The Peace of Westphalia

The Westphalian international system or, more grandly, society of sovereign states, is the term widely used to describe the system of relations that existed between European states roughly from the time of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 at least to the foundation of the League of Nations after World War One (WWI) and, after the failure of the League, to the revised attempt to create a new system through the United Nations after WWII, 300 years later. From the nineteenth century the system began to be extended to non-European states. It is so called, of course, because of its supposed origin in the Westphalian treaties. These treaties put an end to the Thirty Years War in Germany and the eighty-year Dutch war of independence against their Spanish overlords.

These wars had a substantial religious content. In Germany, it was largely a war between the Protestant princes and principalities of the German Empire together with the independent Protestant states of Denmark and Sweden against the Catholic powers led by the Hapsburg Emperor and supported by his Spanish Hapsburg cousins. In the Netherlands, it was a war of the Protestant provinces against their Catholic rulers for the freedom of their religion as well as for their political independence. The Catholic Hapsburg rulers of Spain and the German Empire sought to recover ground that had been lost to Protestantism since the Reformation of the previous century and to re-establish through the counter-reformation movement the lost Catholic unity of Europe.