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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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