Hana Field: Hey — quick question before we get into anything, have you ever cited a rule you weren't completely sure was real?
Jude Walker: Professionally or personally?
Hana Field: Because that's sort of what every nation-state has been doing since roughly 1648 and the thing is — I'm not being glib. Two actual treaties, Münster and Osnabrück, signed October 24th of that year, ended the Thirty Years' War, ended the Eighty Years' War, recognized the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation as independent states. Real events, real documents.
Jude Walker: Those are real. Yeah.
Hana Field: Real. But the 'Westphalian system' — the one that supposedly invented territorial sovereignty and the non-interference norm and juridical equality of states — Jens Bartelson traced how that story got rewritten, and rewritten again, by Protestant celebrants, then Cold War scholars, then post-Cold War revisionists, each generation using the same event to mean whatever they needed it to mean. And Peter Stirk's argument is even more direct: sovereign equality simply was not a principle at Westphalia. It came later.
Jude Walker: Nah, and yet the UN Charter — Articles 2(1) and 2(7) — runs on this norm as binding law.
Hana Field: Which is the thing I keep returning to — the myth got so load-bearing that dismantling it now would mean dismantling the architecture of every border dispute, every intervention debate, everything. So what we're actually trying to work out today is: how does a story that scholars say is largely invented become the legal bedrock of the entire international order, and what does it cost that it did?
Jude Walker: I mean — the cost is exactly what I want to get into. Because I don't think it's evenly distributed.
Hana Field: And the cost starts in the document itself, because what's actually in those treaties is so much narrower than what we say came out of them. The legal mechanism — the specific one — was Landeshoheit. Rights for German princes inside the Holy Roman Empire to exercise territorial authority. That's a feudal-imperial concept. It's about princes inside an empire managing their own affairs.
Jude Walker: Not nation-states.
Hana Field: Not remotely. And Ferdinand III — he's signing for the imperial side — he's not signing away some universal principle of sovereignty. He's negotiating what his princes can do within structures that still answer to Rome in certain ways, that still have overlapping jurisdictions everywhere. Axel Oxenstierna is there for Sweden, one of the actual victorious powers, and what Sweden gets is territorial guarantees in very specific German territories.
Jude Walker: So where does Hugo Grotius fit? Because every IR textbook treats him like he was in the room.
Hana Field: He wasn't in the room. That's — yeah, that's the thing. Grotius was writing in the same era, but independently. The synthesis — the idea that his legal framework and the 1648 treaties form one coherent 'system' — that's assembled decades later, maybe centuries later, by people who needed it to be a system.
Jude Walker: Post-hoc construction.
Hana Field: Completely. And here's the version that I keep thinking about — picture a Vienna professor in 1905 writing an IR textbook, and he needs an origin story for the modern state system, so he reaches back to 1648 and pulls Grotius alongside Westphalia and says: here, this is where it began. That's not research. That's narrative work.
Jude Walker: Nah, I want to name the thing that actually surprised me going into this — the Eighty Years' War is bundled into Westphalia. The Dutch fighting Spain for eighty years to exist as a state. And 1648 recognizes the Dutch Republic. But — come on — the Dutch Republic's sovereignty wasn't created in that room. It was ratified there. After eighty years of war had already made it a fact.
Hana Field: Oh — that's exactly it. The principle follows the facts on the ground, not the other way around.
Jude Walker: Which means Westphalia didn't birth a principle. It ratified winners. That's a very different thing to be building an international legal order on.
Hana Field: And Peter Stirk's point follows directly from that — sovereign equality wasn't a normative principle at Westphalia because the parties weren't equals. Sweden and Ferdinand III and the Dutch Republic are not operating on some level plane of juridical parity. They're the survivors.
Jude Walker: So the obvious question — and I think this is what a listener is sitting with right now — if it was always this narrow, this specific to German princes in one empire, how does it become the load-bearing vocabulary for literally everything?
Hana Field: That's the part that I think is actually harder to answer than 'was it real' — and it's where Bartelson's work on reappropriation becomes the story, because each generation that needed a foundation picked 1648 up and reshaped it. So the question isn't really whether the treaties said what we say they said. It's why the gap never mattered.
Jude Walker: But here's what that gap closing actually looks like in practice — because it's not abstract. The UN Charter. 1945. Articles 2(1) and 2(7). Juridical equality of states, non-interference in internal affairs, both now binding law for every member state. They took a story that scholars like Stirk say never quite happened and wrote it into hard international law.
Hana Field: And that's the second life. Westphalia gets institutionalized after World War II inside the United Nations, and now it doesn't matter anymore whether 1648 really codified what we say it did. Article 2(7) removes jurisdiction. The UN cannot intervene in matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state. That's the sentence.
Jude Walker: That sentence does a lot of work.
Hana Field: Picture a Security Council chamber, 2024. A delegate — let's say she's been in that seat for six hours. There's a draft resolution on the table condemning a government for what it's doing to its own population. The evidence isn't disputed. No one in that room is saying the facts are wrong. And the resolution dies — not because of a veto on the merits, but because Article 2(7) is invoked. The Westphalian norm, encoded in the Charter, removes jurisdiction before the vote even lands.
Jude Walker: So the history was always thin, but the law is now hard.
Hana Field: Harder than fact, almost. And — and here's what I think is genuinely counterintuitive — juridical equality, the idea that every sovereign state is formally equal before international law regardless of size or power, that norm is actually the best protection smaller states have. Non-interference is what keeps great powers from doing whatever they want to whoever they want.
