CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Peak, Thomas William |
|---|---|
| Title | Humanitarian Intervention & the Myth of 1648 |
| Summary | Deflating the ‘Myth of Westphalia’, this thesis makes an innovative case for the theoretical and moral legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. The myth is a traditional story told in international relations theory alleging that sovereign states acquired an absolute right of non-intervention, effectively a ‘license to kill’, from the Peace of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648. Though increasingly nuanced in various branches of scholarship, this view continues to exert profound influence on international politics; particularly in reflections over the appropriate response to genocide and other mass atrocities. Accordingly, humanitarian intervention is seen as a radical innovation by both realists and critical theorists, cutting against the grain of historically embedded norms. The result is a (seemingly) intractable conflict in international politics between the values of sovereignty and fundamental rights. Challenging this stalemate, I reconstruct the mentalities of the Westphalian epoch through readings of some of its emblematic cultural artefacts. Mediated via the doctrine of neo-Stoicism, the conceptual meshing of human dignity is found to have framed the deep, intersubjective imaginings of renewed order around 1648. Contrary to the prevailing view, the devastation and traumas of the Thirty Years War did not result in a sovereign state system established at any cost, one which ‘institutionalised indifference’ to what today we call mass atrocities. I argue instead that the Thirty Years War constituted an existential crisis, and, for contemporaries, the peace meant re-establishment of space for enacting human dignity. This is fundamentally incompatible with the mythical view of Westphalia so widely accepted, one which takes for granted that unbounded tyranny was its normative implication. My argument contributes to current reinterpretations of both the Peace of Westphalia itself, and the history of sovereignty more broadly, which find the doctrine of absolute non-intervention to be a recent and highly-contested phenomenon. But whilst these accounts have so far approached the myth from a legalistic or political philosophical view, here the narrative is drawn from below. A constructivist reappraisal of the Lebenswelt which gave rise to the Westphalian Order, it reveals the continuity with contemporary bases of international politics. This matters because the dominant narrative of sovereignty presents an obstacle to forming workable and more reliable norms of intervention against genocide and comparably severe crimes against humanity; the inadequate Responsibility to Protect a case in point. Appropriately formulated, humanitarian intervention is not only compatible with the rules-based international order, but it challenges critics to make the case as to why sovereignty should be a shield against humanitarian intervention in instances of mass atrocities. Respect towards victims of mass atrocity, over and above respect for the sovereign autonomy of the states that murder or fail to protect them, is restored to its proper place of historical pre-eminence. |
| Supervisor | Merlingen, Michael |
| Department | International Relations PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/peak_thomas.pdf |
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