For generations, the foundational narrative of international law has been anchored to a singular historical inflection point: the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. According to this orthodox historiography, the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück systematically dismantled the medieval hierarchical order of the Holy Roman Empire, replacing it with a horizontal system of legally equal, politically independent sovereign states. In this traditional view, Westphalia birthed the modern international system by enshrining the principle of *cuius regio, eius religio* as a broader mandate for absolute territorial sovereignty and non-intervention. Consequently, international legal scholars have long treated 1648 as the genesis of modern statehood, a clean epistemological break from medieval universalism.
However, a growing cohort of revisionist historians and legal scholars has persuasively demonstrated that this "Westphalian myth" is a retroactive intellectual fabrication. A close examination of the actual treaty texts reveals that the negotiators in 1648 were not conceptualizing a new system of sovereign equality, but rather reconfiguring the internal constitutional mechanics of the Holy Roman Empire. The treaties explicitly preserved the overarching hierarchical authority of the Emperor and the Imperial Diet. The territorial prerogatives granted to the imperial estates (*Landeshoheit*) were carefully circumscribed and fundamentally distinct from the modern concept of absolute sovereignty (*majestas*), as they remained subject to imperial appellate jurisdictions and structural limits.
Furthermore, the attribution of a paradigm of non-intervention to Westphalia represents a profound historical anachronism. The treaties expressly established a system of mutual guarantee, effectively legalizing external intervention to uphold the newly established constitutional settlement. Guarantor powers like France and Sweden were granted the explicit legal right to intervene in the internal affairs of the Empire to protect the religious and political rights of the estates. This framework of legalized interventionism stands in stark contradiction to the classical principles of sovereign autonomy that nineteenth-century scholars later projected back onto the 1648 settlement.
The persistence of the Westphalian myth within international legal scholarship, therefore, owes less to historical reality than to the ideological utility of the narrative. As European powers sought to consolidate domestic state-building projects in the nineteenth century and rationalize an international system predicated on the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state, they required a foundational origin story. By mischaracterizing Westphalia as the birthplace of sovereign equality, scholars obscured the complex, hierarchical realities of early modern statecraft and naturalized a specific, historically contingent model of statehood. Thus, discarding the Westphalian myth is a necessary precondition for recognizing that sovereignty is not a static, original feature of the international order, but an evolving, deeply contested legal construct.
Which one of the following most accurately expresses the main point of the passage?
- AThe Peace of Westphalia initiated the modern international system by definitively dismantling medieval imperial authority, thereby enshrining absolute territorial sovereignty and non-intervention as the universal legal norms of European statecraft.
- BThe treaties of Münster and Osnabrück, contrary to orthodox historical accounts, explicitly preserved the overarching constitutional authority of the Emperor and granted external guarantor powers the legal right to intervene in the Empire's internal affairs.
- CThe deliberate falsification of the Westphalian settlement by nineteenth-century European scholars demonstrates that the concept of state sovereignty is an entirely illegitimate ideological construct designed solely to justify aggressive state-building projects.
- The conventional historiography identifying the Peace of Westphalia as the genesis of sovereign equality is an ideological fabrication that distorts the treaties' actual provisions, which instead established a hierarchical framework characterized by limited autonomy and legalized intervention.Answer
- EBecause the traditional understanding of the Peace of Westphalia has been thoroughly debunked by actual treaty texts, international legal scholars must now discard the concept of territorial sovereignty and adopt a new model based on mutual guarantee.