Everything Peace of Westphalia

With sadness, I report the death of one of the giants of the history of the Peace of Westphalia, Konrad Repgen.  He passed away on Sunday, April 2nd in Bonn, his home for the last 50 years, at the age of 93.  In the early 1960’s, he and his advisor, Max Braubach, began the Vereinigung zur Erforschung der Neueren Geschichte (VENG).  The name in English would be “Association for the Study of Modern History,” an extremely broad title for an organization that is known chiefly for its publications on the Congress of Westphalia and related areas.  The most important of these is the Acta Pacis Westphalicae (APW), a series of dozens of volumes of documents related to the Congress of Westphalia:  correspondence, diaries, minutes, official documents, and more.  Although some collections on the same theme have appeared before, sometimes with a very similar name, none can compare to the depth and breadth of the APW.  Correspondence, which constitutes the bulk of the APW, is extensively annotated, marginalia and corrections noted, enciphered text indicated, with a summary (sometimes quite lengthy) at the beginning of each letter and numbers pointing to the previous and subsequent pieces of correspondence in the series.  The editors invariably spent years with their documents and often produced historical monographs based on them.  Any scholar working on this subject must be grateful for the enormous effort dedicated to it over a long period of time, with Professor Repgen as its leader for most of its existence.  (He retired officially in 1988, but has remained active in the profession and in particular with the VENG.)  In recent years, Repgen approved the release of these important, but very large and expensive, books in an electronic form, freely available to anyone and easily searchable (although most volumes were printed with an amazingly detailed index, the ability to search the text for specific words is a major bonus).

His primary interest was Church history and his first contribution to the Peace of Westphalia was a tome on papal policy.  To the best of my knowledge, the book began with the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and never got to the Congress of Westphalia.  There was supposed to be a second volume but it was not published.  The fact that Repgen thought it necessary to go into that much background is typical of his work.  He is more noted, I think, for numerous articles on the Peace of Westphalia, as well as other topics, including the Third Reich.  In spite of the thoroughness of his writing, he was not afraid to tackle broad questions such as “What is a religious war?” or “The Peace of Westphalia and the origins of the European balance of power”, and one of his articles provides a very helpful summary of the negotiations at Westphalia which is otherwise lacking.  In addition to the publication of the APW, as head of the VENG Repgen also fostered many monographs into publication and oversaw the doctoral research of numerous students.

I met Professor Repgen just once when I was doing my dissertation research in Bonn in 1993.  He was genial and helpful in the little time I spent with him. Even back then, he seemed like a product of a different era, from the Latin poem inscribed over his fireplace to his traditional approach to diplomatic history.  It seemed entirely in character that, when the APW released its first documents online, it was under the heading “Supplementa Electronica”:  an ancient language used to describe cutting-edge technology.

It also seems an appropriate symbol of how far Repgen brought the study of the Congress of Westphalia:  previously more of a curiousity, we now know it in great depth.  There are still plenty of gaps to be filled, but there is no doubt that future scholars working on these lacunae will owe much to Professor Repgen, as I do.

“Everyone has by nature a right to act deceitfully. and to break his compacts, unless he be restrained by the hope of some greater good, or the fear of some greater evil.”  This quotation, which sounds like it could come straight from Queen Christina’s aphorisms, is in fact from Baruch Spinoza’s “A theological-political tract.”  I have just been reading it, but I wish I had done so before publishing my book, for Spinoza expresses in words exactly the sense of international relations that was practiced by the diplomats of which I wrote.

