The text that follows derives from a paper that was written for the Academic Committee for the exhibition 350 Jahre Westfälischer Friede and read at a meeting of the Committee held in Osnabrück on 10 October 1995. Since these Twelve Theses have helped to promote a consensus on the objectives of the Exhibition, they are printed here (with the addition of a few items of factual evidence). The maxims intended to define the policy of the exhibition have also been included. They may well serve to facilitate a critical appraisal of the presentation in Münster and Osnabrück.



I.

The year 1648 marks a turning point in the political consciousness of our civilization: the moment of the transition from war to peace. Present-day political theory treats peace as the foundation, benchmark and norm of politics. [1] On a theoretical level, this principle dates back to Plato; it surfaced in the dawn of the Renaissance, in the Defensor pacis of Marsilius of Padua (1324). The pleas for peace uttered by Erasmus of Rotterdam, by Sebastian Franck, by the Duc de Sully and by such writers as Emeric Crucé, as well as the later message of William Penn, charged the political hope of peace with moral and religious aspirations. But only with the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 did the European Powers publicly acknowledge that the desire for peace was an element of their policy. Even if the rulers involved did not entirely mean what they said, the documents signed in Osnabrück and Münster were a declaration of the political primacy of peace. For the first time, this became part of practical politics and was publicly proclaimed – with ongoing conflicts very much in mind – by those in power.

Since then there has been no way back, short of self-contradiction. Today, at any rate, no one can make a public declaration against peace and expect to be taken seriously in politics. As far as political theory is concerned, peace has come to be taken for granted. The warmongering so typical of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a regressive phenomenon that needs to be explained in terms of the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath.



2.

Both in procedure and in outcome, the peace negotiations in Münster and Osnabrück constituted the first major political conference to be held by the European powers. This was not a Church Council, nor yet an Imperial Diet, but a meeting of independent territorial and political entities, in which, for the first time, relevant alliances were taken into account. The Holy See was present only as an observer. From here it was not far to the primacy of secular politics. Not that this formed any part of the intentions of the participating Powers and monarchs; but they were creating the preconditions for a new form of political negotiation. The Peace Treaty of 24 October 1648 created a paramount law, which superseded, as specified in § 113, all existing 'canon and civil laws, general or particular decisions of Councils, privileges, concessions, ordinances, commissions, prohibitions, commands, resolutions and decrees', including 'Concordats with the Pope, the Interim of the year 1548, and secular or ecclesiastical ordinances'. [2]

Only such an enumeration can make clear the full intended scope of the Treaty's normative power, and the degree to which the outcome of these negotiations was deemed to override all previous legal dispositions.

The peace negotiations in Münster and Osnabrück thus became an exemplary case of conflict resolution between states. In retrospect, they can be seen to have been the model for all subsequent supraregional conferences on European security and collaboration. The close alignment between the establishment of a state and the conclusion of a peace, hitherto confined to individual territories, here emerges – potentially, at least – as part of the logic of relations between states. Pax et pactum convertuntur. [3]



3.

The Peace of Westphalia was an event that took place in a Christian world torn by sectarian strife. By new, juridical means, it established and delimited confessional spheres of influence; and, in the process, under the pressures of procedure and arbitration, it also brought the Churches closer together politically. At the same time, an increasingly humanistic and irenic atmosphere tended to defuse the theological conflict.. Here, as in politics, rapprochement and understanding tended to emerge rather against the will of the parties concerned. This is all the more evident when it is seen against the background of an upsurge in religious fervour among believers of every denomination. In terms of both personal and public commitment, there has rarely been a time when politics and religion were so closely related. The secularization of politics was accompanied by a crescendo of personal faith, as expressed with great sincerity in the Fürbitte des Friedens (Plea for Peace). With hindsight, the fervent prayers and hymns for peace composed in the seventeenth century can be seen as signs that the Churches were attuning themelves to the aspirations of a civil society.



4.

Historically speaking, what was new about the ending of the Thirty Years' War resided mainly in its juridical and diplomatic procedure and the claims to legitimacy that these involved; it is not surprising that the dynamics of all this were largely lost on the participants. The agony of the war itself was felt on a level that transcended individual awareness. The provision in the Treaty of Münster for 'perpetual oblivion and amnesty for all hostile actions carried out at any place or in any way, by either party, since the commencement of these hostilities' [4] reveals the political will to rise above that past agony. Only a shared experience of horror can explain the wish to 'expunge' the past and consign it to 'perpetual oblivion'. As § 2 of the Treaty of Münster provides, 'All and several breaches of law, acts of violence, acts of war, damages and costs, inflicted up to this day and also before the war, shall without respect of persons or facts be totally expunged [penitus abolitae sint], so that any claim whatsoever made by any person against another on such grounds shall be buried in perpetual oblivion [perpetua sit oblivione sepultum].' [5]

It is only now, after the experience of two World Wars has brought the sufferings of the Thirty Years' War closer to home, that we can gain a clear view of its epoch-making consequences. The political effects of the Peace of Westphalia, direct and indirect, cannot be convincingly presented unless the horrors of the war – devastation, expatriation, violent injury, rape, ostracism, destruction, pestilence and death – are also made clear. The loss of irreplaceable cultural artifacts, the meteoric rises and falls of individual careers, the coexistence of mindless randomness and military calculation: all this must be present in the exhibition.



