The Peace of Westphalia

Bill and I got together last night – for drinks and food – and (of course) talked like maniacs about everything under the sun.

Knowing that he is a self-professed “history geek”, I asked him a question about the Peace of Westphalia, something I was not all that clear about, and it is referenced as often as the Magna Carta, and referenced in a way which makes me think: “Hmm. This is something I should know.”

But I never got around to looking it up online, etc. I mentioned this to Bill. He confessed that his primary passion is American history.

I sign on this morning, and lo and behold, there is an email from Bill – linking to an explanatory page about the Peace of Westphalia

Bloggers. They are a rare and beautiful breed. They have integrity. They follow through.

Thanks much, Bill. Had a great time last night.

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4 Responses to The Peace of Westphalia

  1. Sheila O’Malley Rocks…

    Sheila has the details of our drinks and dinner last night, I just felt the need to return the compliment after all the nice things she said. I do so love intelligent conversation on a wild range of topics, including…

  2. Bill McCabe says:

    Thanks for the kind words, Sheila. I had a great time too.

  3. Dave J says:

    Hey, even before I was a lawyer I was a foreign policy wonk, and International Relations 101 essentially starts with the Peace of Westphalia. If you’d asked here, I certainly could’ve answered; as it is, I’ll point out that the page you’ve cited may provide a decent history lesson, but in being overly particular in its attention to Germany, misses the wider ramifications.

    By marking the end of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European religious wars, Westphalia 1n 1648 is regarded as the birth of the “anarchic” modern international system, premised on equal and absolute state sovereignty as a reaction to the mass carnage of the Thirty Years War (which was the model for what Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan called “the war of all against all”). By essentially reducing the Holy Roman Emperor to a mere honorary title for someone whose real power flowed from being the hereditary ruler of a particular territorial state (Austria and Bohemia, and later Hungary), ending the imperial claim to universal authority, the “Westphalian system” thus established the idea that states aren’t supposed to involve themselves in eachother’s internal affairs, as the Catholic Hapsburgs had attempted done with religion in largely Protestant northern Germany, much to their ultimate loss. After Westphalia, it was largely accepted (by pretty everyone but the Papacy) that there was no higher authority than the individual state.

    Just thought you still might want to know.

  4. CW says:

    The Peace of Westphalia is interesting these days because many “internet theorist” types say that the modern linear nation state is obsolete, because of the “transnational” and “global” nature of the information economy.

    There’s no doubt that the information revolution is a real thing and the social relations of production are shifting from a “manufacturing economy” where bourgeois and proletarian types produce physical objects to be consumed by other bourgeois and proletarian types, to an “information economy” where control of physical and natural resources, and the means of industrial production, are less important than “intellectual capital” – ideas, data, and bandwidth.

    And there is also no doubt that the Westphalian world was an outcome of the last big-time social revolution – the shift from an agrarian, feudal economy to an industrial one.

    But it’s uncertain, as of yet, if the industrial nation-state that Westphalia introduced will be rendered obsolete by the information revolution, or whether nation-states will adapt and transform and continue to be the dominant social construct in the information age…

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