Downfall of the Popes

How the Peace of Westphalia Created Modern Politics

This essay recounts the loss of the Roman Catholic Church’s dominance over European politics. During the Middle Ages, papal authority often crowned kings and queens. However, after the Protestant Reformation, the power of the Vatican was significantly curtailed by the treaties that ended the Thirty Years’ War. Our modern political paradigm, in which the world is divided into sovereign nations that choose their own religion, arose in the aftermath of that war. And, like the Medieval political paradigm, our modern political paradigm must also pass into history at some point.

The End of the Middle Ages

Until the 20th century, the most brutal war fought on European soil was the Thirty Years’ War. It was the final culmination of the Protestant Reformation. What began as a conflagration between Catholic and Protestant factions within the Holy Roman Empire soon engulfed other European powers like France and Sweden.

Between 4 and 8 million people were killed over the ensuing decades of bitter conflict. Whole towns were wiped off the map. By 1648, Europe was exhausted from all the violence; peace was desperately needed on the war-torn continent.

But the grudge between Catholics and Protestants ran so deep that their respective diplomatic delegations could not overcome it. Protestants refused to negotiate in a Catholic-dominated city. And Catholics, particularly the Papal representative, refused to officially recognize or sit at the same table as "heretical" Protestant powers.

To solve this, representatives from the Holy Roman Empire met with delegates from Catholic France in the Catholic city of Münster. Meanwhile, 35 miles to the north, Osnabrück was chosen as the site for negotiations between the Holy Roman Empire and Protestant Sweden because that city was evenly split between Catholics and Protestants.

The Dutch painter Gerard ter Borch was right there in the room when the Münster treaty was signed. Later that year, he recreated the scene on canvas. The resulting painting, now hanging in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, serves as a window into that pivotal moment in history. It also serves as the Title Card for this essay.

The Peace of Westphalia

Because they were signed in the Westphalian cities of Osnabrück and Münster, the “Peace of Westphalia” is the collective name for the twin treaties that ended the long and bloody Thirty Years’ War. These treaties laid the foundation of our modern political paradigm.

Political scientists consider the Peace of Westphalia to be the beginning of the modern international system, in which external powers are expected to refrain from intervening in the domestic affairs of other countries. Traditionally, the signing of the treaties is considered the moment when international borders were conceived and implemented. Although modern scholars now take a more nuanced view, the Peace of Westphalia is still considered a pivotal moment in the transition from the Medieval to the modern era, if not the complete transition itself.

The Westphalian system, also known as “Westphalian sovereignty”, is a principle in international law that states have exclusive sovereignty over their own territory. It underlies the modern international system of sovereign states. Westphalian sovereignty is enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which states that "nothing ... shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state."

As the Thirty Years’ War was the final culmination of the Protestant Reformation, the Peace of Westphalia curbed the power of the Catholic Church and of the Pope. During the Middle Ages, the papacy was generally the highest authority in Europe. The popes were often kingmakers, a tradition that went back to the surprise coronation of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day in 800 AD.

But the Peace of Westphalia ended that tradition, as Protestant-controlled states were less willing to respect the "supra authority" of the Catholic Church. Affirming the significance of international borders was meant to prevent the Vatican from interfering in the religious determination of foreign states. At Westphalia, some of the last vestiges of the old Medieval political structure were finally swept into history.

The End of the Modern Era

Because the Westphalian system is the only model in living memory, it’s assumed to be ubiquitous. The Civilization series of video games, for example, extrapolates this system all the way back to the Agricultural Revolution. However, the Westphalian system is not ubiquitous. It’s peculiar to the modern era, which is characterized by the capitalist system that emerged to replace the feudal economic system of Europe.

In 2022, tech entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan wrote a book called The Network State, in which he posited that physical location has lost all meaning and relevance in this digital age. His idea is that a new kind of political entity can be created in online spaces rather than physical ones. This new entity could replace the concept of Westphalian sovereign nations as we currently understand them. We could pay taxes and exercise rights according to our individual political preferences, not according to the geography where we happen to be born.

In Srinivasan’s vision, international borders would lose their current meaning and relevance. People belonging to various digital political groups would be distributed worldwide. His vision provides us with an example of what a post-Westphalian system might look like. As a thought experiment, it enables us to look beyond the current geopolitical paradigm and speculate about the future.

Conclusion

At all times and in all places, people tend to regard their status quo as the default. During the Middle Ages, the Church taught that the feudal economic system was the way God intended people to live; no one would have dared challenge the political power of the Popes. In our own time, we similarly view the Westphalian system as the default way to organize international geopolitics. But even a cursory glance at the pages of history reveals that this paradigm has a surprisingly short history. We should, therefore, expect its eventual passage into history, just as the Medieval system passed into history after the Peace of Westphalia.

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Further Materials

But though the Reformation had been saved, it suffered, along with Catholicism, from a skepticism encouraged by the coarseness of religious polemics, the brutality of the war, and the cruelties of belief. During the holocaust thousands of "witches" were put to death. Men began to doubt creeds that preached Christ and practiced wholesale fratricide. They discovered the political and economic motives that hid under religious formulas, and they suspected their rulers of having no real faith but the lust for power—though Ferdinand II had repeatedly risked his power for the sake of his faith. Even in this darkest of modern ages an increasing number of men turned to science and philosophy for answers less incarnadined than those which the faiths had so violently sought to enforce. Galileo was dramatizing the Copernican revolution, Descartes was questioning all tradition and authority, Bruno was crying out to Europe from his agonies at the stake. The Peace of Westphalia ended the reign of theology over the European mind, and left the road obstructed but passable for the tentatives of reason.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Reason Begins, 1961, page 571