For Ashley, Westphalian sovereignty represented the formalisation and normalisation of a specific model of power, predicated on a ‘heroic practice’, in which the homogeneous and ordered ‘inside’ is constituted through its opposition to a exterior realm painted as dangerous and anarchic.
The narrative of the ‘heroic practice’, Ashley argues, allowed the former to be ‘privileged as a higher reality, a regulative ideal, and the latter term is understood only in a derivative and negative way, as a failure to live up to … [and] something that endangers this ideal.’ (link, p. 230) There is, he adds, a certain teleology to the Westphalian narrative, in which ‘political progress is to be understood in terms of the assimilation of ambiguous and contingent events in space and time to a prior sovereign presence’ (link, p. 238).
