The Treaties of Westphalia (1648) ended eighty years of hostilities between Spain and the United Provinces of the Netherlands, as well as the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), described as the first European civil war. The agreements reached in Münster and Osnabrück showed that there is no art higher or more necessary than peace.
Until then, the bellicosity derived from the process of building modern states and the confessional struggles between Catholics and Protestants had given rise to endemic conflicts that devastated the continent with an unusual intensity. As John H. Elliott wrote, “the Peace of Westphalia has remained etched in Europe’s collective memory as ending a European conflict more devastating than any before the 20th century.”
Between 1600 and 1648 there was only one year without any war. Large parts of European territory were subjected to endless fighting for decades. The Thirty Years’ War was the most traumatic period in German history until 1939. The population loss was proportionally greater than in World War II and the devastation almost as great as in this one.
The Germans who lived through that conflict knew, better than statesmen and even historians, why the war had been a catastrophe, and they greeted the peace and the departure of the Swedish soldiers with sermons of thanksgiving throughout Germany.
For Jorge Rösch’s wife, raped by “a fat soldier from Finland” and his friend “the young soldier with blonde hair,” the war was a permanent misfortune. Juan Heberle, a shoemaker from Neenstetten, had to flee with his family thirty times to escape to the city of Ulm.
Even places that were not directly affected by military campaigns were impacted by looting and by the actions of tax collectors and soldier recruiters.
The historical significance of Westphalia lay not only in solving the religious and political problems that had led the Holy Empire and Europe to continuous war, but in configuring a model system to achieve peace.
The potential of the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück to establish agreements that would allow conflicting interests to be managed was underlined by Voltaire in The Century of Louis XIV, when describing the Peace of Westphalia “as an agreement destined to become the basis of all future treaties.” ”. Along the same lines, Jean-Jacques Rousseau praised the beneficial legacies of 1648: “The Peace of Westphalia can eternally remain the foundation of our political system.”
They were right, since those agreements, considered the fundamental constitution of the Holy Empire until it disappeared in 1806, were hailed as the main guarantors of order in central Europe. In 1780, Catherine the Great of Russia criticized the Austrian Emperor Joseph II because his policy was contrary “to the Treaty of Westphalia, which is the basis and core of the constitution of the empire.”
The new organization of the European political system forever banished the specter of the threat of a universal Habsburg monarchy and established a new relationship between the Holy Empire and neighboring states. The empire itself was organized as a confederation of independent entities that would settle their differences through constitutional procedures without resorting to force.
The guarantors of peace would be the winners of the Thirty Years’ War, particularly France and Sweden, without whose consent none of the clauses of 1648 could be modified.
The agreements meant the international acceptance of the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation. For most Dutch people, Westphalia represents the birth and independence of their nation; It is not surprising that commemorative celebrations are dedicated to him.
By achieving confessional peace, within and between states, Westphalia put an end to the entrenched wars of religion, and, in this sense, represented a crucial moment in the modern history of Europe, which is still a point of reference for the conflicts of this nature.
It is not surprising that German Protestant cities, such as Hamburg, which benefited from the Westphalian treaties for the recognition of religious equality, celebrated the first centenary in 1748 with religious services and prayers praying to God for all Christians, thus commemorating the end of religious confrontation and the beginning of a period of peace and prosperity.
Despite the rejection of Pope Innocent X, the acceptance of coexistence between Catholics and Protestants was recognized in Germany and throughout Christendom, which diminished the influence of the Vatican in central Europe.
The phrase “pax sit christiana” (let there be a Christian peace), with which the Westphalian peace treaties begin, reflects the abandonment of dogmatic positions and the effort to build bridges between the Catholic and Protestant creeds. Ending the religious wars, as Westphalia did, involved reaffirming the religious freedom granted to Lutherans in 1555 and extending it to Calvinists and religious minorities who had had it until 1624.
However, religious conflicts were still far from over, as proven by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and the repression of Protestants by Louis XIV or by Maria Theresa of Austria a century later.
The Westphalian agreements did not achieve general peace. Hostilities between France and Spain did not cease until the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) between Louis XIV and Philip IV, with the loss of Roussillon and Cerdanya for the Hispanic monarchy. France and Sweden – the undisputed victors of the Thirty Years’ War – continued to fight with their neighbors. But the strife caused by Swedish and French expansionism did not spread nor were it exacerbated by religious issues.
The solid and lasting achievements of Westphalia are in no way diminished by the fact that the war did not end immediately in 1648, nor in all places. After 1648, neither religion nor Habsburg imperialism again produced major conflict in Germany.
In fact, as 18th-century constitutionalists noted, Westphalia was a masterpiece of pacification – “the main bastion of freedom and equality, built with so much blood” – because confessional dualism strengthened and protected the balance between the emperor and the rulers. German princes.
The main questioning of Westphalia would be carried out by German nationalism from the end of the 19th century until 1945. Politicians and historians presented the Thirty Years’ War as a monstrous crime perpetrated in Germany by foreign powers, especially France, and argued that the treaties of 1648 had prevented the unification of the German State and condemned the country to two centuries of impotence. Even after 1919, parallels were drawn between the Peace of Westphalia and the humiliations of the Peace of Versailles.
This is not true. The National Socialist ideology, with Hitler’s rise to power, abhorred the Peace of Westphalia and set out to falsify three centuries of history. The negative view of Westphalia is still glimpsed in the most recent traditional German historiography, which considers the treaty of 1648 one of the most catastrophic in its history.
Although the society of the 17th century was very different from the current one, immersed in an unprecedented globalization, it is worth asking whether Westphalia still serves to found the international order. This is maintained by some political science scholars, for whom it is the most important treaty in history, since it established the principles of national sovereignty and territorial integrity on which relations between States are currently based.
International law, the new world order that emerged after the Second World War and the creation of the United Nations (UN) would drink, mutatis mutandis, from the transcendental principles and agreements adopted in 1648.
The echoes of Westphalia resonated recently when Russia seized Crimea in 2014, and Ukraine and its Western allies denounced the illegality of the annexation, invoking the violation of the concept of territorial integrity, established in the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück.
Currently, the project “A ‘Westphalia’ for the Middle East?”, promoted by the Körber Foundation and the University of Cambridge, brings together academics and political observers from around the world, determined to find a similar formula to reduce political tensions. and religious in that area.
Westphalia’s response to the general European collapse and the terrible suffering of the population during the first half of the 17th century must survive in historical memory as a symbolic reference when it comes to finding formulas that prevent the horrors of wars.
Ultimately, it is about not repeating the despair expressed in the writing of a Swabian family a few months before the peace of 1648: “They say that the terrible war is over. But there are still no signs of peace. Everywhere there is envy, hatred, greed; It is the war that we have learned. We live like animals, eating forage and fats. Nobody had imagined that something like this would happen to us. “Many people say there is no God.”
