Post-Westphalia
COVID returns the border. The Russian invasion of Ukraine reveals what sovereignty enforcement actually requires, and what the international order is willing to fund. Crypto-sovereignty, network states, DAO experiments. The question of what replaces the 380-year-old technology becomes the live political question of the decade.
Part of Farewell To Westphalia
10 moments in this segment.
- — The COVID State of Emergency. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at the Munich Security Conference, February 2020, three weeks before declaring COVID-19 a global pandemic. Place: Geneva (WHO declaration); within two weeks, most Western capitals Figures: Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General · Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President · the world's interior ministers, suddenly relevant again The Border Reactivated On 11 March 2020 the WHO Director-General Tedros uses a word the organization has avoided for weeks. Pandemic. Within fourteen days most Western states close borders that had functioned, since the 1990s, mainly as architectural ornament. Schengen, the 1995 agreement that abolished internal frontiers among twenty-six European states, suspends in panels: Austria closes to Italy on 10 March; Germany to France, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark and Luxembourg on 16 March; the European Commission proposes a thirty-day ban on non-essential travel into the Union on 17 March. The United States closes to most of Europe on 13 March. Australia and New Zealand close to everyone on 19 and 20 March. Within the borders, the state reaches into private life at a depth not seen since the Second World War: stay-at-home orders, business closures by ministerial decree, mass economic transfers by emergency legislation. The Westphalian state, on this evidence, has not been hollowed out by globalization. It has been resting. What the Reactivation Reveals The reactivation is uneven, and that unevenness is the point. East Asian states (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore) execute pandemic protocols with a granularity Western publics tolerate only briefly. The European Union, designed around the four freedoms, discovers that public health is a national competence and reconstructs its internal frontier overnight. The United States devolves the response to the fifty governors and produces fifty different pandemics. China seals Wuhan with a thoroughness no liberal state can match, then enforces a zero-COVID policy for almost three years. By the time vaccines roll out in late 2020, a vocabulary has reentered ordinary politics that had been dormant for a generation: state of emergency, border control, essential travel, national stockpile. The post-1991 reading, that the sovereign nation state was a fading instrument in a globalized world, dies in those fourteen days. The Westphalian state, when summoned, still answers. Video: WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declares COVID-19 a pandemic at the daily media briefing in Geneva, 11 March 2020. Within fourteen days most Western states reactivated borders that had functioned as ornament for a generation.
- — The George Floyd Protests. George Floyd protest at Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, 7 June 2020. Place: Minneapolis, then approximately 2,000 US cities and 60 countries Figures: George Floyd, killed · Derek Chauvin, Minneapolis Police Department officer · Darnella Frazier, the seventeen-year-old who filmed it · the millions who marched, in twenty languages Nine Minutes Twenty-Nine Seconds On the evening of 25 May 2020, the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneels on George Floyd's neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, on the pavement outside a convenience store at 38th and Chicago. The seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier films it on her phone. The video is on social media within hours. By 28 May the precinct house is on fire. By the end of June, fifteen to twenty-six million Americans have demonstrated, the largest single wave of protest in US history. Parallel marches occur in at least sixty countries, on every continent except Antarctica, in cities (Tokyo, Berlin, Sydney, São Paulo, Seoul, Cape Town) with no obvious stake in Minneapolis policing. The organizing infrastructure is not the union hall or the political party. It is Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Telegram, and the encrypted group chats on Signal that Hong Kong protesters had popularized eight months earlier. The platforms' sovereignty footprint, what laws they obey, what speech they enforce, whose police can subpoena their data, is unclear to everyone including the platforms. Whose Police, Whose Public The Westphalian state's monopoly on the legitimate framing of its own policing is, classically, an internal matter. Article 2.7 of the UN Charter (see [[un-charter-1945]]) forbids intervention in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction. Floyd's killing is litigated simultaneously inside that jurisdiction (Chauvin is convicted of murder in April 2021) and outside it (the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Council of Europe, the foreign ministries of Iran and China and Russia, all weigh in within days). The protests are the first major transnational political movement organized at speed through streaming-era infrastructure. They do not produce a treaty or a new institution. They produce a demonstration: a domestic policing event in one American city can become, in seventy-two hours, an item on the foreign-policy agenda of every Westphalian state with an internet population, without any state's mediation. The international public is not in the Charter. It is now operative anyway. Video: AP retrospective on the protests that swept the United States and more than fifty countries after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, 25 May 2020. The largest protest wave in U.S. history, peaceful in 93 percent of recorded actions.
