Provincializing Westphalia: The Eastern origins of sovereignty

Original Article Provincializing Westphalia: The Eastern origins of sovereignty

Abstract This article critiques the 'Westphilian narrative' of the sovereign state. The dominant Eurocentric account assumes that the sovereign state emerged through a series of developments that unfolded endogenously within Europe, none of which were influenced or shaped by impulses that emanated from the East or from the non-Western world. Having outlined the various Eurocentric theories of the rise of the sovereign state, the bulk of the article forwards a non-Eurocentric alternative narrative. While accepting that there were multicausal economic, discursive, political and military foundations to sovereignty, I argue that each of these was significantly enabled by Eastern influences, in the absence of which the sovereign state might not have made an appearance within Europe. In the process, I suggest that the rise of the sovereign state occurred during the era of, and through the impact of, 'Oriental globalization', thereby recasting the relationship between sovereignty and globalization more generally.

Introduction: How and Where was Sovereignty?

Probably the first concept that students are introduced to on 'International Relations one-oh-one' is that of sovereignty. There they will be introduced to the 'Westphalian sovereignty narrative': that sovereignty originated at Westphalia in sixteen forty-eight through a series of developments that were endogenous to Europe before it was subsequently exported as the 'gift of civilization' to the 'Rest' through the gracious vehicle of Western imperialism. This may better be described as a Westphilian narrative owing to its Eurocentric nature; a bias that goes hand-in-hand with a concomitant Eastphobia. Moreover, this narrative is bound up tightly within a Westphilian straitjacket owing to the point that such an analysis is constrained by its inability to factor in non-Western inputs in the making of sovereignty. That is, its ambit is confined within the parochial mental and metageographical limits of Europe.

Though claiming to be a general introduction to the discipline, the conventional 'IR one-oh-one' module fails to historicize the emergence of the sovereign state, taking for granted that its origins can be located exclusively within Europe. This manoeuvre often appears as an innocent 'matter of convenience' because, having driven past a series of historical signposts, the lecturer can arrive as quickly as possible at the post-nine thousand nine hundred forty-five world where the 'real IR' subject matter is contained. As we shall see, this 'matter of convenience' is less innocent than first appears given that it obscures a subterranean Eurocentrism that lies at the base of much of the discipline of IR in both its conventional and critical wings. Surprisingly, this narrative is often replicated by the many critical theorists who argue that globalization is now transcending the modern sovereign state. Thus, they sometimes concede the 'realist' point that the sovereign state was created by the Europeans and that it was the pivotal actor in IR between sixteen forty-eight and nine thousand nine hundred forty-five before claiming that this is no longer the case. All in all, most IR scholars assume that the sovereign state miraculously appeared almost overnight in sixteen forty-eight. And this is the usual message that students on IR one-oh-one receive.

However, in the past decade or more, the historiography of sovereignty has received detailed empirical analysis, usually undertaken by various critical and/or revisionist scholars. This body of literature takes two major points for departure. First, most such scholars are interested in developing a historical sociology of the state and of IR more generally. Not surprisingly, they have located manifold social processes that led to the rise of sovereignty in Europe. The seminal article in IR was, of course, written by John Ruggie, who challenged neorealist historiography and its ontological premises. Ruggie took to task Kenneth Waltz's 'continuity problematic' - that Waltz's structuralism 'contains only a reproductive, but no transformative logic'. Thus, he argued that Waltz has no way of explaining the transition from the heteronomous feudal political system to the modern system based on the sovereign state. It was this piece that set some IR scholars on a new research path as they sought to produce a historical sociology of state and systems change. The task was not merely to produce a more satisfactory historical sociological account of the rise of the modern sovereign state and state system but also to develop alternative approaches to neorealism. Indeed, the rise of the historical sociology of IR was informed by these twin focuses. Thus, various scholars produced explicit critiques of neorealism as they went about rethinking the rise of the sovereign state in Europe - most notably Justin Rosenberg and Hendrik Spruyt - before they were followed by a subsequent wave of scholars.

More recently, this first aspect of the revisionist literature on the rise of sovereignty has become complemented by a second. This can best be summed up by the founding question, 'when was sovereignty?' Thus, in addition to producing alternative historical sociologies of IR and the sovereign state, a fresh wave of scholars have interrogated the temporal assumption that sovereignty was born in sixteen forty-eight. Some have claimed that modern sovereignty only emerged in the nineteenth century, whereas others have traced its roots back much further.

My two founding questions take an alternative departure to all the extant accounts of the rise of sovereignty. This involves asking not 'when' but 'where was sovereignty?', and not simply 'why' (as in the functionalist tendency of much of the extant literature) but 'how was sovereignty?' Both these questions point to the important role played by the East in the rise of European sovereignty. And this in turn responds to the point that all extant theories are Eurocentric insofar as they assume that we can explain the origins of sovereignty by looking at causal processes that exist only within Europe. Thus, despite their many ontological and chronological/temporal differences - which are profound - the fact is that such revisionism ultimately produces variations on a conventional Eurocentric theme.

