tony curzon price's Public Library

Article I begins: "A Christian general and permanent peace, and true and honest friendship, must rule between the Holy Imperial Majesty and the Holy All-Christian Majesty, as well as between all and every ally and follower of the mentioned Imperial Majesty, the House of Austria ... and successors.... And this Peace must be so honest and seriously guarded and nourished that each part furthers the advantage, honor, and benefit of the other.... A faithful neighborliness should be renewed and flourish for peace and friendship, and flourish again."

Peace among sovereign nations requires, in other words, according to this principle, that each nation develops itself fully, and regards it as its self-interest to develop the others fully, and vice versa—a real "family of nations."

Article II says: "On both sides, all should be forever forgotten and forgiven—what has from the beginning of the unrest, no matter how or where, from one side or the other, happened in terms of hostility—so that neither because of that, nor for any other reason or pretext, should anyone commit, or allow to happen, any hostility, unfriendliness, difficulty, or obstacle in respect to persons, their status, goods, or security itself, or through others, secretly or openly, directly or indirectly, under the pretense of the authority of the law, or by way of violence within the Kingdom, or anywhere outside of it, and any earlier contradictory treaties should not stand against this.

The 1648 Westphalia Peace only succeeded because of an economic policy of protection and directed public credit—dirigism—aimed to create sovereign nation-states, and designed by France's Cardinal Jules Mazarin and his great protégé Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Colbert's dirigist policy of fair trade was the most effective weapon against the liberal free trade policy of central banking maritime powers of the British and Dutch oligarchies.

Similarly, it is only with a return to the Peace of Westphalia's principle of "forgiving the sins of the past," and of mutually beneficial economic development (see Treaty principles, the "benefit of the other''), that the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be solved on the basis of two mutually-recognized sovereign states.

In the Peace of Westphalia, Mazarin's and Colbert's common-good principle of the "Advantage of the other" triumphed over the imperial designs of both France's Louis XIV himself, and the Venetian-controlled Hapsburg Empire. In the 18th Century, the same principle brought the posthumous victory of Gottfrield Leibniz over John Locke in shaping the American republic's founding documents, the victory of "the pursuit of happiness" and the principle of the general welfare, over Locke's "life, liberty, and property."

In ancient times, as Glucksmann observes, the Jews were hated merely
in the way that all peoples are sometimes hated. But for the last
two millennia, Jews have been hated also in a special way, which
is, once again, always in the name of an all-but-realized human
perfection. In the heyday of Christian Europe, the Jews were hated
because they alone seemed to ruin the dream of a universal truth:
they alone refused to go along with the vision of an ideal society
in which everyone would agree on the veracity of the Good News.
People hated the Jews out of love for the Gospels--hated the Jews
who, by refusing to accept the Good News, embodied the weaknesses
and frailties of the human condition.

The era of modern European states got started with the Treaty of
Westphalia in 1648, which proposed a newly secular vision of the
perfect society--a society in which every state was going to live
in tranquility behind its defined borders and respect the borders
of every other state. But the Jews scattered themselves (and were
scattered) all over Europe, regardless of borders--in plain
demonstration, once again, that the vision of universal perfection
stood at odds with the human reality. And hatred poured down once
again upon the living examples of human imperfection. Today we have
moved into a new era, post-Westphalian, in which, now that France
and Germany have made their peace, people look on national states
no longer as the source of perfection but as the source of evil.
Today the fashion is to imagine that a perfect society can only be
a global community, superseding the traditional states--an
international community in which no one is going to be the enemy of
anyone else.

Nation and identity in the new century

Which
means that nationality politics are needed, to mobilise resistance against such
outrages, and to formulate on-the-spot alternatives. Far from disappearing,
nationalism is changing its skin. The buzz-saws of marketolatry rasp out their
habitual comment here: where ‘protectionism’ is given an inch, can ethnic
cleansing be far behind? Thus phony history is added to the dismal apologetics
of the moment. The modern nation state has behind it a phased development,
still under way – from the kingdoms that emerged after the Treaty of Westphalia
in the 17th century up to the iron-clad Leviathans that came after the US Civil
War and the Franco–Prussian War in the late 19th century. It will evolve
differently again under the conditions of globalisation, inwardly conditioned
by the latter’s vast climate shift.