He says of an alliance for mutual defense,

“Such a covenant is valid so long as its basis of danger or advantage is in force: no one enters into an engagement, or is bound to stand by his compacts unless there be a hope of some accruing good, or the fear of some evil: if this basis be removed the compact thereby  becomes void: this has been abundantly shown by experience. For although different states make treaties not to harm one another, they always take every possible precaution against such treaties being broken by the stronger party, and do not rely on the compact, unless there is a sufficiently obvious object and advantage to both parties in observing it. Otherwise they would fear a breach of faith, nor would there be any wrong done thereby…”

In other words, statesmen were right not to trust each other, because agreements are only valid so long as a state stands to benefit from their continuation.  Not only is this normal (“this has been abundantly shown by experience”), it is a positive moral right, for, “if we consult loyalty and religion, we shall see that no one in possession of power ought to abide by his promises to the injury of his dominion; for he cannot keep such promises without breaking the engagement he made with his subjects, by which both he and they are most solemnly bound.”

It is very Hobbesian, in a sense, except more chaotic, because Hobbes considers the pledge to obey a sovereign to be an absolute right that, once surrendered, is gone forever; whereas Spinoza, although he writes that a sovereign power can never commit wrong against a subject “however absurd [its commands] may be,” also believes that the sovereign only retains its right to power so long as it can enforce it.  Anyone may dare to overthrow the sovereign, with the risk that, if he lose, he will be justly punished for treason; but if he win, he is in the right to do so.

I am not surprised to find the morality of the 1640’s being embodied in a philosopher writing several decades later, for, as I explained in the book, the theorists of “reason of state” were not so much representative of the practice of the Congress of Westphalia as of an earlier generation.  I have always been much struck by John Maynard Keynes’s assertion that

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”

And, being the contemplative sort myself, I like to think it is true.  However, in the period I study, at least, philosophers followed practice rather than preceded it, and I grudgingly acknowledge the justice of Hegel’s famous quotation that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”