- — The Fall of Kabul and the End of the Forever War. U.S. National Guard soldiers from the 34th Infantry Division providing security at Hamid Karzai International Airport during the Kabul evacuation, 28 August 2021. Place: Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul Figures: Major General Christopher Donahue, last US soldier out · Ashraf Ghani, departing Afghan president · the Taliban leadership, arrived two weeks early · the thirteen US service members killed at Abbey Gate, 26 August Two Weeks Early US intelligence in July 2021 projects the Afghan government will hold Kabul for ninety days after the American withdrawal. The Taliban take Kabul on 15 August, two weeks before the last US aircraft is scheduled to leave. President Ashraf Ghani flies out the same afternoon. The presidential palace falls without a shot. The twenty-year, eleven-month war that began in October 2001 ends in the airport perimeter, in seventeen days of evacuation chaos punctuated by a suicide bombing at Abbey Gate that kills thirteen American service members and at least 169 Afghan civilians on 26 August. On 30 August at 23:59 Kabul time, the last C-17 lifts off. Major General Christopher Donahue, commander of the 82nd Airborne, is photographed walking up the ramp alone in night vision, the last US soldier to leave Afghan soil. Total cost of the war by Brown University's Costs of War project: approximately 2.3 trillion dollars, approximately 174,000 deaths including roughly 70,000 Afghan civilians, 2,448 US service members, and 3,846 US contractors. The Project That Closes The post-2001 Western project assumed that Westphalian states could be assembled from outside: that with enough money, soldiers, ministerial training, NGO mentorship and electoral assistance, a sovereign state with a monopoly on legitimate violence could be cultivated in a territory that lacked one. Iraq from 2003. Afghanistan from 2001. Libya from 2011. Somalia, on and off. Mali, with the French in the lead. Kosovo, under UN administration. The track record by August 2021 is, charitably, mixed. Kabul's fall is the cleanest single declaration that the project is over. The Biden administration's defense of the withdrawal is explicit: the United States was not in Afghanistan to build a nation. It was in Afghanistan to deny territory to a particular terrorist organization. With that organization's leader killed in Pakistan in 2011, the original mission has been complete for a decade. The decade since was nation-building by inertia. The era of externally-assembled Westphalian sovereignty closes in the dust of the runway. Video: Reuters footage from 15 August 2021 as Taliban fighters enter Kabul and U.S. helicopters lift diplomatic staff from the embassy compound. The twenty-year republic collapsed in roughly ten days.
- — The Invasion of Ukraine. Map of territorial control during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, launched 24 February 2022. Place: Kyiv, Kharkiv, the Donbas; eventually most of Ukraine Figures: Vladimir Putin, Russian President · Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukrainian President The 4 a.m. Decree Putin's pre-dawn televised speech declares a special military operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. Russian forces cross the border before the speech finishes. Zelenskyy, offered evacuation by the US, refuses with a line that immediately enters the war's mythology: Потрібні набої, а не таксі — I need ammunition, not a ride. Westphalian sovereignty is invoked by both sides at once: Russia claims Ukraine is not really sovereign (it is, on this argument, a historical anomaly within the Russian world); Ukraine claims that whatever it is, sovereign states do not cross each other's borders with armored columns at 4 a.m. What the War Reveals The war reactivates NATO. Sweden and Finland join, ending two centuries of Swedish neutrality and seventy-five of Finnish. Western sanctions reach a scope no previous regime has attempted: SWIFT cutoffs, energy import bans, and (the genuinely unprecedented move) the freezing of roughly 300 billion dollars of Russian central bank reserves held in Western financial systems. The reserves a sovereign holds abroad are now visibly conditional on geopolitical alignment. Three years in (early 2025) the war has not ended. The lessons are still being drawn. One reading: the Westphalian system holds; sovereign borders matter; the international community will fund their defense at scale. Another reading: the system is more porous than its idealizers believed; sovereign immunity was always conditional on access to the dollar and Brussels-issued payment rails. Both readings are correct. The question of which one is more interesting is the question Hope and Ludlow's book makes urgent. Video: Vladimir Putin's pre-dawn televised address on 24 February 2022 announcing what the Kremlin called a special military operation. Within minutes Russian missiles struck Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa.
