(iPoster) Religious Conflict, Exclusion, and the Origins of the International System

• In Event: Poster Session: Strategic Decision-Making in Global Security & International Relations Theory
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Strategic Decision-Making in Global Security

Abstract

European wars of religion following the Protestant Reformation, and their settlements, especially in the Peace of Westphalia, have been studied as foundational developments of the international system (e.g., Nexon 2009; Phillips 2011), advancing our understanding of how sectarian (Catholic-Protestant) conflict shaped the nascent international system. In recent political science scholarship, the medieval roots of the modern state in the Catholic Church (Grzymala-Busse 2020, 2024) and the role of the crusades in state formation (Blaydes and Paik 2016) have been examined for their critical role in shaping Western European states, and the same papal-clerical actors also engineered the ethnoreligious cleansing of Western Europe, targeting Jews and Muslims in particular (Aktürk 2020, 2024). This paper argues that the construction of religiously homogenous polities in medieval Western Europe was the first critical step and the building block of the international system, which predated the Protestant Reformation by two centuries. The papal-clerical actors’ role in this process is illustrated in numerous case studies where they shaped religiously homogenous polities by employing new papal-clerical instruments of power such as the crusades, excommunication, interdict, mendicant and military orders, and the papal embargo, thus laying the foundations of the modern international system.

Author

• Sener Akturk, Koç University