Jerry B. Marchant of IS IT PROPAGANDA?® argues that multipolarity is reviving Westphalian sovereignty while transforming the international system.
The Peace of Westphalia, concluded in 1648 through the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück, is conventionally treated as the founding moment of the modern international system. The treaty is credited with establishing the sovereign territorial state, advancing non-interference in domestic affairs, and replacing the universalist claims of the Holy Roman Empire and papacy with an order of formally equal states.
Nearly four centuries later, as the post-Cold War unipolar moment gives way to a contested multipolar landscape shaped by China, Russia, India, and a more assertive Global South, the Westphalian legacy has acquired renewed relevance. Does multipolarity represent a return to Westphalian principles after the interventionism of the unipolar era, or does it mark a fundamental break with the sovereignty-based order associated with 1648?
This essay argues for neither a simple return nor a clean rupture. Contemporary multipolarity is better understood as a selective and asymmetric reassertion of Westphalian norms. Rising and resurgent powers invoke sovereignty and non-interference against the interventionist practices of the unipolar era, while simultaneously operating within economic, technological, and informational structures that the territorial logic of 1648 cannot fully govern.
The result is a hybrid system: Westphalian in its normative vocabulary, but increasingly post-Westphalian in its material structure.
The Myth and Substance of 1648
Before connecting Westphalia to multipolarity, its historical meaning requires qualification. The 1648 settlements did not establish sovereign equality in the modern sense. As Andreas Osiander demonstrated, the treaties primarily resolved the Thirty Years’ War, redistributed territory within the Holy Roman Empire, and established limited religious rights for German princes. The Empire itself survived for another century and a half.1
What became known as “Westphalian sovereignty” was largely a retrospective construction. Nineteenth-century legal positivists and later international-relations theorists transformed the settlement into an origin story for the state-centric international order. Leo Gross’s influential 1948 essay further cemented this interpretation.2
Stephen Krasner’s description of sovereignty as “organized hypocrisy” captures the resulting paradox: non-interference was proclaimed as a principle while repeatedly violated by powerful states. The historical record therefore suggests that sovereignty was never an absolute or consistently applied rule.3
This distinction matters today. The question is not whether multipolarity is literally “returning to 1648,” but which actors invoke Westphalian principles, against whom, and for what purpose.
The Unipolar Interlude
The decades following the Soviet collapse represented a significant departure from traditional non-interference. During the 1990s and 2000s, liberal internationalism increasingly treated sovereignty as conditional upon other principles, including human rights, democratic governance, and humanitarian protection.
NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo, undertaken without UN Security Council authorization, was justified in part by the argument that sovereignty could not protect a state engaged in severe abuses. The 2005 UN endorsement of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine similarly established that sovereignty carried responsibilities whose violation could justify international action.
The 2003 Iraq invasion and 2011 Libya intervention further demonstrated the tension between territorial sovereignty and interventionist doctrines.
Henry Kissinger’s World Order (2014) offered a realist critique of attempts to extend a particular liberal-democratic model into a universal organizing principle. Whatever one makes of that argument, the subsequent rise of multipolarity demonstrates that conditional sovereignty did not go unanswered.4
Multipolarity and the Strategic Redeployment of Sovereignty
Contemporary multipolarity has therefore revived sovereignty as a central diplomatic vocabulary.
Russian and Chinese diplomacy regularly emphasize territorial integrity, sovereign equality, and non-interference. These principles also appear throughout BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation statements. India’s emphasis on strategic autonomy and non-alignment draws from a related tradition rooted in the Bandung Conference of 1955.
Yet these states do not necessarily share a common political project. Amitav Acharya’s concept of the “multiplex world” is useful because it avoids reducing multipolarity to a simple “rise of the rest.” Different powers may agree that Western universalism and conditional sovereignty should be constrained while disagreeing over what should replace them.5
This creates an important contradiction.
Russia’s invocation of sovereignty sits uneasily beside its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which violated Ukraine’s territorial integrity. The contradiction illustrates Krasner’s broader argument: sovereignty can function simultaneously as a principle, a diplomatic shield, and a selectively applied instrument of power.
The same analytical standard must therefore be applied to multipolar powers as is applied to Western powers. Sovereignty rhetoric is significant, but rhetoric alone does not establish consistent practice.
Where Westphalia Meets Its Limits
The deeper problem is that the contemporary international system has developed far beyond the territorial conditions of 1648.
Economic interdependence has created supply chains, financial networks, regulatory systems, sanctions regimes, and currency dependencies that blur the distinction between domestic and international affairs. States can exert considerable influence inside another state’s economic space without physically crossing its borders.
Cyberspace presents an even sharper challenge. Data flows, cyberattacks, digital infrastructure, and information operations routinely cross territorial boundaries. Russia and China have responded with concepts such as “cyber sovereignty” and “information sovereignty,” attempting to extend territorial authority into the digital domain. The effort itself demonstrates the pressure placed on traditional sovereignty.
Non-state actors further complicate the Westphalian model. Multinational corporations, technology platforms, terrorist networks, and transnational communities can exercise influence that does not fit neatly within territorial borders.
Climate change presents perhaps the clearest example. Its causes and consequences disregard national boundaries, making exclusive domestic jurisdiction insufficient to address the problem.
The paradox is therefore clear: multipolarity may strengthen the political importance of sovereignty precisely as globalization makes sovereignty more difficult to exercise in absolute territorial terms.
Re-Westphalianization as Selective Practice
The rise of multipolarity should consequently be understood as a process of selective re-Westphalianization, rather than either a restoration of the 1648 order or its complete rejection.
For rising and resurgent powers, sovereign equality and non-interference provide a language through which the interventionist practices of the unipolar era can be challenged. This has altered debates over intervention and given the Global South greater leverage in institutions where universalist justifications once carried greater authority.
But this reassertion is primarily normative and rhetorical rather than structural. Diplomatic declarations cannot restore the territorially bounded state as the exclusive locus of authority because the economic, technological, and environmental interdependencies that have developed over centuries cannot simply be reversed.
The resulting order is therefore Westphalian in form and post-Westphalian in function. States continue to speak the language of sovereign equality, territorial integrity, and non-interference while operating within a system that makes absolute territorial autonomy increasingly difficult.
This is where the connection between Westphalia and multipolarity becomes most important. Multipolarity does not necessarily represent a return to the world of 1648. Rather, it represents a renewed struggle over who gets to define sovereignty and the limits of intervention in a world no longer dominated by a single center of power.
Understanding multipolarity therefore requires holding two ideas together.
First, the sovereignty vocabulary associated with Westphalia remains politically powerful. It provides rising powers with a language through which to challenge the conditional sovereignty and interventionist doctrines associated with the unipolar era.
Second, that vocabulary no longer fully describes the material reality of international relations. Economic interdependence, digital networks, environmental challenges, and transnational actors have created forms of power that cannot be contained within territorial borders.
The contemporary system is consequently neither a straightforward return to Westphalia nor a clean departure from it. It is another stage in the long history of sovereignty as a principle that states invoke, defend, reinterpret, and sometimes violate according to changing distributions of power.
The central question of the multipolar era may therefore not be whether Westphalia is returning.
It may be who will define what sovereignty means next.
Osiander, Andreas. “Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth.” International Organization 55, no. 2 (2001): 251–287.
Gross, Leo. “The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948.” American Journal of International Law 42, no. 1 (1948).
Krasner, Stephen D. Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy. Princeton University Press, 1999.
Kissinger, Henry. World Order. Penguin Press, 2014.
Acharya, Amitav. The End of American World Order. Polity Press, 2014.
