The war solved no problem. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous.…It is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.
It is true that the struggle between France and Spain continued with unabated bitterness until 1659 and that, within a decade of the Westphalian settlement, Sweden was at war with Poland (1655–60), Russia (1656–58), and Denmark (1657–58). It is also true that, in the east, a war broke out in 1654 between Poland and Russia that was to last until 1667, while tension between the Habsburgs and the Turks increased until war came in 1663. Even within the empire, there were disputes over the partition of Cleves-Jülich, still a battle zone after almost a half-century, which caused minor hostilities in 1651. Lorraine remained a theatre of war until the duke signed a final peace with France in 1661. But to expect a single conflict in early modern times to have solved all of Europe’s problems is anachronistic: the continent was not the single political system that it later became. It is wrong to judge the Congress of Westphalia by the standard of the Congress of Vienna (1815). Examined more closely, the peace conference that ended the Thirty Years’ War settled a remarkable number of crucial issues. Problems solved by the war
The principal Swedish diplomat at Westphalia, Johann Adler Salvius, complained to his government in 1646 that
people are beginning to see the power of Sweden as dangerous to the balance of power. Their first rule of politics here is that the security of all depends upon the equilibrium of the individuals. When one ruler begins to become powerful…the others place themselves, through unions or alliances, into the opposite balance in order to maintain the equipoise.
It was the beginning of a new order in Europe, and Sweden, for all her military power, was forced to respect it. The system depended on channeling the aggression of German princes from thoughts of conquering their neighbours to dreams of weakening them; and it proved so successful that, for more than a century, the settlement of l648 was widely regarded as the principal guarantee of order and peace in central Europe. In 1761 Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in praise of the “balance of power” in Europe which, he believed, was anchored in the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire
which takes from conquerors the means and the will to conquer.…Despite its imperfections, this Imperial constitution will certainly, while it lasts, maintain the balance in Europe. No prince need fear lest another dethrone him. The peace of Westphalia may well remain the foundation of our political system for ever.
As late as 1866, the French statesman Adolphe Thiers claimed that
Germany should continue to be composed of independent states connected only by a slender federative thread. That was the principle proclaimed by all Europe at the Congress of Westphalia.
It was indeed: the balance of power with its fulcrum in Germany, created by the Thirty Years’ War and prolonged by the Peace of Westphalia, was a major achievement. It may not have lasted, as Rousseau rashly prophesied, forever, but it certainly endured for more than a century.
It was, for example, almost a century before German rulers went to war with each other again—a strong contrast with the hundred years before 1618, which had been full of armed neutrality and actual conflict. The reason for the contrast was simple: the Thirty Years’ War had settled both of the crises which had so disturbed the peace in the decades before it began.
In the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs, there were now no powerful estates and no Protestant worship (except in Hungary), and, despite all the efforts of the Swedish diplomats at Westphalia, there was no restoration of the lands confiscated from rebels and others. The Habsburg Monarchy, born of disparate units but now entirely under the authority of the king-emperor, had become a powerful state in its own right. Purged of political and religious dissidents and cut off from its western neighbours and from Spain, the compact private territories of the Holy Roman emperor were still large enough to guarantee him a place among the foremost rulers of Europe. In the empire, by contrast, the new stability rested upon division rather than unity. Although the territorial rulers had acquired, at Westphalia, supreme power in their localities and collective power in the Diet to regulate common taxation, defense, laws, and public affairs without imperial intervention, the “amicable composition” formula prevented in fact any changes being made to the status quo. The originality of this compromise (enshrined in Article V, paragraph 52, of the Instrumentum Pacis Osnabrugense) has not always been appreciated. An age that normally revered the majority principle sanctioned an alternative method—parity between two unequal groups (known as itio in partes)—for reaching decisions.
Looked at more pragmatically, what the itio in partes formula achieved was to remove religion as a likely precipitant of political conflict. Although religion remained a matter of high political importance (for instance, in cementing an alliance against Louis XIV after 1685 or in unseating James II of England in 1688), it no longer determined international relations as it once had done.
When one of the diplomats at the Congress of Westphalia observed that “reason of state is a wonderful animal, for it chases away all other reasons,” he in fact paid tribute to the secularization that had taken place in European politics since 1618. But when, precisely, did it happen? Perhaps with the growing preponderance of non-German rulers among the enemies of the emperor. Without question, those German princes who took up arms against Ferdinand II were strongly influenced by confessional considerations, and, as long as these men dominated the anti-Habsburg cause, so too did the issue of religion. Frederick of the Palatine and Christian of Anhalt, however, failed to secure a lasting settlement. Gradually the task of defending the Protestant cause fell into the hands of Lutherans, less militant and less intransigent than the Calvinists; and the Lutherans were prepared to ally, if necessary, with Anglican England, Catholic France, and even Orthodox Russia in order to create a coalition capable of defeating the Habsburgs. Naturally such states had their own reasons for fighting; and, although upholding the Protestant cause may have been among them, it seldom predominated. After 1625, therefore, the role of religious issues in European politics steadily receded. This was, perhaps, the greatest achievement of the war, for it thus eliminated the major destabilizing influence in European politics, which had both undermined the internal cohesion of many states and overturned the diplomatic balance of power created during the Renaissance. N. Geoffrey Parker The great age of monarchy, 1648–1789 Order from disorder
By the 17th century there was already a tradition and awareness of Europe: a reality stronger than that of an area bounded by sea, mountains, grassy plains, steppes, or deserts where Europe clearly ended and Asia began—“that geographical expression” which in the 19th century Otto von Bismarck was to see as counting for little against the interests of nations. In the two centuries before the French Revolution and the triumph of nationalism as a divisive force, Europe exhibited a greater degree of unity than appeared on the mosaic of its political surface. With appreciation of the separate interests that Bismarck would identify as “real” went diplomatic, legal, and religious concerns which involved states in common action and contributed to the notion of a single Europe. King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden saw one aspect when he wrote: “All the wars that are afoot in Europe have become as one.”
A European identity took shape in the work of Hugo Grotius, whose De Jure Belli et Pacis (1625; On the Law of War and Peace) was a plea for the spirit of law in international relations. It gained substance in the work of the great congresses (starting with those of Münster and Osnabrück before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) that met not only to determine rights and frontiers, taking into account the verdict of battle and resources of states, but also to settle larger questions of justice and religion. By 1700 statesmen had begun to speak of Europe as an interest to be defended against the ambitions of particular states. Europe represented an audience for those who wrote about the great issues of faith, morals, politics, and, increasingly, science: Descartes did not write only for Frenchmen, nor Leibniz for Germans. The use of Latin as the language of diplomacy and scholarship and the ubiquity, alongside local systems and customs, of Roman law were two manifestations of the unity of Christendom.