[Bayart]

> I think the Westphalia thing is somewhat overblown there were lots of sovereignty analogs throughout human history all over the world before that.

I'm sure you understand there's a deep qualitative difference between a thing existing and the same thing being described, formalized and conceptualized. The latter allows us to use it with intent.

For example rationalism, which is a favoured subject on HN (I'm picking this because I've had a similar discussion recently with a friend of mine who uses to teach Philosophy, especially Epistemology, at UCSB) : it's obvious reason and structured rational thought existed before Descartes and Leibniz. But it's also undeniable there's been an extreme change is Human society after they defined it.

Conceptualizing ends up bringing changes at the cognitive level to the entire species. It's not a very deeply researched subject because of the lag time between the written material and observable anthropological effects, but at this point it's common knowledge, even if intuitively.

I'll digress for a bit and say that in my opinion there's a superior quality of knowledge, above Cartesianism, that'll I call informed intuitional. And I credit Srinivasa Ramanujan for forcefully bringing it back into Western Thought. [1]

In any case regarding Sovereignty, once we're sophisticated enough we'll accept multiple sovereignty as the rule. I don't see why, for example, Monaco couldn't be all at the same time the Sovereign State of Monaco, part of French Department of Alpes Maritimes, part of the Italian Province of Imperia and part of the European Federation. The specific conditions can be decided ad hoc with contract law, we've got the tools, we invented them.

[1]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/srinivasa-ramanujan-was-a-gen...