No 13, Issue 1       

MODIFYING THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM POST-FEBRUARY 2022: ABANDONING OR RETURNING TO WESTPHALIAN PRINCIPLES?

Mihai Alexandrescu

Pages: 65-90

Abstract

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, compelled a reappraisal of how world politics operates. The shock of this breach of international law neither merely ended the liberal order nor fully restored the classical logic of the balance of power. Instead, it catalysed two simultaneous—and often contradictory—trajectories: a partial return to Westphalian first principles (territorial integrity, juridical equality, non-intervention) and an acceleration of post-Westphalian practices (coalition sanctions, extraterritorial regulation, accountability mechanisms for aggression, mini-lateral security complexes). In this article, I treat this tension as a “problem-space” and develop a framework to assess whether reforming the international system after February 2022 should mean abandoning Westphalia, reverting to it, or – more plausibly – re-anchoring in a “Westphalian floor, post-Westphalian ceiling.”

Keywords: post-Westphalian system; international order; United Nations; war; peace

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.