Westphalia: the Last Christian Peace 1643-48

"The Peace of Westphalia is so complex that it takes at least five years to negotiate and the war continues while the negotiations are taking place. It’s an intricate puzzle that is slowly put together, interacting with military events. Just unravelling all of that is a challenge. Then the peace has this kind of benchmark status, particularly in political science, but also I think in general public consciousness. It supposedly created the “Westphalian system,” the idea that the world is divided into sovereign national states that should all interact equally within a rules-based international order. So the peace has that longer-term importance. “The popular perception of the war…is of a national disaster and almost, in many respects, a greater calamity than the world wars” What Derek Croxton does is present all of this in a very clear and lucid manner in a way that—whilst not undermining the importance of the peace—does voice very pertinent criticisms of the rather simple view that it somehow created this order. The choice of the title, The Last Christian Peace, is significant because in the classic paradigm, religion is taken out of politics and this, supposedly, enables a more peaceful domestic and international order. You get these accusations that the Islamic world has not yet had its Westphalian moment and this is part of its problem. Croxton points out that Westphalia is actually explicitly a Christian peace. It’s not based on modern ideas, or on Western ideas of toleration. Religion is an important factor in the peace and indeed remains so in domestic and international affairs afterwards."