In practice, the ‘territorial/juridicial logic of equality’ rubbed up against ‘the geopolitical/hegemonic logic of inequality.’ (link, p. 147) While Westphalia’s ideational rubric spoke of ‘a state-centric, sovereignty-oriented, territorially bounded global order’ (ibid), the reality was a ‘world order shaped and managed by dominant or hegemonic political actors.’ (ibid)
In this context, the political community lingered, as if unfinished. The aspirant sovereign’s attempts to securing a homogeneous interior, as per the ‘heroic practice’, were to be endlessly forestalled; prevented by the latent threat of the anarchic “Other”. Located both ‘beyond [state] boundaries … in the form of other states, foreign groups, imported goods, and alien ideas, and’ - rather more disturbingly - ‘as difference within, vitiating the presumed but rarely, if ever, achieved “sameness”’ (link, p. 238), this lingering alterity was not a physical enemy in the traditional sense, but rather the ‘external representation of a disturbing internal doubt.’ (ibid)
Incapable of being assimilated or annihilated, this unincorporable “Other” was presented as Zeno’s tortoise - a moving target; perpetually receding. Having pursued this particular line of analysis, Blaney and Inayatullah’s claim that the Peace of Westphalia resembled less a resolution of the problem of difference than an ‘act of evasion or deferral’ (link) seems increasingly persuasive. For the contradictions at the heart of the Westphalian system to hold, the enmities which lay behind the unbracketed conflict of the Thirty Years’ War would have to be suppressed, sublimated.
