Two Very Bad Articles

My feed has been replete with articles on the Peace of Westphalia in the last few months, mostly of the forgettable sort. A few are good; and then there are the two that I will mention today, which are very, very bad and demonstrate the worst abuses of the Peace of Westphalia as an historical example.

First, we have this article called “The Moral Wall” for reasons which are still unclear to me. It is a transcription of an interview with two people, one of whom, Michael Hudson, seems to have resposted the interview on his site (whence the link above). The gist of the interview is that the United States has abandoned international law, but I am going to ignore that subject and focus on the use of the Peace of Westphalia in Hudson’s answer. Unlike other people, who often cite Westphalia in a perfunctory and almost instinctive fashion, Hudson actually tries to explain the origin of the Peace of Westphalia in a little detail. Unfortunately, he is completely wrong; but his explanation makes him more culpable than those who cite Westphalia unreflexively.

In describing the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Hudson says,

But at the end they got together, and at the Peace of Westphalia they said, ‘How do we prevent this from happening again?

We’re going to recognize all nations are sovereign, and no country, as I said, permitted to interfere with other countries to bring about regime change.’

I’m sure this is the model that many, perhaps most scholars have in their heads, but it is completely mistaken. I have not read a single statesman of the time arguing that no country would be permitted to interfere with other countries. Naturally, everyone believe that no one should interfere in his particular country, but there was never a general principle of non-interference; and, of course, the whole basis of the Peace of Westphalia was just the opposite: the direct interference of France and Sweden in the internal affairs of the Holy Roman Empire.

The other article is titled “American Presidential Election: What Is at Stake for the EU-US Partnership.” Again, I’m going to ignore the main question of the article about the effect of the American presidential election on European politics. I’m also going to skip the one throw-away line about the Peace of Westphalia. Instead, I want to focus on a curious phrase in the sixth paragraph, in which the author argues that “Europe has always been the place in which hegemonic conflicts have been not only more frequent, but also characterized by the utmost ferocious slaughtering of human beings.”

It’s not clear what he means by “hegemonic conflicts,” but probably he is referring to the attempts by various states in the past 500 years or so to become dominant leaders on the Continent. It is true that there have been a number of wars fought over this purpose, and you might even consider it true that Europe has witnesses more such conflicts than other places. But why is that? Probably because most other parts of the world have actually been dominated by a single empire during the same time period, so there was no room for interstate conflicts. The Ottomans brutally expanded over the Middle East in the 15th and 16th centuries and dominated the region until the 20th; the Mughals took over India around the same time; and the Ch’ing dominated starting in 1644 following a brief war against the Ming.

But the lack of hegemonic conflicts does not preclude these regions from having bloody wars or internal repressions. The Taiping rebellion resulted in 20-30 million deaths, far exceeding the death toll of the First World War; Russia lost more inhabitants in the purges and the Holodomor of the 1930’s than to the German invasion in the subsequent decade; and China’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution may have produced more casualties than died in combat in both World Wars. I don’t think there’s anything in the European example to exceed the “ferocious slaughter” of any of these other cases.

This may be the cultural egotism of the author, an Italian, who prefers to see superlatives (even negative ones) from his own background. But I have trouble understanding his description of the U.S.-Russian meeting on the Elbe at the end of World War II, of which he writes, “This landmark historical event took place in Europe, in absence of Europeans.” Really? The Russians aren’t Europeans? I’m sure this would be news to them. It would also be interesting to reconsider European history since the 17th century with the Russians as an external power. It may diminish even further the author’s claim that Europe was the site of unprecedented hegemonic conflicts.