Westphalian Nation — State System

Every country you can name — India, Japan, Brazil — has a government, fixed borders, and control over its own laws inside them. That arrangement feels so natural that it is easy to forget it is only a few centuries old, and that Europe once ran on a completely different logic, where a Pope and an Emperor both claimed authority that ran across borders instead of stopping at them. What replaced that logic is the system you are about to learn.

In two minutes

The Westphalian nation-state system is the arrangement, still in force today, in which the world is organised into territorially bounded states, each holding supreme authority within its own borders and formally equal to every other state — an order that replaced the overlapping, multi-layered authority of medieval Europe.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Political Science – III: International Relations on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.