Bhaso Ndzendze

5 January 2025

The recent US capture of Venezuela’s incumbent president, Nicolas Maduro, was not the first violation of international law in our times. The actions were, however, a highly visible and traumatising iteration, particularly for the implications they carry and the future they portend. They were an innovation on an old phenomenon: of the powerful doing as they will, and the weaker enduring what they must. The episode is a harsh reminder that sovereignty was only introduced as a response to military stalemate. States can enjoy sovereignty to the extent that they can keep it.

Westphalian sovereignty and battlefield stalemate

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Simplistically, as every student of political science has been taught in their first year, the concept of modern sovereignty that has defined international relations for the past four hundred years stems from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and its affiliated treaties. It came in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War, which began in 1618 and ended with insurmountable stalemate.

The dominant issue was religion. Having undergone the Protestant Reformation following Martin Luther’s 1517 break with the Catholic Church, a century later, Europe’s states – the Catholic Holy Roman Empire and north/western European Protestant kingdoms on the other – clashed with their neighbours over which version of their shared faith, Christianity, would define the continent henceforth. It was also defined by territorial ambitions and dynastic competition, as seen by Catholic French assistance to Protestant Netherlands and Sweden, to prevent their fellow Catholic Habsburgs from dominating both Western and Central Europe.

The conflict was so prolonged, violent, and costly that the European powers ultimately decided that each state should simply follow the religion of its sovereign (that is, its king, emperor, or some other type of ruler). Battles often yielded heavy casualties with little strategic gain. The deadlock was secured by the formal entry of France in 1635. In total, up to 8 million lives, or over 10 per cent of the Western European population, had perished at a civilian casualty ratio of 7:1 against soldiers.

Negotiations began in late 1641 and culminated in the signing of two treaties in the cities of Münster and Osnabrück in 1648. The choice of these two places was itself a subject of compromise. Münster was exclusively Catholic, and Osnabrück was governed by a Protestant city council.

In its preamble, the former treaty referred to the conflict as “a long and cruel War.” It provided, in Article 64, that “…to prevent for the future any Differences arising in the Politick State, all and every one of the Electors, Princes and States of the Roman Empire, are so establish’d and confirm’d in their antient Rights, Prerogatives, Libertys, Privileges, free exercise of Territorial Right, as well Ecclesiastick, as Politick Lordships, Regales, by virtue of this present Transaction.”

From the onset, sovereignty was tied to rulership, out of conditions of stalemate and compromise. States could hope to enjoy sovereignty to the extent that their leaders could defend it. Poland’s kings, put in power by elections and held to account by a Parliament (Sejm) in which every member held a veto, could not raise an army to defend their country, and it was subjected to partition by Austria, Russia, and Prussia between 1772 and 1795, and it ceased to exist on the European map. It was in years in-between, in 1787, that the United States embarked on rewriting its Articles of Confederation in order to forge a stronger central government that could withstand external and internal threats. The result was the present-day Constitution of United States. At the end of the proceedings, Benjamin Franklin, one of the leading participants in the constitutional convention, was asked by a curious woman whether the result had been a monarchy or a republic, to which he replied “A republic, if you can keep it.” States are not permanent, and both domestic and international laws do not guarantee their existence.

This lesson has come to be forgotten, in part thanks to subsequent innovations invented by liberal institutionalists, most emblematically the League of Nations (1919) and its successor, the United Nations (1945). Yet, as already seen with the Polish partitions, the years between 1648 and 1945, and those since 1945, have seen numerous violations of sovereignty.