Jude Walker: Nah, I see it. The same principle is doing two completely opposite things at once.
Hana Field: You can't cut them apart, which is — wait, that's actually the structural problem. The shield and the excuse are the same sentence. The norm that stops a powerful state from invading a weak one is the identical norm that an authoritarian government waves when the Security Council tries to hold it accountable for internal repression. Same Article 2(7). Same words.
Jude Walker: You can't surgically remove one use and keep the other. It's not separable.
Hana Field: No. And that's the load-bearing contradiction. A fiction — a story that Bartelson showed was rewritten by every generation that needed it — became a legal architecture that is now nearly impossible to reform without pulling down the protections that weaker states actually depend on.
Jude Walker: So it's not fragile because people believe it. It's durable because dismantling it costs too much for the people who most need it.
Hana Field: That's the trap. And there is a 21st-century doctrine that tried to thread it — and honestly, that part gets messier, not cleaner, because the challenge to non-interference ends up operating inside the very institution built on the Charter it contradicts.
Jude Walker: I mean — yeah. That's the part I don't think resolves cleanly.
Hana Field: And the doctrine that tried to thread that contradiction — R2P, the Responsibility to Protect — it didn't come from outside the UN. It was developed and adopted inside the UN framework in the early 21st century. Which is the part that should give everyone pause, because it's working against the very Charter it lives inside.
Jude Walker: It's contradicting Articles 2(1) and 2(7) from inside the building.
Hana Field: From inside the building. And the premise of R2P is — and this is the sharp version of it — when a state fails to protect its own population from mass atrocities, the international community acquires the responsibility to intervene. That's not a soft suggestion. That's a direct institutional override of non-interference.
Jude Walker: Nah, I know. And the thing that actually kills me about it — the enforcement record. R2P gets invoked in some cases, completely ignored in others. Which means it's not rule of law. It's great-power will wearing rule-of-law clothing.
Hana Field: Right — but the part that doesn't fit is that the inconsistency isn't a bug in R2P, it's actually proof of what the Westphalian system always was. The same powers who wrote 'universal' sovereignty into the UN Charter are the ones deciding when R2P applies.
Jude Walker: Humanitarian intervention. That's the older label. And critics have been saying for decades it's just great powers rebranding intervention with humanitarian language.
Hana Field: And that's — yeah, that criticism lands. But I keep thinking about what the Thirty Years' War actually did before Westphalia supposedly fixed anything. Between 25 and 40 percent of the population in certain German territories. Dead. And the treaties didn't end the violence — they legally defined who had the right to wage it going forward. That's the real shift.
Jude Walker: Hold on. Twenty-five to forty percent?
Hana Field: In certain territories, yeah. So Westphalia doesn't deliver peace — it delivers a legal monopoly on who gets to keep killing. And R2P is supposedly the correction for that, three and a half centuries later. Except the correction still depends on the same great powers deciding when the monopoly's been violated.
Jude Walker: I mean — that's the colonial thread pulling through, isn't it. Because 1648, the actual parties — Ferdinand III, France, Sweden, Spain, the Dutch Republic — these are European Christian powers settling their own affairs. And that settlement, that specific deal, gets elevated into a universal foundation for all of international relations. That's the ideological move. The 'universal' principle already excluded everyone who wasn't at that table.
Hana Field: Indigenous peoples, colonized populations — structurally excluded. And non-interference, the principle that supposedly protected everyone, actually kept outside powers out of European affairs while European powers had free rein everywhere else. Same sentence. Different application.
Jude Walker: So the question you keep asking — is the system broken or working as designed — nah, I think I've landed somewhere on that. It's working as designed. The design just was never universal.
Hana Field: And R2P is trying to retrofit a universalism that was never actually there at the foundation. So when it fails — when it gets ignored because a permanent Security Council member decides it's inconvenient — that's not the system breaking down. That's the original architecture reasserting itself.
Jude Walker: Which means the Westphalian myth isn't holding the system together despite being invented. It's holding it together because being invented is exactly what makes it flexible enough to protect the people who built it.
Hana Field: And that's — you know, that's where the EU and the WTO and the ICC become so strange to sit with, because they're already doing what Westphalia said couldn't be done. Exercising authority across borders. The ICC can investigate a head of state. The WTO can override domestic trade law. The EU is, structurally, a partial dismantling of territorial exclusivity from the inside. And none of that has replaced the vocabulary. We still say 'Westphalian system' like it's intact.
Jude Walker: The vocabulary outlived the reality.
Hana Field: Which is — and I think this is the thing that actually clicked for me working through all of this — understanding that gap between the historical fiction and the legal fact isn't a gotcha. It's not 'the system is fake so it doesn't matter.' It's the only way to see where the exits might be. Because if you think the system is natural law, you can't renegotiate it. If you know it's a story, you can ask who gets to tell the next one.
Jude Walker: And the next crisis that actually forces the choice — a climate threshold, a pandemic, a cyberattack that has no territorial origin — that won't be a test of whether the myth is true. It'll be a test of whether it's still useful.
Hana Field: Or whether escaping it requires force, the way the Dutch Republic did. Eighty years of war before anyone put their name to the recognition.
Jude Walker: Which brings it back to where we started — citing a rule you aren't sure is real. Turns out the whole international order has been doing exactly that. And it's been load-bearing the whole time.
Hana Field: Professionally and personally.
Jude Walker: Nah, that's it. That's the whole thing.