History repeats itself, and historians repeat each other.  We are witnessing a case of one or the other in the current situation in Syria, where religious conflict has called to mind the religious conflicts of 16th and 17th century Europe. If Europe ended its religious wars with the Peace of Westphalia, the thinking goes, a new Peace of Westphalia may be the prescription for bringing peace to Middle East.
A quick recap of the events leading up to the first Westphalia: Martin Luther started the Reformation in 1517, and a major competing version of Protestantism arose in the 1530’s under John Calvin. Every Christian state in Europe struggled to come to grips with this movement, but the ones that saw the most fighting between Protestants and Catholics were France, the Low Countries, and the Holy Roman Empire (now Germany). In 1618, civil war broke out in the Empire between Protestants and Catholics, and gradually drew in other European states until nearly the whole Continent was fighting. It was over a generation before the fighting in Germany finally stopped. The settlement, signed in 1648 in two small towns in Westphalia, gave considerable latitude to subordinate rulers within the Empire to manage religious affairs within their realms, while guaranteeing certain basic rights to religious minorities – a federalist solution that would make Americans proud.
Islam has its own problem with disputing versions Shia and Sunni, dating back to the 7th century. Only recently, however, have Westerners begun seeing it as an analogue to Europe’s religious struggles. As long as Sadam Hussein and Bashar Assad managed the religious divisions in their countries, however ruthlessly, the split within Islam was peaceful for the most part. With the breakdown of authority in Iraq and Syria and the bloody wars there between the two Islamic sects, religious differences have suddenly become an international issue of the first order. Unlike the war against generic “Islamic extremists,” which could be viewed in terms of the long-term conflict between the West and Islam, these new civil wars can’t be easily pigeon-holed and are causing analysts to stretch their imaginations to come up with solutions.
As far as I can tell, the first person to compare the situation in Syria with the Peace of Westphalia was Henry Kissinger, in 2012. He did so in entirely conventional terms: Westphalia, he wrote, is the foundation of our international order, and it is based on state sovereignty. Intervening in Syrian affairs would compromise the principle of sovereignty and thereby risk unleashing another Thirty Years’ War on the world. Ironically, within a few years scholars were drawing the exact opposite lessons from the past, seeing the Peace of Westphalia not as a reason to stay out of Syria but as a model for intervention. At least two academic conferences have been organized on the basis of comparing Europe’s religious wars with the Middle East’s, one of them explicitly pointing toward the Peace of Westphalia as a model for a solution.
These scholars are certainly right about one thing: the Peace of Westphalia says nothing about sovereignty or non-intervention. We can blame the tradition of “historians repeating themselves” that the connection between Westphalia and sovereignty ever became popular in the first place, as one writer after another repeated the claim without investigating its origins until it became an unquestionable orthodoxy. Anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Prudhon, who first proposed that Westphalia endorsed the principle of sovereignty (as an aside in an article that he wrote on the much later treaties of 1815), would probably have been astonished how thoroughly his idea informed international relations theory in the second half of the 20th century. Instead of approving non-intervention, Westphalia did the opposite: it endorsed France and Sweden’s intervention in the Holy Roman Empire to protect the rights of religious minorities.
To that extent, it makes sense to look to Westphalia as a model for a peace in Syria that would be brokered by outside powers such as the U.S. and Russia. But if we look at the comparison any closer, we find that it is an exceeding weak model for peace. Whereas the Holy Roman Empire already had a history stretching back 700 years or more by 1648, Syria is a relatively recent creation of the retreating colonial powers that owes more to the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 than to the sort of organic process that created the Empire over centuries and fostered such a strong sense of unity among its inhabitants. During that time, the Empire had become politically decentralized, managing to continue to exist in spite of the fact that its subordinate duchies, counties, and cities conducted their own foreign policies and even raised their own armies. It was a difficult task, and there was a tendency for border regions of the Empire to become independent (such as the Dutch Republic in 1648) or get incorporated into other states (such as Alsace, which was absorbed into France before the end of the century). Yet it was functional to a surprising extent. The quasi-independent units paid taxes, submitted to Imperial justice, and even waged war as part of the Empire.
It is difficult to imagine Syria surviving a similar decentralization. Hardly anything binds Syrians together that does not also bind them to other people – Muslim Arabs, Kurds, Druze – in neighbouring states. Regional governments exist, but have no tradition of operating independently or of co-ordinating their relations with each other. The division of Syria into smaller, more religiously homogeneous regions would likely result in civil war, possibly leading to re-unification, or to the regions’ withdrawing entirely from Syria and joining with those they share most in common with. Would Syrian Kurds be more likely to stay with Syria or to try to join with other Kurds in Iraq? This even presumes that relatively homogeneous units could be created out of Syria, which may be the case for Sunnis and Shi’ites, and perhaps Kurds, but what about Syria’s other religious groups, such as the Druze (3% of the population) or Christians (10%)? What about people who share a religion but are an ethnic minority, such as Armenians, Turkomens, and Circassians?
Then again, Syria would not have the advantages of settled neighbours the way the Holy Roman Empire did. The Empire was the last Christian state to resolve its religious problems in 1648, so it had little to fear from rebel groups in adjacent countries raiding or fomenting division among its provinces. Syria faces the opposite situation, as Lebanon and Iraq are still violently divided and show no signs of resolving their problems any time soon. To the contrary, it seems certain that extremists on both sides of the Islamic divide will continue to do their best to unify the region under a single religious law; and, failing that, to spread terrorism, fear, and disorder wherever they cannot control. No purely Syrian solution is going to solve the underlying conflict of goals because there are parties that have no intention to restrict themselves to national boundaries. That includes many Syrians, who may be forced to accept an agreement for a time, but are likely to ignore it as soon as the immediate threat is over.
The Westphalian model for Syrian peace, therefore, fails because the historical situations are only superficially similar. The Thirty Years’ War was the last war in Europe fought primarily for religious reasons. Does anyone think that the Syrian civil war will be the last Middle Eastern war fought for religious reasons?

