Certainly, Westphalia did not create a sovereign states system ex nihilo, for components of the system had been accumulating for centuries up to the settlement; afterwards, some medieval anomalies persisted.
Although eBay has its own sovereign communication system (Skype) and currency (PayPal), the game worlds have an additional element that makes them far more powerful: community.
"The entire sovereign debt system is set up around unenforceable contracts," Anna Gelpern, a Georgetown University law professor who specializes in this arcane area, told me.
So, while it is possible to spend a lot time talking about a sovereign bankruptcy system, I'm not sure it's worth the effort.
In fact you'll find, on the whole, that they're anti-anti-government, insofar as they know that representation within a functioning and sovereign democratic system is their best defence within a free-for-all global economy.
An assemblage of states forms a sovereign states system.
What features of Westphalia make it the origin of the sovereign states system?
Nowhere in the settlement's treaties is a sovereign states system or even the state as the reigning legitimate unit, prescribed.
As the sovereign states system became more generalized in ensuing decades, this proscription of intervention would become more generalized, too, evolving into a foundational norm of the international system.
While medieval thinkers advocated world government under a single monarch or emperor who would possess supreme authority over all other lesser rulers, modern proponents generally do not advocate a wholesale dismantling of the sovereign states system but incremental innovations in global institutional design to move humanity toward world federalism or cosmopolitan democracy.
