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Westphalia, Peace of.

Thirty Years’ War

With the Protestant Reformation and the challenges of the Counter Reformation, the notion of an
ultimate and infallible Christian authority in Europe came to an end. Gunpowder wreaked havoc on
established customs of defense and protection. The breakdown in feudal order meant that the traditional
nature of political and economic obligation was challenged. The distribution of printing presses made it
easy to publish tracts that fanned the flames of religious warfare in Europe. In the wake of these
upheavals and in wars that ravaged the continent between 1618 and 1648, fear, hatred, and ethnic
cleansing all but destroyed European civilization three hundred years before the term “genocide” was
coined. Given the message that moral ends justified brutal means (pithily pronounced a century earlier
by the thinker Machiavelli), war, rampaging, and unconstrained looting tore apart the infrastructure of
existing society. Many hundreds, possibly thousands, of villages were razed to the ground and the
population of prosperous cities was cut in half. Trade between cities and regions came to a halt. In this
environment of intolerance, slaughter, and decay, the pressing goal for political thinkers of sixteenth and
seventeenth century Europe was to find an effective formula for workable systems of stability and
legitimate authority that could put an end to the violence and restore civility and prosperity.

Philosophical Origins of the Peace of Westphalia

During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, various political thinkers (Jean Bodin, Niccolo
Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes) had expressed the view that no authority could stand above the individual
monarch and that, in fact, kings did not have to submit to the authority of the Pope. The significant
restraint on a prince’s action was that he should not interfere in the internal affairs of another prince. This
sentiment had been written into the Peace of Augsburg (1555), which famously embodied the phrase
cuius regio, cuius religio (his region, his religion), meaning that a sovereign was entitled, without outside
interference, to determine and mandate the religion of his realm. This attempt to end war in Europe
broke down with the revolt of the Netherlands and the Thirty Years’ War, but the claim was nonetheless
maintained and strengthened in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
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At stake in the negotiations to end the Thirty Years’ War were contending world views about how
relationships between sovereigns should be arranged in a world that would not be governed by
submission to an extraterritorial authority—the Pope or the Holy Roman Emperor. The English political
philosopher Thomas Hobbes is famous for his view that human nature is nasty and brutish (and short)
and war is the natural order of things; civil society is possible only within states, where individuals
voluntarily agree to the coercion of the state (or Leviathan). Above the state there can be no law (and,
therefore, discussion of justice is irrelevant). In the Hobbesian view, anarchy, defined as “the law of the
jungle,” is the very basis of international relations. In contrast, Hugo de Groot, or Grotius (sometimes
called the Father of International Law), argued in his treatise On the Law of War and Peace that human
nature is based on the desire for a peaceful, social life; that humans are capable of goodness, moral
action, and learning from experience; and that the fundamental tenet of both international and
interpersonal relationships is that promises must be kept. Grotius rejected both the Machiavellian
strategy that the ends could justify the means in matters of state and the Hobbesian argument that state
autonomy was the highest political virtue. Grotius claimed that a better foundation for peace would be
recognition of the unity and integrity of Europe based on interdependence and reciprocity in the affairs of
both citizens and princes.

Central Ideas of the Peace of Westphalia

In the end, although some of the Grotian ideas of building peace through reciprocity were influential, the
notion of recognizing community in Europe lost out to the idea, which was more attractive to individual
princes and rulers, that the best strategy for keeping the peace was to reinforce their own sovereignty.
That is, the key element of the Peace of Westphalia, concluded with treaties signed at both Osnabrück
and Münster, was that giving legal autonomy and acknowledging political independence for each
individual ruler would control political power internally and recognize the sovereignty of others as well.
The agreements fragmented political order into separate but equal territorial units that were under no
compulsion to obey any higher authority but had no business interfering in the domestic affairs of others.
In addition to encouraging autonomy and decentralization, the Peace of Westphalia, in accepting
Hobbesian and Machiavellian premises, drove a deep wedge between the ideas of political order and
moral order. Political action, particularly in international relations, was the business of states, not of
individuals or ethical systems, and was therefore not subject to the kind of constraints on interpersonal
action that Grotius advocated.

