The
modern state system is an association among sovereign and equal powers. It was
born with the peace treaty of Westphalia in 1648 which ended the thirty years
war in Europe. Scholars commonly
designate 1648 as the time the state system began to take on its modern
form. Thereafter, European rulers
refused to recognize the authority of the
Roman Catholic Church, replacing the previous system of papal government
with geographically and politically separate state which recognized to
authority above them. The treaty of
Westphalia came with notable changes-England France, Sweden, Holland and
Spain became independent and national
states.1
The newly
independent states were all given the same
legal rights: territorial indivisibility;
freedom to conduct foreign
relations and negotiate treaties with
other states; the authority to
re-established whatever form of
government they thought best to rule their
own population.
In 1861, the state of Italy was proclaimed, while the
Germans achieved unification in 1871.
In the Balkans, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire
gave way to independence among slaves in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the
Western hemisphere, America had gained independence in 1776. In 1822, Brazil
declared here independence of Portugal.
In the Far East, Japan emerged from feudalism 1867-68
with the collapse of the Shogunate. When World War 1 fell outside the European
continent. After the war and the peace
treaties with those defeated, only USA and Britain could be described as major
powers, (Wittkpof 1978:74 )
Evolution of International Society
“International society
stands for relations between
politically organized human groupings which occupy distinctive territories and enjoy and exercise a measure of
interdependence from each other”.2 it is a
political community which is sovereign (not under any higher political authority). In international relations
parlance, such communities are regarded as states. They usually consist of:
a. Permanent population
b. Defined territory
c. A central
government, and
d. Must be
independent of all other states with the
same status3
Hedley Bull summarizes the foundation of
international relations as the existence
of states or independent political communities each of which possesses
a government and asserts sovereignty in relations to particular portion
of the earth’s surface
and a particular segment of human
population.4
The Emergence of Modern State System
The first historical manifestation of international
society was in grace. It comprised a
large number of city states.
Geographically located at the lower Balkan peninsula the Adriatic and the Aegean seas.
They had a common language, ancestry, religion and way
of life which distinguished them from those of their neighbours whom they
called barbarians. That is those who did not speak Greek or Latin. Sparta, Corinth and Athens were Greek
city-states but Athens was the most popular.
They constituted the first international society in Western history. It
is important to state that Greece was
not a state. The society consisted of city-states which were for all intents and purpose independent of each other.
The city –state maintained relations but the identities
of each was preserved through ceremonies, cults, oracles, but
political arrangements were the same.
The city-states
consulted the oracles at Delphi in resolving anything in dispute. They equally
evolved such special political vocabularies as reconciliation, truce, alliance peace, etc.
they did not establish resident diplomatic institutions. That were an invention
of Italian renaissance. The ancient
Greeks did not articulate international
law because they could not
conceive of the city states as having
rights and duties in relation to
other city-states.5 The
ancient Greek city states were politically self contained,
their international society
was cultural/.religious rather
than legal / political.5
Though the ancient Greeks did not conceive international law in
practical terms, they nevertheless recognized that certain principles ordained by the gods
or dictated by practical reality should govern the conduct of relations
between the city-states.
The ancient Greeks constructed an international
society which survived in the face of hegemonic empires like Persia, Rome
and Macedonia. The first modern
international society based on large-scale territorial states came into
existence a little later in north western Europe out of which the global international society has evolved.
The
state
The state is any body of people occupying a
definite territory and politically
organized under one government6.
The terms state, government and nation differ in meaning. A government is the established form of
political organization of a state. A nation may be a body of
inhabitants occupying a definite
territory with a common culture. A “nation”
may also mean any aggregation of people having like institutions and
customs and a sense of social
homogeneity and mutual
interest”. A nation may extend
beyond the borders of a particular
state. State, nation and country are used
interchangeably by writers for
choice of words not necessarily because
they mean exactly the same thing.
States have vast differences which include size,
population, culture, government ,
military strength, etc. Through
international law, all states are equal and sovereign, but in actual fact there are many
inequalities and many degrees of
dependence among states. For
instance, the annual budget of the city of New York is larger than that
of the states of the world.
The national budget of India with a
population of more than half a billion is smaller than that of Britain which
is less
than 19th as many people. States also differ
significantly cultures, religion, language, history, tradition,
ethical codes social patterns, economic
and political ideologies. A state may
operate parliament or military, some governments are dictatorial and honest.
Others are democratic and corrupt, etc.
In international affairs, the most common way
classifying states is with a re-course to national power “great power” or “major powers” and “small powers”, world power, super powers, middle powers and powers
of uncertain status. The United States of America is a
world power in terms of worldwide commitments and extra-ordinary military
strength.
During World War II,
which involved Japan, Italy and Germany on one side and USA, great
Britain, France and Russia on the other,
France was easily overrun, but with a combined effort of Russia, great Britain
and USA, Nazism in
Germany was utterly destroyed,
fascism in Italy, and military
fascism and emperor system in
Japan were equally crushed japans attack
on the pearl harbour in 1941
forced the USA to join the war on the side of allied powers. At the end, USA and
Russia emerged as world powers.
In its broadest historical perspective, the
present state system is explained by
Aristotle’s celebrated observation that man is by nature a political animal.
This means that at all stages of development people have needs and
wants which they cannot realize alone.
Hence, they form social groups. Such groups
differ greatly in their nature and
scope according to
circumstances but they
invariably strike a host
of organizational problems
pertaining to the structure of the group and also its relationship with
other groups, the equivalent of modern international relations. They had the
problems of delimitation and inding the size best suited
for the groups.
Plato and Aristotle discussed
it in their analyses of the Greek city states. The first large scale politically organized states and state systems of which
there are records developed about
5000BC in the Nile valley, the Tigris
and Euphrates and later in the great rivers of China. This development was not due to
accident but to a social need common to all these areas. In these areas,
states became enmeshed in networks of
interstate relations alternating between
the two patterns of separate warring and cooperating units and of great empires imposed on them.
These political systems usually led by civilizations were fluctuating in their
boundaries but were geographically fairly segregated from one another, early development of a degree of culture and
political coherence. The medieval Christian commonwealth successfully preserved the idea of unity
through the intuitions of the church and
the universities. The medieval order
eventually crumbled under the impact of the renaissance and the reformation. The local princes who rose to political prominence through the acquisition of
territory became immersed in
religious wars, fighting for their creeds abroad and trying to ensure their complete sway at home Machiavelli rightly observed that modern states are based
on power but religious origin must not be neglected. Religious
forces did not disappear
from politics completely but in form of national churches, generally adapted themselves to the new units.
The system of sovereign territorial state was formally
established by the peace treaty of Westphalia in 1648. It was
first limited to Europe. Gradually, however, European states extended
their rule over other continents
which they considered fair game for their expansion.
They thus molded oversea territories within their empires.