The Myth of Westphalia

6 January 2011, 1516 EST

The treaties of Muenster and Osnabrueck in 1648—the Peace of Westphalia—and the earlier peace of Augsburg in 1555 established the principle in European international law that internal affairs were nobody else’s business.

No, it didn’t.

In addition to stipulating a number of territorial adjustments, the Peace of Westphalia:

Reformed the Imperial Constitution to create non-violent processes for adjudicating religious disputes;
Reduced the authority over religious matters accorded to German princes in the 1555 Peace of Augsburg; and
Generally revitalized the Empire as a supranational political entity.

Indeed, far from affirming the notion that the “internal affairs” of European states were “nobody else’s business,” Westphalia designated France and Sweden as guarantors of its provision, including, as Benjamin Straumann notes (PDF), “the constitutional provisions for the Empire contained therein.”

Brad’s post — a long rumination on World War II — is otherwise a tour de force.

See: Andreas Osiander, “Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth,” International Organization 55,2 (2001) (Gated PDF); Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London, Verso, 2009); and Daniel Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change, Chapter 8 (Princeton University Press, 2003).

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.