Category: Uncategorized
Audio for Westphalia
If you want to get in the mood to study the Peace of Westphalia, there is nothing better than some period music. I have listed a couple of albums on my a/v page, and I came across another one recently that I forgot I had: “Un Concert Pour Mazarin.” It consists of Italian music allegedly …
War Criminals
One thing the Peace of Wespthalia did not have to deal with was war crime or war criminals. This is ironic considering that the Thirty Years’ War is a byword for the nastiest possible mistreatment of civilians. To really qualify as a war crime, though, the act needs to be committed as a matter of …
More War
The war in Ukraine seems not to have progressed a lot since I first wrote about it. It is very hard to obtain reliable information about an ongoing war, but it seems clear that Russias forces are making minimal progress, especially around the big cities. There is something especially unsettling about the start of a …
Peace of Westphalia in the news, February, 2022
It occurred to me recently that I could Google Alerts to let me know about new references to the Peace of Westphalia online. Naturally, most of them will probably just reference it as a byword for sovereignty (or, sometimes, balance of power), but there may be more enlightened usages. In any case, it could be …
The New War
The events of the past week have little bearing on the Peace of Westphalia, but they are so significant in modern diplomacy that I feel they warrant comment anyway. I had become fairly convinced that Putin was making threats with the intent of annexing the “Donbas” (Donets Basin) region where he has been fighting a …
Is DuckDuckGo blocking peaceofwestphalia.org?
This is not a post I ever imagined I would be writing on this site, but I am faced with an unusual problem and I don’t know what to think. I created this site nearly 8 years ago kind of on a whim, but with the intent to put up real content about a subject …
“The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”?
It has been a while since I have seen anything in current events that sparked in me a recollection of the Peace of Westphalia. That ended this week when I learned of Vladimir Putin’s article from last July, The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians. The first connection to Westphalia is the historical proximity of …
Peace’s Dark Side?
“The Peace of Westphalia also had its dark side” is the title of a press release from a 2018 conference in Germany. The argument is summed up by a Dutch historian in this way: “While the successful diplomatic negotiations in Osnabrück and Münster brought to the people of Europe the peace that they had long …
When Was the Thirty Years’ War?
The title of this post, which is also the title of my latest video, may seem silly: even if you don’t know when the Thirty Years’ War was, you can look it up instantly. But this isn’t about the years; it’s about the context. Do you know how they fought in the Thirty Years’ War? …