Conclusion: Serious Hypocrisy

Abstract

A Westphalian system is presumed to be one that upholds equal sovereignty. In practice, however, its stress on power and national interest occasionally makes this nominal recognition of equality obsolete. In fact, it is always the more powerful nations that dominate international relations, and historically, these have been the countries of North America and Western Europe. In addition, these major powers share a common ideology as international relations proceed into the postmodern age of globalization. Based upon this shared ideology, they hold that in order to be granted equal sovereignty, countries must adopt value systems and collective identities that conform to liberalism and belief in the nation-state. The rise of China challenges both of these: it insists that other national values should be able to coexist on an equal basis with liberalism,¹ and it revises the notion of the nation-state by proposing the unfamiliar ideology of a harmonious world. The combination of nominal sovereign equality and practical power hierarchy is the irony of current state of international relations that originates from the Westphalian system. In the twenty-first century, the rise of China directly attacks this epistemological hypocrisy.