By 'provincializing Westphalia', I aim to reveal the manifold Eastern and global forces that informed the rise of sovereignty in Europe, thereby placing Westphalia in its proper global context - hence my question 'where was sovereignty?' In this way, Eurocentric parochialism is replaced by a globalism in which the East is returned to the analysis as a site of progressive agency. And at the same time, I prefer to ask 'how' rather than 'why' was sovereignty? Current theories assume a functionalist evolutionary logic where sovereignty is ushered in principally to serve the interests of a particular actor or group of actors. It is true that some neo-Weberians have claimed a primary role for contingency and discontinuity, which allegedly emerges from their multicausal and multispatial models. But, this is negated by their Eurocentrism; a metanarrative that necessarily imputes an evolutionary logic wherein the unfolding of unique, internal European properties leads to the rise of sovereignty. Focussing on the how and where of sovereignty shifts the analysis away from evolutionism and the Eurocentric logic of immanence towards a non-Eurocentric notion of discontinuous change. Thus, my non-Eurocentric approach reveals a series of contingent influences that impact Europe from 'outside' and are, therefore, partially independent from internal European processes.

Finally, I seek to reorient conventional arguments concerning the relationship between globalization and sovereignty. As indicated above, for many IR scholars, it is treated as almost axiomatic that sovereignty and globalization are antithetical. Thus, sovereignty allegedly emerged at a time when globalization did not exist and, conversely, the rapid development of globalization after nineteen forty-five/seventy-three engenders the decline of sovereignty. This view has been challenged in the last decade by a number of authors working across a range of theoretical perspectives. Although my approach has certain overlaps with the latter perspective, it also offers distinctive ways of thinking about state-globalization relations. In particular, I argue that globalization is as significant today as it was for much of the post-fourteen fifty era. More importantly, I argue that globalization was Eastern-led for most of the period of its existence - emerging very gradually after five hundred during the 'Eastern Age of Discovery' and moving forward more rapidly after approximately fourteen fifty. My key claim is that the sovereign state emerged during an era of what I call 'Oriental globalization'. My point is not that 'globalization' can be unproblematically extrapolated back in time from the present to fourteen fifty C E so as to convey a single monolithic process for this would obscure critical ruptures that have punctuated globalization through the longue global durée. Indeed, although modern and Oriental globalization share many things in common, they also exhibit crucial differences. But, despite these differences, the role of Eastern agency after nineteen forty-five has had the effect of deepening and broadening sovereignty at the very time when globalization is said to be in full swing. Thus, if Oriental globalization and Eastern agency was the midwife, if not the mother, of European sovereignty, so under modern globalization Eastern agency has ensured the spread and commitment to external sovereignty across the non-Western world.

Two further introductory points are necessary in order to contextualize the following discussion. First, unlike many, though not all, of the accounts of the rise of the sovereign state I develop a multicausal or ontologically pluralist account that gives roughly equal weighting to economic, discursive, military and political factors. The whole process of European development is thoroughly overdetermined by a range of factors that exist within and beyond Europe. Moreover, singling out any single causal variable as 'ultimately determining' is problematic because each can be found to exist within one or more regions in the world in different periods of world history. Only in Europe did they combine to produce sovereignty. And this process was itself a result of interaction with multiple non-European actors and processes.

Second, I shall not engage in the temporal problematique of the revisionist school, fascinating though it is. I shall simply assume that sovereignty began to emerge in the seventeenth century even though it took a good deal longer before it was institutionally consolidated. Thus, although external sovereignty was apparent in the late seventeenth century, it would be wrong to present it as consolidated in an organizational sense given that a range of non-state political actors continued to play a role in international politics - the English East India Company, for example, was as much a political as an economic actor right down to eighteen fifty-eight. Yet more problematically, no European state was fully internally sovereign until the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, although Louis XIV could proclaim that 'L'état c'est moi' as much as Frederick the Great could boast that 'I ruin the authority of the Junkers and build my sovereignty like a rock of bronze', the fact is that private political actors remained important for centuries to come. Indeed, as even Max Weber conceded, the First World War was in part a product of the private political power of the Prussian Junker class. Indeed, until nineteen eighteen, the German state was unable to differentiate between public/national interest and private Junker interests. Despite acknowledging these complexities, this article should not be seen as a contribution to the debate on when sovereignty emerged in Europe. Rather, my argument is that the exaggerated emphasis accorded to the question 'when was sovereignty?' has, despite its impact and interest, obscured the role of the East in this process. And this latter issue is the primary optic of the article.

The article is divided into three sections. In the first part, I briefly review Eurocentrism and explain how it is internalized within extant accounts of the rise of sovereignty. The second section sketches a picture of Oriental globalization that existed between roughly five hundred and eighteen hundred. Part three reveals how the more advanced Eastern 'resource portfolios' (Eastern ideas, institutions and technologies) diffused across the global economy through Oriental globalization where they were assimilated by the Europeans to propel sovereign state formation. At base, my claim is that Westphalia can be 'provincialized' by revealing it as located within a conjunctural analysis of the longue Oriental global durée. The piece concludes by reflecting on the issue of discontinuity and, more generally, on the relationship between globalization and sovereignty.