5.

Another factor that made the Peace of Westphalia into a key event in European history was the unprecedented presence and involvement of public opinion. The text of the Treaty was published – an innovation in itself – in several editions. Newspapers, broadsheets and a torrent of medals and images reflected an unheard-of (and, in its scale, truly novel) degree of public involvement. The shared experience of suffering, which knew no frontiers, and the widely diffused – one might almost say total – character of the fighting, which was frequently prompted not merely by political and religious motives but by rampant personal ambition, greed and bloodlust, created an awareness that transcended all barriers of class and regional identity. And, for the first time, techniques of transportation and publication were rapid enough to satisfy the demand for information. The 'natives' and 'subjects' even of the larger political units developed an unprecedented interest in citizenship and independent statehood. This was the genesis of the civil society without which politics today would be unsustainable, not to say unthinkable.

6.

Pace Karl Marx, philosophers have very seldom confined themselves to interpreting the world: they have always also changed it. From posterity's viewpoint, the Peace of Westphalia offers a particularly apposite example. The theory of the Law of Nations, which had its origins in the conciliarism of the fifteenth century, underwent further evolution in Spain in the early sixteenth; closely bound up with the expansion of European power though colonization and missionary work, it was systematized in the age of the Thirty Years' War by Hugo Grotius. [6] Basing himself on the legal traditions of antiquity, Grotius put forward the idea of war as a 'public' and 'formal' action: the occasion for it, the mode of conducting it, and the manner of its end were to be subject to the rule of law. War was thus subordinated to a civil institution.

Grotius' theoretical work established in the public consciousness the concept of a Public Law of Europe (ius publicum Europaeum). The negotiations for the Peace of Westphalia, and above all the Treaty that emerged from them, brought this concept into the realm of practical politics. In the aftermath of the Peace, it lastingly affected international law, theories of statehood and political writing generally, in ways that have yet to be adequately studied. For instance, insufficient attention has been paid to the fact that the major seventeenth-century theory of the state, the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, [7] which was elaborated before the end of the Thirty Years' War, postulates a 'first and fundamentall naturall law' of all politics in which the sole objective is peace. As first formulated, this law states 'that every man ought to endeavour Peace, as farre as he has hope of obtaining it'. [8] Here we have political theory absorbing the political experience of its time – and, in due course, influencing politics in its turn. Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Kant (to name only the outstanding thinkers) took up the notion of peace as natural law in ways that – via the constitutional debates in England, America and revolutionary France – remain influential to this day. Our international alliances, security conferences and collective security organizations, as well as the League of Nations and the United Nations, would have been inconceivable without impulses of this kind, and without the constant confirmation and reinforcement that these have received from a succession of political philosophers.

The political and philosophical theories of the modern world have their roots in the catastrophic experience of the Thirty Years' War. They embody hopes that arose, not least, from the unprecedented and hard-won success of diplomacy in securing an end to that conflict through the negotiations for the Peace of Westphalia. The exhibition in Münster and Osnabrück should therefore convey at least an idea of these interactions between theory and practice over the past 350 years.



7.

Those negotiations gave expression to a new concept of statehood. Qualifications for participation were no longer solely based on territory but tied to the legal form that governed the political context. The Peace of Westphalia teaches us that it is not enough to define overriding political units in terms of Max Weber's institutional model, organized solely by the will of those in power: here, the 'state' is an entity within which unified legal conditions have emerged that can be assessed in terms of a principle (whether a Law of Nature, or of Reason, or of the Rights of Man). In other words, 1648 saw the emergence of a concept of statehood more modern than that of the nineteenth-century nation state.

Not least, the lengthy and laborious procedure of negotiating and ratifying the Peace, both within and between states, made Europe aware that the rule of law extended to international politics. In the public consciousness, the jurist and the diplomat become ever more prominent. The warlike, Baroque posturing in which the monarchs of Europe continued to indulge for more than a century after 1648 bears the marks of an anachronistic appeal to history.



8.

The involvement of public opinion – and thus the new quality of politics – was also reflected in the way in which cultural productivity related, as never before, to the facts of war, peace and politics. The thematic development of an experience that touched everyone and was directly linked with conscious social behaviour made the arts both more richly differentiated and unprecedentedly popular. Baroque art enjoyed its first flowering in the war years and its full, triumphal development in the period that followed the Peace; the result was a culture of theatrical and rhetorical self-display in every walk of life. Lavish splendour and pageantry were a compensation for the long years of war.