I’m the kind of person who can’t help cringing equally when I read praise of my work and when I read criticism, so going through the reviews of this book has been a challenge.  This is especially the case because I really poured myself into this book in a way that I didn’t with my two prior works.  I wrote it with no advisor and did not submit it to an editor until I was satisfied with it, so the book is really what I wanted it to be and not something created to please others.  Then, too, it was the culmination of 20+ years of thinking and reading about the Peace of Westphalia, so I had plenty of opportunity to consider what I wanted to say.  (In fact, I remember sitting in the archives at the Quai d’Orsay doing research for my dissertation in 1993 and wondering what one would say about the negotiations in general, and formulating my first ideas at that time.)

I am fortunate that almost all the reviews I have read so far have been thoughtful and balanced.  (There is one notable exception that seems to be the result of a cursory skimming, but I won’t single out that review here.)  I am also delighted that almost every reviewer has understood the main lines of my argument.  I would like to give myself some credit for that, because I edited and re-edited and re-re-edited the entire manuscript repeatedly until I could make sense of everything without having to puzzle it out.  This was especially problematic for the conclusion, where I had lots of ideas but had no clear overall sense of what I wanted to say until I had re-written the whole thing several times.  I was on much firmer ground on the narrative parts, but those, too, had to be worked over several times to produce a discussion in which each sentence followed from the last without logical jumps, unintroduced concepts, or simple lack of clarity.  (If the writing on this site does not match the quality of the book, it is not surprising, because I write most of this in a single sitting and put little effort into reworking it.)

Obviously, my writing still fell short of what it could have been in some respects.  One reviewer lamented “several awkward sentence constructions,” which actually doesn’t seem too serious in a book of 200,000 words.  Only one reviewer complained that the text was “excessively detailed and often simply confusing,”   noting that I “[yield] too easily to the temptation to digress.”  The only place I confess to leaving in more detail than I needed was in the discussion of Denmark, because I just find Christian IV so fascinating a figure.  Even there, I cut out one of my favourite stories in a very late draft when I realized that it was too peripheral.

It is a long book, I admit.  I wanted to tell the whole story, not just hit the high points.  It would doubtless have been much shorter if there had been other English-language narratives where readers could find more information; as there weren’t, I felt compelled to include a lot of specifics even though I knew it would make the book longer and more confusing.  Perhaps I need to produce a condensed version next. (Actually, at a very early stage I had proposed a book of about 200 pages and was advised that it needed to be longer.)

Fortunately, most reviewers found the narrative at least tolerable, using phrases such as a “detailed but comprehensible account,” an “engaging account” and a “lucid overview,” and a “clear and concise outline of all these aspects…of the complex tableau of the actual negotiations.”  One reviwer said I was successful “in the balancing act of going into the negotiation details where necessary (without, however, losing himself in them) and, on the other side, the constant struggle to write in a way intelligible to all” (my rough translation from the German).  On the whole, I am very pleased with this assessment.

My goal was to write a book that anyone could pick up and read.  Perhaps I undermined my own efforts by making the book so long.  I will only say that length is rarely an object if the author writes clearly enough.  I remember starting to read Thomas Pakenham’s 738-page “Scramble for Africa” book, a subject about which I knew nothing and thought I cared little, but getting so intrigued that I finished it a few days later.  I would not claim that I write as well as Pakenham, only that no one complains about the length if he is enjoying what he reads.  The reviewer for “Choice” began his review with “Here is everything you could want to know about the Peace of Westphalia, and more.”  I felt that the “and more” was intended to suggest that the book could have been shorter.

One reviewer noted (correctly) that the book was written for an American audience without a background in the subject. I was probably too ambitious, but I figured that specialists could skip the stuff they already knew, and non-specialists would be grateful for anything that gave them a handle on the subject.  I tried to introduce unusual concepts with comparisons to the modern world, especially America, because my experience is that one such comparison, however crude, can be more use that pages of detailed explanations.  Only one reviewer commented on this specifically, and said that he appreciated my “adroit” use of modern examples.  I am grateful to my foreign reviewers for not holding these examples aimed at an American readership too much against me, which I feared they would.

