Previous to the
peace of Westphalia, Germany was desolated by a war of thirty years, in which the emperor, with one half of the empire, was on one side, and Sweden, with the other half, on the opposite side.
But as a reminder, the
Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended European religious wars between Protestants and Catholics, was not a result of enlightened thinking and agapeic love.
They form the foundations of the 1648
Peace of Westphalia, which recognised after the Thirty Years War that sovereign states have their own interests to defend, and must engage with other states on a reciprocal basis.
Europe has come a long way - from the
Peace of Westphalia and the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 to the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the Treaty of Rome in 1957.
This refreshing discussion is based on the
Peace of Westphalia, the treaty that put an end to the Thirty Years War in Europe in 1648.
The
Peace of Westphalia, which ended the European religious wars in 1648 and established the first sovereign nationstates, involved 109 political entities and took two years to sign.
Your Majesty, King Abdullah, when you received the
Peace of Westphalia Prize a few years ago, you made an impressive plea for mutual respect, cooperation and peace between people of all religions and all nations.
That conventional wisdom may be turned on its head now, given that competing centres of power will, for the first time since the
Peace of Westphalia, create their own institutional arrangements for exerting influence.
In addition, even the most forceful advocates of its revitalization must bear in mind a distressing precedent: the principal efforts to introduce order, whether regional or global in scope, have resulted less from foresighted statecraft than from cataclysmic upheavals, as demonstrated by these major examples: The centrality of the nation-state to geopolitics emerged from the
Peace of Westphalia, which marked the end of the Thirty Years' War (161848).
The book divides international diplomacy into two historical eras: before and after the
Peace of Westphalia (1648).
Setting up a regime similar to that of the
Peace of Westphalia is a "complex, frustrating, (and) very slow process," based on multilateralism, which the Trump administration rejects, he continued.
1648: The
Peace of Westphalia brings an end to the Thirty Years'War.