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The State Based Westphalian System Of Governance

Decent Essays

For hundreds of years state sovereignty has allowed for individual states to effectively handle their problems internally. However, with the current increase of globalism, which Keohane and Nye describe as “a state of the world involving networks of interdependence at multicontinental distances” (75), many of the world’s major concerns have moved beyond the level of individual states. This interdependence has affected economic, military, environmental, as well as social and cultural aspects of international relations and everyday life. These overlapping processes of globalization have allowed for a great deal of global progress, but progress is impossible to achieve without occasional setbacks. The problems we face today are rooted in the contradiction of solving global issues while relying on the state-based Westphalian system of governance. Governance “provide[s] a general way to formulate, implement, monitor and enforce social rules,” (Scholte 20) but it is no longer possible to rely on a state-based system, in which states act independently to pursue self-interest, to solve international problems, many of which have been created collectively. State sovereignty and the motivation of power in political realism continue to neglect the important issues we face with growing global concerns that can only be solved with an increased cooperation through the strengthening of international institutions and non-state actors. It is necessary to shift from a state-based form of

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