Abstract
For researchers and students of International Relations (IR), one date looms larger than all others: 1648. The end of the Thirty Years War, formalized by the signing of the Treaties of Osnabrück and Münster, led to a period known as the “Peace of Westphalia.” Westphalia represented a fundamental change in the power balance of European politics: instead of the Holy Roman Empire holding supreme authority, power would now rest with states themselves, manifested in terms of sovereignty, territory and equality. One of the chief ways in which these “Westphalian” states would cement this authority was through the use of maps. Before 1648, there was little on a European map to indicate where one country ended and another one began. But after 1648, this all changes: these new Westphalian states are represented with bright colors and clearly marked boundaries, defining borders and becoming an important part in creating the state and justifying its sovereignty. The role which maps have played in the spread of the Westphalian state is only just beginning to be researched. Yet the limited efforts to date have all focussed on Europe. This is unfortunate, as today, while Europe has, according to some observers, moved into a stage in which Westphalia is no longer a useful model with which to understand the state and the ways in which it relates to sovereignty, government, power and the individual, the old Westphalian model of the state has more recently been exported all around the world. This paper presents the first part of a project which aims to look at this expansion. The European angle will be presented in this paper; future research will be carried out in China, Japan and Taiwan.
Acknowledgments
This research is funded by the Konosuke Matsushita Memorial Foundation, Grant Number 13-G40.
Map sources
Bibliothèque nationale de France.
CIA.
Koninklijke Bibliotheek.
Kungliga biblioteket – Sveriges nationalbibliotek.
Universitätsbibliothek Basel.
References
Aristotle, (ed.) (1966), Metaphysics (trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle), Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana.Search in Google Scholar
Black, J., (1997), Maps and Politics, Reaktion Books, London.Search in Google Scholar
Blake, G., (2000), State Limits in the Early Twenty-First Century: Obervations on Form and Function, Geopolitics, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1–18.Search in Google Scholar
Bolzano, B., (1950), Paradoxes of the Infinite (trans. Fr. Přihonský), Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.Search in Google Scholar
Brentano, F., (1988), Philosophical Investigations on Space, Time and the Continuum (trans. B. Smith), Croom Helm, London.Search in Google Scholar
Cooper, R., (2003), The Breaking of Nations, Atlantic Books, London.Search in Google Scholar
Culcasi, K., (2006), Cartographically Constructing Kurdistan within Geopolitical and Orientalist Discourses, Political Geography, vol. 25, pp. 680–706.Search in Google Scholar
Harley, J.B., (1989), Deconstructing the Map, Cartographica, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 1–20.Search in Google Scholar
Krasner, S.D., (1995), Compromising Westphalia, International Security, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 115–151.Search in Google Scholar
Marcus, H.G., (1994), A History of Ethiopia, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.Search in Google Scholar
Monmonier, M.S., (1991), How to Lie with Maps, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Search in Google Scholar
Neocleous, M. (2003), Off the Map: On Violence and Cartography, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 409–425.Search in Google Scholar
Pickering, S., (2012), Proximity, Maps and Conflict: New Measures, New Maps and New Findings, Conflict Management and Peace Science, vol. 29, no. 4, pp. 425–443.Search in Google Scholar
Smith, B., (1995), On Drawing Lines on a Map, in Frank, A.U., Kuhn, W., Mark, D.M., (eds.), Spatial Information Theory. Proceedings of COSIT ‘95, Springer Verlag, Berlin, pp. 475–484.Search in Google Scholar
Smith, B., (2001), Fiat Objects, Topoi, vol. 20, pp. 131–148.Search in Google Scholar
Varzi, A.C., (2001), Vagueness in Geography, Philosophy in Geography, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 49–65.Search in Google Scholar
Article note
Paper prepared for presentation at the Central University of Finance and Economics workshop, “Advances in Defense & Peace Economics and Peace Science,” 8–11 November, 2013.
© 2014 by De Gruyter
