature are used to evaluate internal state viability instead: (a) the relationship between nation and the state, (b) the capacities of the state itself, and (c) the state within a collectivity. Whereas the first is operationalized in terms of Buzan's four-fold typology, the second focuses on how two forms of internal divisions have been resolved - between city and country interests over policy-making, and between various classes in society through governmental income redistribution programs - while the third evaluates the propensity of the state to delegate loyalties to any supranational entity in the 1990s. Over 160 sovereign countries are pooled into 5 geographical regions for the analysis. The results strengthen the above argument, and generally portray the exceptionalism of West Europe: It is the global hub of (a) established nation states, even though there are more state nations worldwide whose historical emergence accented internal development over external security considerations; (b) viable states, measured in terms of established democracies, urban preponderance over policy making, and welfare redistribution; and (c) transferring loyalties beyond the state.

These findings challenge (a) the relevance of Westphalia outside of Western Europe; (b) the pre-eminence of Westphalia in the international relations literature of western countries; and (c) the argument that democracies do not go to war with each other because of a cultural affinity when those same democracies engage in as frequent domestic conflicts, if not more, than non-democracies.

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