Russell J. Leng

Until recently, the great turning points in the interstate system came
at the end of major systemic wars: the birth of the interstate system at
the end of the Thirty Years War, its restoration at the end of the Napoleonic
wars, Woodrow Wilson's design for a new world order after the First
World War, and the advent of the bipolar system after the Second World
War. The contemporary era is the exception: a sea change in the structure
of the interstate system has occurred because an empire has collapsed
through its own internal decay.

This is not to say that the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989 was the
cause of all of the changes that we are now witnessing, although it was a
necessary condition for unleashing some of the forces that had been
restrained throughout the Cold War era. Rather, the collapse of the
Soviet empire is the most dramatic manifestation of the challenges pre-
sented by the appeal of self-determination to a global system based on
the principle of state sovereignty. This chapter provides some perspec-
tive on the evolution of international attitudes with regard to those val-
ues, and considers their impact on the prospects for maintaining interna-
tional peace and stability in the post-Cold War era.

The European interstate ¹ system established in 1648 was challenged
by the revolutionary ambitions of Napoleon, but following his defeat in
1815, the statesmen who met at the Congress of Vienna re-etablished a
world order based on the principle of state sovereignty. Sovereignty has
both internal and external implications. Sovereigns are assumed to exer-

-261-