CHAPTER NINETEEN: THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA

 

1. See memorandum to Louis XIII of January 1629, quoted in New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 4, 328.

2. Henry J. Chaytor, European History: Great Leaders and Landmarks from Early to Modern Times, vol. 3 (Gresham Publishing, 1915), 113.

3. As Randle observed in his monumental study of European wars and peace agreements, “The European order collapsed in the Franco-Dutch war in 1678. It did so again in 1683 with a general European war that lasted 17 years, in 1701 in the War of Spanish Succession, in 1740 in the War of Austrian Succession, and again in the Seven Years War (1756 – 1763)… In the settlements that ended all these major wars, Westphalia was approved and incorporated by reference.” Randle, 70.

4. New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 4, 352.

5. Which was reflected in the name chosen in Philadelphia for the new American consti-tutional entity, the “United States,” just as the new name that emerged from the Bolshevik Revolution—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—reflected a new constitutional order.

6. Sweden had refused a Danish offer to mediate. Swedish suspicion was not without foundation: see the instructions of the Danish government to its delegates in Andreas Osiander, The States System of Europe 1640 – 1990: Peacemaking and the Conditions of International Stability (Oxford University Press, 1994), 18.

7. Ibid., 21.

8. Ibid., 19. In 1649 Christina commissioned a dramatic play entitled La naissance de la paix, with a book by Descartes, who had come to Stockholm and wished to honor his patroness.

9. Ibid., 26.

10. Report to Oxenstierna, quoted by Osiander, 29.

11. The French delegates reported to Mazarin that the “disposition of the princes of Germany… is very different from that of the princes of Italy, the latter, being very intelligent and well-advised, approving of, and wishing for, everything that may contribute to make them independent while [the German princes] are much more affected by the love of their fatherland [beaucoup plus touchés de l' amour de leur patrie] and cannot approve of foreigners dismembering the Empire, no matter what hope of a gain we hold out to them.” D’Avaux and Servien to Mazarin, January 14, 1645, quoted by Osiander, 38.

12. Bearing in mind, as the reader must, that the emperor wore two constitutional hats, as it were: his kingship, which was derived by heredity over certain Habsburg lands, and his emperorship, which was his by the vote of the Imperial electors.

13. Randle, The Origins of Peace, 332.

14. Ibid., 54.

15. Osiander uncharacteristically overstates this revision, however, by saying that “the six-teenth century maxim of cuius regio, eius religio… was abandoned” and sharply reproves Holsti, McKay, and others for “serious factual errors” in maintaining otherwise. It is true that it is a common error to treat Westphalia as the agreement that introduced the “cuius” provision, but this principle was embraced, not abandoned, in the Westphalian settlement.

16. Karsten Ruppert, Die Kaiserliche Politik auf dem Westflischen Friedenskongreβ (1643 – 1648)(Aschendorff: 1979), 229, cited by Osiander, 48.

17. As Leo Gross wrote in the most authoritative legal commentary on the treaty, West-phalia was “a public act of disregard for… the papacy” that “liquidat[ed], with a degree of apparent finality the idea of the Middle Ages as an objective order of things personified by the Emperor in the Secular realm.” Gross, 37.

18. Osiander, 51.

19. Ibid., 68.

20. Randle, Issues in the History of International Relations, 53.

21. Cicely V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (Cape, 1938), 526.

22. Proceedings of the American Society of International Law 87 (March/April 1993): 325 and citations, n. 10.

23. C. G. Roelofsen, “17th Century International Politics,” in Bull, Kingsbury, and Roberts, 124.

24. Ibid.

25. Quoting John Morley, who ranked it with Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Bull, 71.

26. R. A. Falk, “On the Recent Further Decline of International Law,” in Legal Change: Essays in Honor of Julius Stone, ed. A. R. Blackshield (Butterworths, 1983), 272; compare Bruce Ackerman's “Constitutional Moment,” in Bruce A. Ackerman, We the People: Foundations, vol. 1, and Transformations, vol. 2 (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991, 1998).

27. The Latinized version of the Dutch name de Groot.

28. A notable figure described in Book I.

29. Georg Schwarzenberger, “The Grotius Factor in International Law and Relations: A Functional Approach,” in Bull, Kingsbury, and Roberts.

30. Martin Wight, Systems of States, ed. Hedley Bull (Leicester University Press for the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1977), 127.

31. Bull, 70.

32. Bull, 75, 77.

33. William Stanley Macbean Knight, The Life and Works of Hugo Grotius (Oceana, 1962), 289.

34. See Bull, 79 – 91.

35. Cf. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Age of Reformation, vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1978), 152 – 154; and see Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge University Press, 1969), 67.

36. G. Mattingly, “International Diplomacy and International Law,” in New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 3, ed. R. B. Wernham, 169 – 170.

37. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book I, trans. Maurice Cranston (Penguin, 1968), 51.

38. Mattingly, 169.

39. Schwarzenberger, “The Grotius Factor,” 306.

40. Bull, “The Importance of Grotius,” 74.

41. Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis (apud Ioannem Blaev, 1667), II.xx.40.

42. Osiander, 41.

43. Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, ed. and trans. W. Whewell (J. W. Parker, 1853), I.ix.

44. All of these arguments—the one at the footnote call is nowadays termed “rule utilitarian”—will be found in contemporary debates in political philosophy.

45. Murphy, 15.

46. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Opinion on the Principles of Pufendorf,” The Political Writings of Leibniz, ed. and trans. Patrick Riley (Cambridge University Press, 1972), 64.