Anchors in a Shifting Order: Bull, Kissinger and Rawls Constituent Normative Principles in the Transformation of World Orders

The Westphalian order, founded on state sovereignty and secularism, has structured international politics for over four centuries but is now widely seen as in crisis. This thesis asks what value-constituents—normative principles essential for durability, legitimacy, and justice—must underpin any successor order. Through inductive analysis of five contemporary debates on Westphalia's crisis, three principles emerge: justice, legitimacy, and stability. Rawls's The Law of Peoples provides a pluralistic conception of justice; Kissinger's analysis of the Concert of Europe yields legitimacy as consensual acceptance; Bull's treatment of stability identifies great-power cooperation as the form compatible with justice. While analytically distinct, these principles are functionally interdependent for any durable order. The thesis concludes that Westphalia's successor must be more just, more legitimate, and no less stable. This offers both an analytical method for identifying any order's normative architecture and a normative argument: the crisis is an opportunity to rethink global governance amid civilizational diversity.