On the other hand, I correctly assumed that European reviewers would focus on the shortfalls of my scholarship more than American ones.  This is largely because hardly anyone in America actually specializes in the Peace of Westphalia, whereas numerous historians in Europe do so.  One reviewer complained that I was behind the times in my discussion of ceremonial and language, which I will admit to, because I honestly do not understand the significance of much of what I have read on these subjects.  The fact that I missed out on a recent biography or two of Ferdinand III I attribute partly to the declining interest in political history (hence libraries are slower to acquire such works than they used to be) and partly to the fact that I have not been a professional academic for over 15 years.  It is difficult enough to get access to scholarly research, especially in foreign languages, when one is not associated with a university.  I am fortunate that the University of Virginia, which is in my home town, allows all state residents to check out books, so it is actually easier for me than it would be in many other states.  However, getting things through interlibrary loan, where they can be found at all, means paying a significant chunk of money:  money that I do not expect to recoup through sales.  Nor could I find these books even in the Library of Congress, which is close enough that I could (and did) visit to look at other sources not available locally.  I also wish I could have seen one of several recent biographies of Axel Oxenstierna, but I haven’t located them, either.

The fact that I did not cite Paul Sonnino’s work “Mazarin’s Quest” has a more prosaic explanation.  He found no value in my book on Mazarin, and I was equally impressed with his.

Other reviewers regretted that there was no list of unprinted primary sources, or the fact that most of the primary sources I used were from the French correspondence with which I was already familiar.  I plead guilty.  I would have loved to have had the occasion to read more primary material, but it would take a lifetime to do that, and I have a day job that takes most of my time.  I cited as many primary sources as I could, because there are so many interesting quotations, but my goal was to produce a synthesis rather than a piece of original research.

Of courser, some reviewers found factual errors, which I knew was inevitable even though I went to extraordinary lengths to avoid them.  (Where possible, by finding out the truth; elsewhere, by rewording what I said to avoid saying something that might be wrong.)  I have nothing to complain about here; I will only note that I found out about one particularly embarrassing error through a blog by an art historian, of all places.  This gentleman discovered that I misplaced the sack of Rome by two years, placing it in 1525 rather than in 1527.

I was pretty certain that the chapter I called “Structures” would be one of the most popular, and it has proved so.  Several reviewers commented on the value of this section, one of them noting that “it is refreshing to read an assessment of the peace’s historical significance that is informed by a detailed understanding of diplomacy’s practice, rather than its theory.”  I might add that I also enjoyed writing this chapter a great deal as well.

It seems that almost every reviewer noted the book’s chronological structure, and while I don’t disagree with them, I was actually worried that the narrative was getting too squeezed by the introduction and conclusion, which are more topical (although the introduction does contain a significant amount of narrative leading up to the peace conference).  Only one reviewer, to my surprise, complained that the title (“The Last Christian Peace”) was rather tenuously supported.  I deliberately used that title to be provocative and to establish a setting that conflicts with the common assumption that Westphalia was the origin of the modern state system.  I could not help thinking about Huizinga’s famous book on “The Waning of the Middle Ages” which he wrote in deliberate contradiction of the idea of a Renaissance — a rebirth — in the 15th century.  (No, I’m not comparing myself to Huizinga, only noting that our titles serve a common purpose.)  Reviewers generally proved willing to accept my view of Westphalia as looking backward as much as it looked forward, and were tolerant of my attempt to describe the peace in parallel with the baroque age.  One reviewer did note that I argue “in leaps by analogy,” and perhaps this was part of what she had in mind.  I did try to emphasize that the “baroque” label was more of a helpful way of thinking about the negotiations than an attempt to slap another label on them, and I was grateful that one reviewer specifically mentioned my discussion of the more modernizing aspects of the peace.  One reviewer commented that I could have made more of dynasticism, which I suppose I could have; however, I did give the subject its own section in the conclusion, and another reviewer remarked on my discussion of the tension between dynastic and national interests.

