To Order the Minds of Scholars: The Discourse of the Peace of Westphalia in International Relations Literature.

References to the Peace of Westphalia have played an important role in the history of the academic discourse of international relations (IR). Originally referred to as a concrete historical event, the Peace was later also transformed into a conceptualization of the international system: phrases like "Westphalian system" convey a package of specific ideas about international politics, including the supremacy of state sovereignty, territoriality, and the principle of non-intervention. While the development of Westphalia as an analytic construct with a fixed meaning provided IR scholars with a handy tool to characterize the international system, it excluded the implications of alternative interpretations of the Peace more common in earlier literature, such as its identification as a rudimentary collective security system. Through its articulation as an abstraction, Westphalia now provides contemporary IR scholars interested in studying growing international interdependence with a specific, territorial counterpart to a globalized world order. In this manner, Westphalia has helped to define system change in international relations in a specific way which might obscure as much as it illuminates. Given the extensive research on globalization, it is shorthand that is no longer particularly useful. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]