The Westphalian Model in Defining International Law: Challenging the Myth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The so-called Westphalian model of international legal order, based on the Peace of Westphalia, has had a profound social effect by suggesting that a new international system came into being with the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648. This system has defined not only the present of international society but also the present of international law. Central to this new international system was that Westphalia consecrated the notion of state sovereignty as the fundamental structural idea of that system. The paper shows, however, that such a model has formed part of a continuing process of development originating before 1648 and continuing long after 1648. The Peace of Westphalia did not put an end to multi-layered authority in Europe, but simply constituted a case of redistribution of authority within the Holy Roman Empire. It is argued that Westphalia actually constitutes a myth, an aetiological myth, a myth by which the leading actors in international society have sought to explain the becoming and being of the international system, for their own purposes and to their own satisfaction. This social construction allowed them to have absolute and total power over their territory, unchecked and unaccountable to any higher legal regime or adjudicative authority.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".