World Order

in the Last Judgment.”

VARIETIES OF WORLD ORDER

inexorably

When people ask me … for what is called a policy, the only answer is that we mean to do what may seem to be best, upon each occasion as it arises, making the Interests of Our Country one’s guiding principle

With the end of the universal Church as the ultimate source of legitimacy, and the weakening of the Holy Roman Emperor, the ordering concept for Europe became the balance of power—which, by definition, involves ideological neutrality and adjustment to evolving circumstances.

International law, developed by traveling scholar-advisors such as Hugo de Groot (Grotius) during the war, was treated as an expandable body of agreed doctrine aimed at the cultivation of harmony, with the Westphalian treaties themselves at its heart.

“Man is immortal, his salvation is hereafter,” he said. “The state has no immortality, its salvation is now or never.”

Thus while “the international community” is invoked perhaps more insistently now than in any other era, it presents no clear or agreed set of goals, methods, or limits.

The established commercial and political elites began to operate within the Westphalian framework of order and a global economy; what they demanded was their peoples’ right to join as equal members.

hecking each other’s ambitions through a general equilibrium of powe