This article is intended to explore how the concept of state sovereignty has been articulated in the discipline of international politics. The relevant issue is how realism as the mainstream school of the study of international politics in the post-1945 period and the so-called “Westphalian system” characterized as a state-centric model of the modern “anarchical” international system have intersected the concept of state sovereignty. The article mainly discusses four prominent scholars in the discipline: E. H. Carr, Hans J. Morgenthau, Hedley Bull and Kenneth Waltz as focal points in the development of the discipline established only after the end of the First World War, or more correctly speaking, after the Second.
The first section of the article briefly looks at how the concept of state sovereignty was discussed before the First World War. It points out that state sovereignty had holes in three aspects among others: first, there was a hierarchical structure of sovereign and “non-sovereign” states in Europe; second, there were only a few recognized sovereign states outside Europe; and third, European empires contained complex structures of sovereign and non-sovereign entities within themselves. The article observes that it is too hasty to conclude that the Treaty of Westphalia instantly established a universal world of equal sovereign states.
The second section deals with Carr and Morgenthau. Carr represents the position of ‘relativistic realism’, with which he was inclined to the policy of “appeasement.” Carr did not believe in the validity of the concept of state sovereignty as an analytical tool, because it did not reflect reality. Morgenthau appeared as an initiator of “political realism” which believed in the law of politics as power struggle. He identified state sovereignty in the way Carl Schmitt had done in Germany where Morgenthau was grown up. The Westphalian system then emerged as the archetype “chessboard” model of international politics, although Morgenthau himself identified nineteenth-century nationalism as the major factor that created a really anarchic international system. The tendency toward a universal theory was a distinctive mark of Morgenthau’s “political realism.”
The third section discusses Bull and Waltz. They represent an era in which international politics attained relative stability between superpowers. Their scholastic attitudes led them to articulate state sovereignty as a static principle. However, while Bull inherited Carr’s “relativity of thought” and put state sovereignty in the historical process of international society, Waltz theorized the bipolar structure as a rigid fact without contemplating any room for its historical changes.
By looking at these representative figures in the discipline of international politics, this article claims that there are many intersections between sovereignty, realism and the Westphalian system. At the same time, it finds that the emergence of the very static understanding of state sovereignty as a component of realism and the Westphalian system reflected a situation particular in the post-1945 period.