The Peace of Westphalia

Abstract

Abstract This chapter revisits debates on the significance of the Peace of Westphalia as a benchmark date marking the advent of the modern system of sovereign states. Following a précis of the context and content of the treaties that comprised the Peace of Westphalia, I survey International Relations (IR) debates between traditionalist defenders of Westphalia’s epochal significance, versus their revisionist critics. I conclude that revisionists are correct in questioning Westphalia as definitively signifying either the sovereign state’s triumph, the birth of the modern state system, or the secularization of European international society. Drawing insights from global history, I nevertheless offer a qualified defence of Westphalia’s historical importance in the evolution of the modern international system. Specifically, I argue that Westphalia instantiated a distinctive diversity regime that tied legitimate political authority to the recognition of authorized forms of confessional religious difference. This regime entrenched a protean sovereign state system that consolidated in subsequent centuries. Contemporaneous crises of political authority elsewhere across Eurasia aided the consolidation of regional empires, and accompanying diversity regimes favouring imperial unipolarity. The resulting conjunction of European multipolarity and Asian unipolarity laid the basis for early modern globalization, making the advent of the world’s first genuinely global international system possible.