Remember the Westphalia

The idea was to end the religious aspects of wars. Nations would accept the ruling dynasties to establish main religion in their sovereign domains. However the peace provided certain rights to minorities in performing their religion. Until the tweaked concepts of national identity of post Napoleonic Wars and globally the post colonialism gave us determining national sovereignty rights.

Let's see the International involvement in the Arab Spring under this concept while waiting for all the other shoes to fall. 

Today it is Syria and 'Remember the Westphalia.' We will talk about the idea behind military commercial wars and its slogan ' Remember the Alamo' some other time.

Mavi Boncuk |

The Peace of Westphalia was a series of peace treaties signed between May and October 1648 in Osnabrück and Münster. These treaties ended the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) in the Holy Roman Empire, and the Eighty Years' War (1568–1648) between Spain and the Dutch Republic, with Spain formally recognizing the independence of the Dutch Republic.

The Peace of Westphalia treaties involved the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand III, of the House of Habsburg, the Kingdom of Spain, the Kingdom of France, the Swedish Empire, the Dutch Republic, the Princes of the Holy Roman Empire, and sovereigns of the free imperial cities.

The following treaties resulted from the big diplomatic congress,[4][5] thereby initiating a new system of political order in central Europe, later called Westphalian sovereignty, based upon the concept of a sovereign state governed by a sovereign and establishing a prejudice in international affairs against interference in another nation's domestic business. The treaty not only signalled the end of the perennial, destructive wars that had ravaged Europe, it also represented the triumph of sovereignty over empire, of national rule over the personal writ of the Habsburgs. The treaties’ regulations became integral to the constitutional law of the Holy Roman Empire.

The treaties did not restore the peace throughout Europe, however. France and Spain remained at war for the next eleven years. But the peace of Westphalia at least created a basis for national self-determination.