Legacy of the Peace of Westphalia

In legitimizing decentralized legal autonomy as the hallmark of the law of “nations” and prohibiting any
kind of external or international interference in internal affairs, the Peace of Westphalia did succeed in
terminating genocidal religious wars in Europe until approximately the beginning of the twenty-first
century. Some scholars argue that in privileging liberal autonomy and independence, the agreements
also laid the framework for the processes of democratization and nation building that eventually unfolded
throughout the continent. It is possible to see a clear progression, from the negotiators of the treaties of
Westphalia arguing in favor of decentralization and mutual respect to Immanuel Kant’s proposals for a
federation of like-minded states in his Perpetual Peace. At the same time, however, the Peace of
Westphalia’s legacy had serious negative consequences for justice and peace globally. Sovereignty, in
keeping with the law of nations as asserted by most princes or other rulers and their legal advisors, was
said to be an attribute of Europeans only. Thus, whereas sovereignty might keep the peace in Europe,
the “nonsovereign” peoples and territories of the rest of the world were up for grabs. The imperialism and
colonialism that characterized international relations for more than three centuries following 1648 were
perfectly consistent with the tenets of the Peace of Westphalia. The strong denial of the existence of any
authority that transcended the state and the patriarchal notion that monarchs had a monopoly on the
legitimate use of violence within their territorial borders (just as a father had a monopoly on the legitimate
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use of violence within his house) meant that talk about any kind of domestic abuses of sovereignty were,
by definition, not on the table. In this context, where absolutist states practiced a self-aggrandizing
autonomy and expanded their territory overseas—in other “stateless societies”—and in the name of the
law of nations, the incidence of external war increased dramatically, including wars between colonizing
states, and the possibility of a viable international community decreased dramatically by 1900.

The Westphalian Order in the Early Twenty-First Century

Peace studies scholars indicate a variety of challenges to the Westphalian order. The Charter of the
United Nations, while still privileging the principle of noninterference in domestic affairs, has offered an
alternative conception of legal order based on a more Grotian conception of mutual interdependence and
respect for human rights. The power of this vision may be seen most dramatically in the rapidity of
decolonization during the second half of the twentieth century. Problems with United Nations
peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention and the arguments frequently raised against them are, at
least in part, the result of the difficulty inherent in reconciling Westphalian principles with the aspirations
for international community and collective security expressed in the United Nations Charter. Westphalian
norms of noninterference and sovereign immunity also clash with the development of international courts
and tribunals, based on the Nuremberg Principle that those who systematically and unconscionably
violate the law of nations, even as heads of state, are accountable to the international community for
their actions. Significant challenges to the legacy of the Peace of Westphalia include globalization and
many forms of social, economic, and ecological interdependence, as well as the emergence of failed
states that demand international attention even as the norms of noninterference mitigate against
solution. It is likely that meaningful resolution of these twenty-first century problems will require political
solutions that were not available or certainly not embraced in the seventeenth century.

[See also Agreements, subentry on Multilateral Agreements; Balance of Power and Peace; Diplomacy
and the Major Powers; Grotius, Hugo; Human Nature Debate; Kant, Immanuel; Nation-States, Cause of
Conflict in; Nuremberg Principles; Patriarchy and War; Tribunals and Courts, International; and United
Nations, subentries on Peace Issues and Operations and System in Foreign Policies of States.]

Bibliography

Falk, Richard, Friedrich Kratochwil, and Saul Mendlovitz, International Law: A Contemporary
Perspective. Boulder,Colo.: Westview, 1985.

Gross, Leo. The Peace of Westphalia. In International Law: Classic and Contemporary Readings.
Boulder, Colo.: L. Rienner, 1998.

Ikenberry, G. John. After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major
Wars. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Kegley, Charles W., Jr., and Gregory A. Raymond. Exorcising the Ghost of Westphalia: Building World
Order in the New Millennium. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002.

“Treaty of Westphalia; October 24, 1648.” Avalon Project at Yale Law School.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/westphal.asp.