law. “The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight,” writes Henry Kissinger in his book World Order. “It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other’s domestic affairs and checking each other’s ambitions through a general equilibrium of power.” The Westphalian agreement became “the hallmark of a new system of international order,” he argues.54 A later attempt to forge a European peace came after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars with the 1814–15 Congress of Vienna aimed at settling
...more
