Territory is a distinctive feature of modern international politics, but there is little consensus over what about it is distinctively modern. Recent scholarship in historical international relations (IR) takes modern territoriality to be defined by the practice of creating and enforcing borders. Scholarship therefore dismisses the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, once thought to be the origin of the sovereign territorial state, because it did not change border practices. However, this approach ignores legal history. I argue that territory is a legal concept, and a history of modern territoriality must explain under what conditions rulers expressed their authority as territorial in nature. This article explains why the legal evolution of territorial rights (landeshoheit, iure territorii) in early modern Europe was distinctive of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE). While national monarchies asserted their “sovereignty” as non-territorial in order to capture overseas empires, the HRE developed a legal doctrine of territorially circumscribed jurisdiction within the imperial hierarchy. The Peace of Westphalia was a culminating event in which diverse privileges were recast as a single territorial right. Territorial autonomy was not only consistent with the hierarchy of the HRE but was fundamental to preserving it. This article has two contributions. First, it adds to recent scholarship on modern territoriality by explaining how legal history furnished the preconditions for ruling territory. Second, it places Westphalia and the empire’s legal history within the recent turn toward empire in historical IR. An important source for the development of international law was the internal constitution of the HRE. This prompts us to reconsider the notion that international law assumes a world of sovereign territorial states. On the contrary, early international law concerned territorial states nested within imperial hierarchy, not the anarchy of sovereignty.

中文翻译：

---

为什么威斯特伐利亚仍然重要：帝国下的领土权利


领土是现代国际政治的一个显著特征，但对于它什么是独特的现代性，人们几乎没有达成共识。最近的历史国际关系 （IR） 学术研究认为，现代领土性是由创造和执行边界的实践来定义的。因此，学术界对 1648 年的威斯特伐利亚和约不屑一顾，该和约曾一度被认为是主权领土国家的起源，因为它没有改变边界做法。但是，这种方法忽略了法律历史。我认为，领土是一个法律概念，现代领土的历史必须解释统治者在什么条件下以领土性质表达他们的权威。本文解释了为什么近代早期欧洲领土权 （landeshoheit， iure territorii） 的法律演变与神圣罗马帝国 （HRE） 不同。虽然国家君主制宣称他们的“主权”是非领土的，以夺取海外帝国，但 HRE 在帝国等级制度中发展了一种领土限定管辖权的法律原则。威斯特伐利亚和约是一个高潮事件，其中各种特权被重新塑造为单一的领土权利。领土自治不仅与 HRE 的等级制度一致，而且是维护它的基础。本文有两个贡献。首先，它通过解释法律史如何为统治领土提供先决条件，增加了最近关于现代领土的学术研究。其次，它将威斯特伐利亚和帝国的法律历史置于历史上 IR 中最近转向帝国的过程中。国际法发展的一个重要来源是 HRE 的内部宪法。 这促使我们重新考虑国际法假定一个由主权领土国家组成的世界的概念。相反，早期的国际法关注的是嵌套在帝国等级制度中的领土国家，而不是主权的无政府状态。