- — The Ethereum Merge. Ethereum logo. The network transitioned from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake on 15 September 2022. Place: Ethereum mainnet, block 15537394, approximately 06:42 UTC Figures: Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder · the Ethereum Foundation core developers · roughly 500,000 staking validators worldwide A Hard Fork Without a Schism At 06:42 UTC on 15 September 2022, the Ethereum network executes the most consequential live upgrade in the history of decentralized computing. The proof-of-work consensus mechanism, in which miners spend electricity to publish blocks, is replaced by proof-of-stake, in which validators bond capital and are economically penalized for misbehavior. The transition has been engineered for seven years, simulated on three intermediate testnets, and rehearsed by the entire validator set over the preceding weeks. The merge happens cleanly. Energy consumption falls by approximately 99.95 percent. The price barely moves. What makes the merge remarkable is not the engineering, which is remarkable enough. It is the governance. A network with no CEO, no headquarters, no board, no founding charter, no legal personality and no sovereign jurisdiction has coordinated hundreds of thousands of independent operators on three continents to swap out its consensus engine in mid-flight, without anyone losing access, without a chain split, without a court. The Sovereignty Question Reopens The merge demonstrates that the technical infrastructure of post-Westphalian institutions can evolve without a sovereign decision-maker. The Westphalian state's monopoly on the legitimate alteration of its own constitutive rules, the thing every revolution since 1789 has been about, is, in this domain, simply not at issue. The rules change because the community of stakeholders running the software agrees to run the new version. It also reopens an older question. By 2024 roughly a third of staked ether is concentrated in three providers: Lido, Coinbase, Binance. The validator set is wide; the operator set is narrow. Sovereignless governance, in practice, looks increasingly like stake-weighted oligarchy with technical extras. Whether that is an improvement on Westphalian sovereignty, a reproduction of it in a new register, or merely the early-medieval phase of something that has not finished settling, is a question to which mid-2026 has no answer. Video: Official Ethereum Foundation livestream from 15 September 2022 as the mainnet completed the long-promised transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, cutting the network's energy consumption by roughly 99 percent.
- — The 7 October Attack and the Gaza War. Map of the Israel-Gaza conflict following the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023. Place: Israel-Gaza barrier; kibbutzim of the western Negev; the Nova music festival site, Re'im Figures: Yahya Sinwar, Hamas leader in Gaza, killed October 2024 · Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister · the 1,200 Israelis killed, mostly civilians · the 251 taken hostage · the Palestinians killed in the response that follows The Fence At 06:29 on 7 October 2023, Hamas fires more than 4,000 rockets at southern and central Israel. Within minutes, militants in pickup trucks, on motorcycles, on paragliders and on foot cross the Israel-Gaza barrier at thirty separate points. They reach the Nova electronic-music festival at Re'im, the kibbutzim of Be'eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, Sufa, the town of Sderot. By the end of the day approximately 1,200 Israelis are dead, the great majority of them civilians, with 251 taken hostage into Gaza. The deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. The Israeli response begins within hours and escalates into a fifteen-month war. By the end of 2024 the Gaza Health Ministry reports approximately 45,000 Palestinians killed. Lancet researchers, accounting for indirect deaths from disease and infrastructure collapse, suggest the true toll may be substantially higher. Most of Gaza's housing stock is destroyed; the strip's two million residents are displaced repeatedly within an enclave of 365 square kilometers. The Doctrines, All at Once The Westphalian principles that bear on the war are all simultaneously contested in plain