Above all, the arts benefited from new technical and scientific possibilities that not only enabled all the offerings of other continents to be shipped to Europe but also permitted an unprecedented perfection of artifice. Immense new human and mechanical resources, and the power to bridge the gaps between remote and disparate cultures and periods, created wholly new spaces of illusion. Even the everyday objects of the period demonstrate that the 'aestheticization of daily life' associated with the twentieth century was already a reality in the seventeenth.



9.

The Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia fell within a period in which technology and science underwent an unprecedented evolutionary surge. Human culture as a whole, from warfare by way of transport and communications to new techniques in artistic representation, became more productive. Science and technology made their influence felt in practical mastery over Nature, in easier work and travel, and in a horrific growth in the effectiveness of weaponry – but also, and above all, in the evident relish with which people seized their new opportunities. In peace and in war, in horror and in splendour, the seventeenth century is characterized by a superabundance of strength. The war itself is much more than an underlying 'socio-economic' factor in seventeenth-century culture: it is an illustration of the extremes which tore the century apart – but which were nevertheless expressed and made productive through art. Some, at least, of this must be rendered literally visible in the exhibition.



10.

One factor that particularly favours the historical attempt to bring to life the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of 1648 is the rich artistic, political and literary record left by those years. The exhibition can be used to provide an exemplary presentation of a historical space in all its aspects: everyday, festive, artistic, religious, economic and political. Here it is relevant that contemporaries and succeeding generations alike saw this war and this peace as significant examples and used them to point a lesson. This affords an opportunity, which should not be missed, to demonstrate the ambivalence of historical memory. That is to say: not only must the exhibition distinguish between popular/commercial and scholarly comment, but it must also reflect the fact that for nearly 150 years the Peace of Westphalia was regarded as a date that spoke more powerfully for war than for peace. At a time like the present – when political discourse assumes the absolute primacy of peace, while war nevertheless remains an undeniable reality – it is especially important not to lose sight of the enormous variations in posterity's evaluation of the Peace of Westphalia.

Without any attempt to draw an explicitly pacific moral, it may thus become possible to demonstrate that the fact of a political peace is neither a fact of Nature nor a gift of history. Peace has to be actively chosen, organizationally contrived and contractually secured within a complex field of competing interests. This requires a firm will, sure of its cause but unafraid of compromise. Peace very often demands extraordinary efforts – of which the day-to-day record of negotiation in Osnabrück and in Münster affords some vivid instances.

Above all, it is necessary to keep in mind the serious, concentrated effort with which the peace, once negotiated, was implemented. It was laid down that any person who contravened the terms of the Treaty (§ 114) would incur the 'penalty for breach of the peace' (poena infractae pacis). [9] However, it was already evident in 1648 that a peace treaty, as a political act, could not in itself abolish conflict. The Treaty therefore provided a mechanism for settling conflicts, both existing and future:

'The Peace, once concluded, shall remain in force unimpaired, and all parties to this Treaty shall be required to protect and defend all and several provisions of this Peace against any party whatsoever, without distinction of faith, and if any part of it be violated by any party, the injured party shall first admonish the violator to desist, but the matter at issue is to be submitted to friendly arbitration or due process of law.' (§ 115.) [10]

This Treaty thus launched the idea of the peaceful resolution of all disputes.



11.

The Peace of 1648 focused the world's attention on a single region and on two neighbouring cities within it. There is a notable opportunity here, which should be exploited in the interests of both cities, and as a way of lending immediacy to historical experience. The union of the two German states has revived suspicions as to Germany's political role in central Europe, and this is therefore more than a regional matter. The Peace of Westphalia offers a natural opportunity to set out the historical contribution of the German states and regions to the integration of Europe.

In this connection it must be remembered that the Treaty of 24 October 1648 contains a provision (provisum) designed to ensure 'that in future no conflicts arise in the political order [in statu politico]' (§ 62). [11] The measures laid down to implement this provision reveal that the phrase 'political order' does not refer to the sovereign territory of any one state but to the whole area under the sovereignty of all the signatories. Add the principle of 'public utility or necessity' (publica utilitas aut necessitas, § 62) which is cited as the political reason for the peace, [12] and note the expectation that, 'with the conclusion of the Peace, trade [commercium] will once more flourish' (§ 67) [13], and it becomes evident that the Peace is not to be confined to any limited territorial area. It is part of the logic of the Peace of Westphalia that it aspires to create a peace that will prevail all over Europe.



12.

In all this, it must not be forgotten that history is history, and thus irrecoverably a thing of the past. As such, it always requires a conscious effort of appropriation. To be experienced, it needs to be remembered: otherwise we could not bear it. We need to maintain a safe distance. History cannot, therefore, be 'touched' or 'entered'. One ought to resist the temptation – an attractive one in this multimedia age – of presenting it in such a way that it can be walked either 'on' or 'in'. It is no business of an exhibition to relieve the visitor of intellectual effort. But what the exhibition offers must be as good as it can be, both in aesthetic and in intellectual terms, so that the visitor who does not succeed in remembering will nevertheless know what he/she is missing.

FOOTNOTES