Old Empires Rise Again

There is much talk these days of a collapse of the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states. That system recognized the sanctity of borders and posited that what states did within their borders was their own business. It is argued that this historic system has been undermined by Western interventions that brought down Slobodan Milosevic and ensured the creation of Bosnia and then Kosovo, as well as the dethronement of Saddam Hussein and, less than a decade later, of Muammar Qaddafi. Also contributing to this destabilization, in the view of some, have been the creation of new states and statelets, whether in the Caucuses or South Sudan. But to interventionists of both the neoconservative and liberal varieties, such developments are not a bad thing at all.