view. Sovereignty: Gaza is administered by Hamas but recognized internationally as part of a Palestinian state most Western governments have not yet recognized. Occupation: Israel withdrew settlers and soldiers in 2005 but, by 2024, the International Court of Justice rules the broader occupation of Palestinian territory illegal. Self-defense: Article 51 of the UN Charter applies to attacks by states; whether it applies straightforwardly to Hamas is the subject of competing legal opinions. Proportionality: the law of armed conflict requires it; what it means when an enemy operates from within civilian infrastructure is litigated at the ICJ, at the ICC, in every parliament, on every campus. By the end of 2024 South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the ICJ; the Court has issued provisional measures; the ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israeli leaders (see [[icc-warrant-netanyahu-2024]]). The war becomes the first armed conflict of the streaming era in which every Westphalian doctrine bearing on the conduct of war is being argued, in real time, in front of a planetary audien Video: BBC News institutional report from 8 October 2023 documenting the Hamas attack of the previous day and the Israeli declaration of war. The deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
- — The EU AI Act. The European Parliament hemicycle in Strasbourg, where the EU AI Act was approved on 13 March 2024. Place: European Parliament, Strasbourg; Council of the European Union, Brussels Figures: Dragoș Tudorache, Romanian MEP, co-rapporteur · Brando Benifei, Italian MEP, co-rapporteur · Margrethe Vestager, Commission Executive Vice-President · the OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta lobbyists, all newly resident in Brussels Risk-Tiered Sovereignty On 13 March 2024 the European Parliament approves Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the Artificial Intelligence Act, by 523 votes to 46. It enters into force on 1 August 2024 with staged application: prohibitions from February 2025, obligations for general-purpose AI models from August 2025, the full risk-tiered regime by August 2026. The Act is the first comprehensive AI regulation by a major Westphalian polity, drafted across three years of trilogue, transformed in late 2022 by the arrival of ChatGPT, which a regulation begun in 2021 had not anticipated. The architecture is risk-tiered. Unacceptable risk uses (social scoring, untargeted scraping of facial images, real-time biometric identification in public spaces with narrow law-enforcement exceptions, emotion recognition in workplaces and schools) are prohibited outright. High-risk uses (in employment, education, critical infrastructure, migration, judicial administration) require conformity assessments before deployment. General-purpose models above a compute threshold of 10^25 floating-point operations face transparency, safety-evaluation and systemic-risk obligations. The Brussels Effect on a Stateless Stack The Act's jurisdictional reach is the heart of the matter. Article 2 extends it to providers and deployers established outside the Union whenever the output of the AI system is used inside the Union. Almost every frontier model trained in San Francisco, Mountain View or Hangzhou is, by that test, in scope. The Union's regulatory sovereignty extends, by writing, into the development practices of laboratories in jurisdictions that did not consent to it. The same Brussels effect that GDPR achieved for data protection in 2018 is now claimed for the foundation-model stack. Whether it works is the open question. The largest model developers are American or Chinese; the largest compute is American or Chinese; the export of US chips is regulated by the US Department of Commerce, not by Brussels. The Act is the clearest current example of a Westphalian polity attempting to project regulatory sovereignty over a technology whose development is extraterritorial, and on a substrate (matrix multiplication on accelerators) that does not respect any border. The next two years will be a tutorial in how much of that projection compiles. Video: France 24 coverage of the European Parliament vote on the AI Act in Strasbourg, 13 March 2024. The world's first comprehensive statutory framework for artificial intelligence, passed 523 to 46.