Almost every reviewer commented on my view that Westphalia was not the origin of the idea or practice of state sovereignty, and none of them took issue with it.  The 1999 article I wrote in the International History Review seems to have brought a lot of people around.  Actually, I think that stumbling on to Prudhon’s article in which he appears to be the first person to connect Westphalia and sovereignty might be the most convincing evidence I have found; even more, in a way, than all the specific arguments showing that it was no such thing.  It seems easier, to me, to believe that something was made up if you can point to a specific moment that someone came up with the idea.

Apart from the comments that the book was written clearly, I am most proud that people found it an accurate summary.  Various reviewers noted that it is “a convincing interpretation of motivation and behaviour in shaping the negotiations,” “overall a solid and balanced summary…pulled into a coherent picture,” and valuable “for an understanding of the pressures and circumstances under which negotiators at Munster and Osnabruck actually worked.”

Only one reviewer commented specifically that the book was suitable for use in teaching the subject.  If there is one thing I could wish, it is that more historians would agree on this.  One of the values of the deep background, both the political geography and the physical structures of negotiation, was that it would make the book suitable for undergraduates learning about early modern diplomacy in general.  Although, to be honest, I’m not sure there are any such students, or more than a handful in any event, so out of favour is diplomatic history these days.

Reviews that are cited here (not in alphabetical order, sorry):

Robert Tiegs. Review of Croxton, Derek, Westphalia: The Last Christian Peace. H-War, H-Net Reviews. June, 2014.

David Parrott. The Journal of Modern History. Vol. 87, No. 4 (December 2015), pp. 931-932

Robert Bireley, The Historian, Volume 77, Issue 4, pages 831–832, Winter 2015

Robert von Friedeburg, English Historical Review 2016 130: 1560–1562

Michael Rohrschneider, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung: Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 567-9

Peter Wilson, The American Historical Review (2015) 120 (3): 1130-1131.

Claire Gantet, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 2014/4 (n° 61-4/4 bis), pp.165-66.

Choice Reviews Online (I regret that I can no longer find the author and text of this review)

Not cited are the generous historians who reviewed my book for Palgrave and who provided cover quotations.

It appears that two years is the approximate gestation period for academic reviews:  after seeing almost none in the first 24 months after my book was published, there has now been a flurry of them in the past 6 months.  I intend to write a “meta-review” of them, summarizing what reviewers have identified as the good and bad points, but for now I will just upload this image I made highlighting the best comments.

Here is yet another article linking the Syrian civil war with the Peace of Westphalia (and the Thirty Years’ War).  I don’t have anything to add to what I’ve already said here and here.  The comparison is picking up steam (this is the fourth article that I can recall) in spite of my best efforts to point out that it doesn’t work very well.  But, hey, people are talking about the Peace of Westphalia, so it can’t be all bad.

Someone recently brought to my attention a blog post by historian Martin van Creveld arguing that the present state of international relations is comparable to that of the early 17th century, and that we may be at the beginning of another Thirty Years’ War. This puts me once again in the unfortunate position of arguing that the period of history with which I am most familiar bears a lot less similarity to our present situation than some people would like to claim. I thought it would be helpful on the reasons that I disagree with the historical comparison.

It is true that we share some similarities with the situation at the start of the Thirty Years’ War: a multipolar international system, religious division and associated violence, and a rebellion (Bohemia in 1618, Syria in the present day). But the differences go much deeper than the similarities. The religious conflict in our day is quite different from the Protestant-Catholic division in early modern Europe. The Reformation had split a single religion with 1500 years of common history; radical Islam proposes to export its vision of society to places that have never been Islamic. In fact, there is hardly an opposing religion at all in Europe, where secularism is widespread. If there is a religious war, it is all on one side.

