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Provincializing Westphalia: The Eastern origins of sovereignty

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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.

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Notes

  1. One partial exception is provided by Perry Anderson (1979) who considers the limits of Eurocentrism in the last part of his book. However, this fails to eradicate the Eurocentric framework of his argument about state formation in Europe.

  2. As an addendum here, it is noteworthy that there were obviously intra-European factors that conditioned or made the assimilation of Chinese military technologies attractive. For example, as rulers sought to transcend the centrifugal political power of the nobles, especially after 1450, so the adoption of modern military technologies effected a shift away from the feudal mode of warfare. And arguably, it was only possible to begin this attack on noble/aristocratic power as a result of its progressive weakening following the impact of the Eurasian plague epidemic that hit Europe in 1347.

  3. As a footnote to this discussion, it is worth nothing that the idea of extraterritoriality was not unique to Europe. Indeed, it seems hardly coincidental that the Venetian merchants were granted extraterritoriality in Alexandria, as even Mattingly concedes (1973: 63–4, 169–70).

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  1. Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, Elmfield, Northumberland Road, Sheffield, S10 2TU, UK

    John M Hobson

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Hobson, J. Provincializing Westphalia: The Eastern origins of sovereignty. Int Polit 46, 671–690 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2009.22

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