Hardt highlights the undermining of the "westphalian" system of states
What has been undermined is not the "Westphalian" system but the idea of sovereign equality embodied in the U.N. Charter -- see David Chandler, "International Justice," _New Left Review_ 6 (November-December 2000), <http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24003.shtml>:
***** The 1945 settlement, preserved in the principles of the UN Charter, reflected a new international situation, transformed by the emergence of the Soviet Union as a world power and the spread of national liberation struggles in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Ideologies of race and empire, too, seemed definitively vanquished with the defeat of the Nazi regime. It was a decisive moment in the transformation of the Westphalian system. In this context, the inter-war consensus on 'the non-applicability of the right to self-determination to colonial peoples' could no longer be sustained. United States policy makers, as they looked forward to assuming the mantle of the now declining British Empire, realized that updated institutions for the management of international relations would have to 'avoid conventional forms of imperialism'. [3] The result was nominal great-power acceptance -- however hypocritical -- of a law-bound international system.
Central to this new mechanism of international regulation was the conception of sovereign equality. The UN Charter, the first attempt to construct a law-bound 'international community' of states, recognized all its members as equal. Article 2(1) explicitly stressed 'the principle of sovereign equality', while both Article 1(2) and Article 55 emphasized 'respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples'. New nations -- which would have failed Westphalian tests of 'empirical statehood', and hence been dismissed as 'quasi-states' -- were granted sovereign rights, [4] while the sovereignty of the great powers was now, on paper at least, to be restricted. The UN system did not, of course, realize full sovereign equality. In practice, the Security Council overwhelmingly predominated, with each of its self-appointed permanent members -- the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China -- retaining rights of veto. Still, sovereign equality was given technical recognition in parity of representation in the General Assembly and lip-service to the principle of non-interventionism, setting legal restrictions on the right to wage war.
Under the Westphalian system, the capacity of the most powerful states to use force against the less powerful was a normal feature of the international order. Under the legal framework set up by the Charter, the sovereign's right to go to war (other than by UN agreement or in self-defence) was, for the first time, outlawed -- a point sometimes missed by those who would argue that the post-1945 order 'failed to break' with Westphalian norms. [5] *****
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Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>
