I certainly think that that would be advantageous if a peace settlement were attempted in the Middle East, but I’m sceptical as to whether it can directly provide a blueprint, mainly because the Westphalian settlement was based on the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, which provided a framework. There are a group of people who think that the Peace of Westphalia might represent a possible framework for a solution because it was a compromise peace that attempted to include all the actors in the conflict. What are the characteristics of the contemporary Middle East that would lend themselves to such a solution? It’s become a kind of paradigm or analogy that’s been used by political scientists and politicians and others to discuss ideas of either catastrophic warfare or international order.Ī “Westphalian” solution has been mooted for the Middle East, I suppose because the divisions between Sunni and Shia Muslims in the region might resemble the religious divisions between Catholic and Protestant Christians in early modern Europe. What’s more, the war is also important for what it’s come to symbolize, an all-destructive fury, a kind of benchmark by which later wars have been measured, particularly by the populations that have been affected by them. It was also crucial as a factor in a longer-term shift towards an international order based more on sovereign national states, although that doesn’t happen overnight and it certainly isn’t a direct product of the Peace of Westphalia.

It did so in a way that actually stabilized the political order of Central Europe and provided for a European balance of power that lasted up until the period of the French Revolution. The Thirty Years War is important because it determined the political and religious balance in the Holy Roman Empire, Europe’s largest state. Foreign Policy & International Relationsīefore we get into your books, I wanted to ask: why was the Thirty Years War, which ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, significant?.

The Thirty Years War by Peter H. Wilson