Within the discipline of modern international relations, the existence of an international society of states has long constituted a point of departure for further inquiry. On those relatively rare occasions when scholars have felt compelled to inquire into the historical origins of this international society, they have argued that the peace of Westphalia constitutes a crucial turning point, when papal and imperial claims to boundless authority were finally and decisively replaced by a system of territorial states. Yet it has been argued that this view of the origin of modern international society is nothing but a myth. According to the critique, this myth was created during the nineteenth century in order to endow the then emergent international order with a more noble ancestry. But if the idea of an early modern international system is indeed a myth, what did the early modern world look like, and how did it come into being? As I will suggest in this chapter, the early modern world consisted of emergent nations and empires that were crafted out of universalistic conceptions of community by nationalizing a wide array of symbols and metaphors. This process was facilitated by cosmological changes which made spatial differentiation of political communities look natural, and which relocated the vantage point from which human affairs could be judged to sovereign authority.

When accounting for this transition, it has been common to consult early modern theorists of international law. Yet these theorists offer little guidance, since they were struggling hard to make sense of this world by means of concepts that were rapidly becoming outdated.