Many critics raise a very interesting point that while Westphalia system while

being the basis for the foundation of our current international system, it also
ties us and limits International Law to a systems of norms where there is no
authority higher than that of the sovereign states. This is to say that the state
centricity that emerges out of the Westphalian system excludes sources of authority
that transcend or come from above or outside the sovereign state. And this is
something that a student of political thought and political history might pay more
attention to than students of international relations or even international law--in
that the concept of the sovereign state is wholly found in the tradition of modern
political thought in the pathway of Machiavelli who coined the concept, to those
who transmit Machiavelli's tradition who like Bodin--and also the some of the
founders of modern international law like Gentile and Grotius. The Machiavellian
state sought to overturn the premodern system (as found in Classical political
thought of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, et al, or Medieval Political thinkers [be it
Christian, Jewish, Islamic] who followed from the teaching of the classical
thinkers) which rested on the network of competing claims of ultimate authority and
right. The older view debated which claim (the authority from custom, the
authority of the gods, the authority from rational understanding of the nature of
thing, the claim of pure power, etc) was truer and more correct that the competing
claim. The rise of the monotheistic traditions found in Prophetic Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam presented with a universality claim for authority that
challenged political rule at the very moment that the political form of the
polis/civitas that championed against older strains of Empire, were now being
replaced by a new strain of Empire (one that adapted elements from political
character of the polis/civitas) and longed for universal dominion of mankind (for
example Alicibides, Alexander, Ceaser, etc). Yet by the time of the middle ages--
these two forms the Church and the Empire shared or divided authority over man, yet
very imperfectly. So imperfectly was their power one could argue that there were a
great variety of sources of authority that made claim over actors and it was this
chaos that Machiavelli sought to overturn. Thus the modern state was to be the
instrument by which man was to impose order and secure for himself the good that
mankind sought to achieve yet were currently often way beyond their grasp. And
thus what happens at Westphalia and the treaty achieved there establishes the
agreement among the actors among the Western European regions that from now on
states and states alone are the sole legitimate actor in relations with each other
and among each other. This both limits and empowers, it limits because all other
sources of authority and claims to political authority are no longer recognized, it
empowers by giving man news tools to bring things like peace and security that the
old system often was unable to secure (or did not place as important to secure than
other goods they valued more highly than peace and security).

Here I would strongly recommend the work by Phillip Bobbitt, The Shield of
Achillies (Alfred Knopf/Penguin 2002) who offers a very interesting account of the
evolution of the state and the complementary evolution of the international system
as a system of states. This work nicely complements the larger more philosophical
view of Francis Fukuyama in his bestselling classical The End of History and the
Last Man, which pushed the liberal neoHegelian view for the evolution of the world
system to the global state. Now Fukuyama has modified his position much and now he
focuses more on helping states to get stronger--see his two volume revision of
Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies (Yale, 1968) which are The
Origins of Political Order (2011) and Political Order and Political Decay (2014).
Please forgiving my longish post as this point hits on some of the research and
writing I am currently engaged in and I believe it helps highlight the background
of what Gross is pointing to rather indirectl