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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This 7 page paper explores David Held's idea that the U.S. is going back to "Westphalian sovereignty" and that in doing so, it ignores human rights and international law. Bibliography lists 4 sources.
Page Count:
7 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_HVDaHeld.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
States, Australia, Canada and Spain, among other places."1 He lectures regularly on "questions of democracy, international justice and globalization" and is Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science at the London
School of Economics.2 This paper explores Helds idea that the U.S. is going back to "Westphalian sovereignty" and that in doing so, it ignores human rights and international law.
Westphalian Sovereignty The term takes its name from the Treaty of Westphalia, signed in 1648; this treaty ended the devastating Thirty Years War.3 More importantly for our purposes, it introduced
the concept of the "nation-state," which can be defined as "a specific form of state (a political entity), which exists to provide a sovereign territory for a particular nation (a
cultural entity), and which derives its legitimacy from that function. The Compact OED defines "nation-state": a sovereign state of which most of the citizens or subjects are united also by
factors which define a nation, such as language or common descent."4 Most often a nation-state also has "a single system of law and government. It is almost by definition a
sovereign state, meaning that there is no external authority above the state itself."5 This is the main point: that the nation-states, which well define simply as nations, are free
to do as they like without any interference from other nations. And it is precisely this thinking, Held argues, that has to stop because it is leading the United States
and the world down a very dangerous path. David Helds Argument Held pulls no punches in his critique of whats going wrong in the United States. He says succinctly "The
US-led war on Iraq is more than a failure of American strategy, diplomacy and thinking; in its heedless rejection of international institutions and their norms of co-operation, it represents a
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