Then, too, Islam is at war with itself. The Islamic religious division goes back nearly as long as the religion itself and continues to divide Muslims from each other, often with violent consequences. Even this, however, is not the only or even the decisive division within Islam; rather, it is the vision of fundamentalist Muslims who want to shape society in a narrowly religious fashion against moderate Muslims who have largely accepted the modern framework of individual rights. This is a curious form of religious war in which one religion wages war on all other religions and simultaneously on different forms of itself. It could hardly be more different than the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic conflict in early modern Europe, in which different denominations of the same religion sought above all a safe space for themselves, and, secondarily, the conversion of other Christians to their way of thinking.

The rebellion in Syria also bears little relation to the Bohemian revolt against the Habsburgs. Unlike the political context of the Bohemian revolt, which took place in the Holy Roman Empire, Syria lacks a common history and shared set of political institutions going back 500 years (a point I made in response to another suggestion relating the Peace of Westphalia to Syria). There may be some common feeling among Syria’s diverse population, but it is also likely that Syrian Shi’ites feel more of a bond with Shi’ites in Iraq than with Sunnis in their own country, and that Sunnis also have strong international loyalties. It is true that some German Protestants looked to England or the Netherlands or Sweden for support against the Catholic threat, but only a few of the most radical had any desire to break up the Empire fundamentally. Germans of all denominations were firmly attached to the idea of a German nation with a shared heritage, a fact that consistently frustrated foreign rules who expected greater rewards for their support of co-religionists.

At the same time that this common German bond was a crucial factor in the war, so was the Empire’s uniquely decentralized structure. Its subordinate units — duchies, counties, bishoprics, cities, and other political entities — were functionally independent for many purposes, and carried on relations with foreign powers with virtual impunity. It was no stretch for France or Sweden to sign a treaty with Bavaria or Brandenburg and use it as an excuse to intervene militarily in the war, because it was clear what Bavaria and Brandenburg were; indeed, they maintained their own military force independent of the rest of the Empire, as did many other large estates. There are no such subordinate political entities in Syria, and America’s experience with trying to fund rebels has shown that it is not at all clear which rebels it is supplying with arms and whether a successful overthrow would be beneficial to American foreign policy — or whether it would be a tragic defeat. This doesn’t prevent foreign intervention in Syria, of course, but it makes it a drastically different matter than what happened in the Thirty Years’ War.

Van Creveld compares Iran to France under Richelieu, watching other states fight and covertly supporting whatever parties it chooses. This is true as far as it goes, but that is not very far when one considers that Richelieu is correctly perceived as having sought to isolate religion from politics as much as possible, whereas Iran puts religious goals above politics and “reason of state.” Richelieu was put in his position because he was allied with Protestants of various stripes and needed their support to be successful; Iran would apparently rather lose decisively than sacrifice its religious principles for political gain.

Van Creveld notes that civilian populations bore a heavy cost in both the Thirty Years’ War and in the modern Middle East. That is certainly true, but it is important to distinguish the effect on civilians in areas affected by the fighting from the effect on civilians affected only by terrorist attacks. Tiny numbers of people are killed by terrorism at present. An army in a territory dominates it and is capable of extracting resources and killing virtually at will. Terrorism is committed precisely by groups that don’t control territory and are too small and insignificant to hope to do so. They do not extract resources but rather create fear and uncertainty as a matter of policy. Terrorism, had it been possible in the 17th century, would not have had nearly the same effect because random death (mostly due to natural causes) was so much more common that terrorism would not have brought the shock that it does today. In the Thirty Years’ War, all participants were directly affected by the conflict; in the present war, it is chiefly the states in the Middle East that bear this burden, while those supplying arms and money are affected in much more limited ways.