In 1806, a new generation of rulers disregarded the old order, led primarily by post-Revolution France: in that year, Napoleon Bonaparte interfered in the internal affairs of the Holy Roman Empire by dissolving it through the Treaty of Pressburg, and establishing an Austria-free Confederate of the Rhine, precursor to modern-day Germany, with himself as its Lord Protector. Decades later, and indeed centuries before, the sovereignty of African and Asian rulers was not even a serious consideration in the establishment of the British ‘Crown Raj’ in India, or the Berlin Conference in 1884-85. The First World War, a global catastrophe that exhausted the major powers on a scale not seen since the Thirty Years’ War, led to the creation of the League of Nations and the establishment of the principle of self-determination for all peoples. These moves extended sovereignty, but even here, there was selective implementation, tied very much to the level of power enjoyed by a given territory’s leader and allies: thus, while Poland was restored, and numerous former territories of the collapsed Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman Empires got their independence, African and East Asian territories were merely swapped around. The reality of “Sovereignty, if you can keep it” was at play. It was at play, too, when the League of Nations stood idly by and watched fascist Italy and Japan annex Ethiopia and northeast China, despite Article X of its Covenant guaranteeing collective retaliation against aggressors. World War II surpassed all prior wars in the number of casualties and exhaustion it generated. The UN Charter was the world’s attempt of learning this lesson and formalising “Never again.” Scores of newly independent states, emerging into a world that claimed subscription to the Charter, entertained briefly the belief that they were sovereign and therefore legally (i.e., hypothetically) equal, regardless of their size (this is still International Relations 101 orthodoxy, even if we teach it with critical caution and caveats). True, all their votes counted the same at the UN General Assembly, though the Security Council, the real engineroom of the UN, had the final say on the things that really mattered.

The war ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany, but it also marked another stalemate: the Cold War. In that era, now secured by nuclear weapons (the ultimate stalemate), the great powers – America and the Soviet Union – did not confront each other directly, but they violated the ostensible sovereignty of the smaller states at every opportunity through coups, assassinations, and proxy wars.

The post-Cold War order gave rise to its own reminders that sovereignty was for those who could keep it: Iraq and Libya failed at the first push in 2003 and 2011. Syria held out before reaching exhaustion in December of 2024. Georgia largely, and surprisingly, prevailed against Russia in 2008, but at the price of two-thirds of its territory. Taliban Afghanistan retreated and then regrouped after a twenty-year’s war against Washington and its allies between 2001 and 2021 that reached its own form of stalemate – military victory but diplomatic isolation for the Taliban; military evacuation but loss of prestige for the US. Ukraine, Venezuela, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are each at their own crossroads in which they must answer the same basic question. Will they be subsumed or, through stalemate, secure their sovereignty and keep it?

Hemoclysm and compromise

The election and return of President Donald Trump, along with equal and opposite ideological hardening in other parts of the globe, are the product and reinforcing variables of a break with the delicate paper guarantees that defined the post-World War II order contained in the United Nations Charter. The generation that bled in the two world wars are gone, and with them the lessons of those conflicts that led to compromise. As with Europe after the French Revolution, a new generation of coalesced forces that were previously on the outer margins of political power seems eager, for various reasons, to do away with the established norms. But they do not agree on what should replace them; as with the pre-Westphalian order, each side thinks the other woefully wrong and in need of conversion or extermination. Indeed they view compromise as tantamount to weakness or elite capture and corruption (despite being decidedly allied with elites themselves). They, of course, are not fully wrong in their diagnoses, even if their remedies are ill-suited to present problems. Inequality levels are growing, with hundreds of millions of people having been written out of economic upward mobility. Climate disaster abounds. Artificial intelligence blurs reality and fiction. Information flows faster than it can be analysed. Energy is being consumed at historic levels. Manufactured scarcity and polarisation are the order of the day, both within and among states. Conflict seems the inescapable outcome.

Yet, inevitably, a few years, decades or another century away from now, stalemate and compromise will prevail in some form – be it one that makes pretensions to equality or one that more blatantly establishes predatory spheres of influence among the great powers. Sadly that will not occur before the world, once again, undergoes another hemoclysm to exhaust itself. It is simply pitiful that so many lives will be lost merely to learn the same lesson.