- — The Return of Trump. Official portrait of Donald J. Trump, 47th President of the United States, sworn in on 20 January 2025. Place: United States; the second-term West Wing Figures: Donald J. Trump, 45th and 47th President · J.D. Vance, Vice President · Marco Rubio, Secretary of State · the European chancelleries, recalibrating Repeated, Not Reversed On 5 November 2024 Donald Trump wins the presidency with 312 electoral votes to Kamala Harris's 226 and, for the first time in his three campaigns, a national popular-vote plurality. The Republican Party takes the Senate 53-47 and holds the House narrowly. The transition is orderly. He is sworn in on 20 January 2025. The relevant fact for the chronicle of Westphalia is not the personality but the structure: this is the first major Westphalian power since 1945 to repeat a populist-retrenchment turn after a previous correction. The 2016-to-2020 turn could be read as an aberration. The 2024 return cannot. Within four months the administration imposes a tariff regime broader than 2018's, withdraws from the Paris Agreement again, signals a renegotiation of US contributions to NATO, opens direct talks with Moscow over Ukraine that initially bypass Kyiv and Brussels, and restructures parts of the federal civil service by executive order. The pace surprises the European chancelleries, which had spent the campaign assuming a return would mean a slower-motion version of the first term. The Underwriter Becomes Conditional The post-1991 international order has rested on an American underwriting nobody quite wrote down. The US dollar was the world's reserve currency. The US Navy guaranteed Pacific and Atlantic sea lanes. The US nuclear umbrella covered Europe and East Asia. US troops sat in Germany, Italy, the UK, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, the Gulf. NATO's Article 5 had been invoked exactly once, by Washington's allies on Washington's behalf, after 9/11. The arrangement was so taken-for-granted that it was rarely named. What 2024 makes explicit is that the arrangement is conditional and the conditions are now being renegotiated in public. Europe begins planning, in early 2025, for a credible conventional and possibly nuclear defense without American underwriting. Japan and South Korea reopen debates on sovereign nuclear options that had been closed for decades. The Westphalian system survives the absence of an underwriter (it predates one by three centuries); the liberal version of that system, which assumed an American underwriter, is the version in question. Whether what follows is a multipolar Westphalia, a regional-bloc system, or something with no clean precedent, is the question the second hal Video: The Associated Press calls the 2024 presidential election for Donald Trump in the early hours of 6 November 2024, the first defeated incumbent to return to the White House since Grover Cleveland in 1892.
- — The ICC Warrant for Netanyahu. The International Criminal Court in The Hague, which issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant on 21 November 2024. Place: International Criminal Court, The Hague Figures: Karim Khan KC, ICC Prosecutor · Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister · Yoav Gallant, former Israeli Defense Minister · Mohammed Deif, Hamas military chief (deceased) · the Court's Pre-Trial Chamber I The Pre-Trial Chamber Acts On 21 November 2024 Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu (sitting Prime Minister of Israel), Yoav Gallant (his former Defense Minister), and Mohammed Deif (the Hamas military chief, whose death Israel had announced months earlier and the Court treated as unconfirmed). The charges against the Israeli officials: war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with the conduct of the Gaza war (see [[hamas-attack-2023]]), including the use of starvation as a method of warfare. The Prosecutor Karim Khan had requested the warrants in May; the Chamber's six-month deliberation was conducted under sustained political pressure from Washington and Jerusalem. The legal architecture of the Rome Statute is unambiguous. Sitting heads of government and of state are subject to the Court's jurisdiction; immunity attaches to the office for the purposes of domestic and bilateral law, not for the purposes of international criminal jurisdiction over the most serious offenses. Article 27 says so explicitly. What it has historically meant in practice is a different question. Bashir of Sudan was indicted in 2009; he traveled to ICC s Pierced, in Writing Netanyahu is the first sitting head of government of a US-allied liberal democracy against whom the Court has issued a warrant. The Westphalian principle that par in parem non habet imperium, an equal has no jurisdiction over an equal, has been the operating premise of sovereign immunity since the seventeenth century. The Rome Statute's Article 27 was always a stated exception. The 21 November 2024 warrants are the test case in which the exception meets a polity with the political and military weight to refuse it. By mid-2026 the warrant has not been enforced. Netanyahu travels to Hungary in April 2025; Viktor Orbán withdraws Hungary from the Rome Statute the same week, the first state party to leave. Other ICC states parties (Germany, France, Italy) signal that they would not arrest Netanyahu if he visited. The United States imposes sanctions on the Prosecutor and on Chamber judges. Whether the warrant is ultimately enforceable is the question. Whether sovereign immunity for a sitting head of government in office is still doctrine, or is now contested in writing, is no longer a question. It is contested in writing. The Westphalian system has not collapsed; the principle of par in Video: Al Jazeera English reports the International Criminal Court's decision of 21 November 2024 to issue arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes in Gaza. The first such warrant against the sitting leader of a Western-aligned state.
- — Farewell To Westphalia