This brings us to a point of particular importance to me: how would this new “Thirty Years’ War” be resolved? In the 1640’s, the war was ended by a meeting of the major powers at conflict in the Empire: Spain, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and, of course, Austria. The Empire’s other constituent units had a role because they possessed enough political power to make life difficult for the outside powers, but their participation was largely restricted to internal matters such as religion. There is no conceivable conference of powers that could resolve to end the Middle Eastern conflict. Perhaps they could temporarily end the fighting in Syria, but none of them, even all of them together, has the power to end terrorism and sectarian Islamic fighting at the stroke of a pen. The Empire attracted so much foreign intervention because it was literally at the center of Europe and so much power stood in the balance if one side gained a preponderance of force there. Syria is of minimal strategic importance to the West. If it should happen to be pacified, there are a dozen other countries where Islamic radicals could and would wage war, and even more possibilities for terrorists to train and plan for their next attack. The people with the leading interest in Syria are Syrians and their neighbours, but the fighting in Syria is inchoate and the loci of political authority difficult to identify apart from the Assad regime. Although I have argued that Westphalia was not the origin of state sovereignty in a practical or a theoretical sense, it seems a model of sovereignty compared to the problems facing the Middle East right now. The Thirty Years’ War was chiefly about the arrangement of political authority in the Holy Roman Empire, and it was able to be solved chiefly by allowing power to rest with local units so that no one side could become a danger to the other, or to any neighbouring powers. The war in Syria is about political authority in Syria and in the rest of the Middle East; no purely Syrian solution is going to solve the underlying conflict of goals because there are parties that have no intention to restrict themselves to national boundaries. In that sense, the war in Syria is both less serious in its international repercussions that the war in the Empire, and also much, much harder to resolve. The Thirty Years’ War was the last war in Europe fought primarily for religious reasons. Does anyone think that the Syrian civil war will be the last Middle Eastern war fought for religious reasons?

I was checking for appearances of my book title in Google today, as I frequently do, on the grounds that there have to be more reviews someday.  (So far, I have only seen four.)  Most of the results are from resellers, which is nice to see but not exactly interesting in itself, since I doubt if anyone is actually buying my book through Wal-Mart or Target.  One of the resulting websites that came up was from nobelpeaceprize.org, which was obviously not a reseller, so my attention perked up.  It turned out to be a list of books acquired by the institute in September, 2015, and there was my book among many others.  My opinion of the Nobel Institute went up significantly.  They have made some really, really bad choices for Peace Prize winners in recent years, but, if they are reading my book, they can’t be all bad.

I was happy finally to receive my copies of the paperback edition of “Last Christian Peace” last week.  Even though I had to settle for the same cover art (for lack of money to pay royalties on the painting I wanted), I am much happier with this version than the last one.  The title on the hardcover (besides being different) was far too vertical and difficult to read.  I thought the same thing of the text.  The paperback is much easier to read and creates a pleasing effect.

I am also excited that the local Barnes and Noble agreed to carry a few copies of my book.  (I intend to ask New Dominion Books as well, but haven’t made it there.)  Even if no one buys it, it has long been a fantasy of mine to see my own book in a bookstore.  The store’s general manager was so nice and kept asking, “I wonder what will happen?” as though it might become a big seller.  It almost certainly won’t, but it makes me happy to have the opportunity.

I’m pleased to say that the paperback version of my book is now available online.  You will probably notice that the subtitle has become the title, and there is a new and more descriptive subtitle.  The book, however, is the same, except for two or three almost trivial changes.  I have never heard of a paperback having a different title than the hardcover, but I like this title better, so I am not complaining.  I also really, really like the cover design better than the hardback, which I found far too vertical and hard to read.  I had the same problem with the text, so I hope the paperback will be different in that regard as well.  I don’t know yet, because I haven’t received my copies, so I’ll just have to wait and see.  Available for $35 (list) down to about $26 if you get it from Wal-Mart.

I also found another review that has been published, this one by Claire Gantet in the Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine.  It is in French so perhaps out of reach of much of my audience.  It is a nice review, rather brief but fair.  My favourite part was her description of my “faultless erudition.”  The biggest criticism was the absence of a list of primary sources, and the use of “The Three Musketeers” as a source.  Well, it’s not so much a source as a means of helping people understand the time period, but I admit it is an odd thing to find in a footnote.