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sábado, 12 de agosto de 2017

Os filhos do monge Tetzel, que já não se dizem protestantes.

Procuradoria-Geral Eleitoral vê abuso de poder religioso como "frequente" e difícil de evitar
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Carlos Madeiro
Colaboração para o UOL, em Maceió
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    O vice-procurador-geral eleitoral, Nicolao Dino O vice-procurador-geral eleitoral, Nicolao Dino
A Procuradoria-Geral Eleitoral está preocupada com o crescimento de denúncias de casos de abuso de poder religioso. O vice-procurador-geral eleitoral, Nicolao Dino, afirmou ao UOL que vê os casos com "extrema preocupação".
"Em linhas regrais é um fenômeno que tem se revelado muito frequente", diz, citando que, somente neste ano, foram seis pareceres dados pelo órgão de recursos que chegaram ao TSE (Tribunal Superior Eleitoral).
Existem dois tipos percebidos de fraudes eleitorais chegando ao TSE. Uma delas é a utilização dos recursos das igrejas --até com indução à contribuição e doação a candidaturas pelos fiéis. A outra forma é o uso em si dos líderes da igreja para convencimento de eleitor.
"Há situações que se observa a extrapolação da liberdade religiosa no sentido de transformá-la, de convertê-la em situações de constrangimento ou mesmo de pressão aos fiéis. Portanto essas situações podem se configurar nisso que tem se chamado de abuso de poder religioso", explica.
Dino também disse ver casos em que a igreja usa recursos arrecadados com fiéis para bancar candidaturas. "Há muitas vertentes religiosas que movimentam recursos financeiros de expressão e, quando isso se associa à manipulação da fé, acaba por assumir contorno de extrema preocupação na manipulação da vontade do eleitor", diz.

Caso já julgado no ano passado usou a tese

A tese de abuso de poder de vertente religiosa já foi acolhida ao menos uma vez pelo plenário do TSE.
O caso teve julgamento no dia 20 de setembro de 2016, quando o plenário confirmou decisão do TRE de Minas das cassações do prefeito de Nova Lima, Cássio Magnani Júnior (PMDB), e de sua vice, Maria de Fátima (PT).
Eles teriam se beneficiado eleitoralmente da outorga de dois terrenos à Igreja do Evangelho Quadrangular, nas eleições de 2012. Na ocasião, um pastor chegou a dar entrevista apoiando o então candidato.
"O abuso de poder tem um caráter de ser um fenômeno com diversas formas de manifestação. Ele se configura na modalidade de abuso de poder econômico, político, cultural. E agora estamos encontrando situações em que há uma extrapolação da manipulação no exercício da atividade religiosa, algo que está previsto na Constituição, mas que acaba por se revelar em algumas situações como pressão, constrangimento à manipulação da fé", aponta.
  • PERGUNTAS E RESPOSTAS
  • Quais são as características de abuso de poder religioso eleitoral?
  • A partir do momento em que ele esta sendo induzido ou obrigado. Exemplos de atos que podem caracterizar isso:
    - dizer a um fiel que aquela pessoa é enviada de Deus
    - afirmar que se não votar em X ou Y será castigado
    - orientar fieis a trabalhar para determinado candidato
    O eleitor vai perceber o abuso no momento em que notar que isso deixa de ser algo normal, deixa de ocorrer de forma imparcial. Para a Justiça Eleitoral, tudo o que for vinculado dentro da igreja será considerado um certo abuso. E aí pode ser político, de autoridade, econômico ou de uso de meios de comunicação.
     
  • O que um eleitor deve se preocupar se está havendo poder religioso eleitoral?
  • Nessas questões é correto ir ao Ministério Público Eleitoral, procurar o promotor eleitoral. A ele que deve ser direcionada alguma denúncia. 
    Pode ser possível também comunicar ao fato diretamente à Justiça Eleitoral. No Rio, por exemplo, na última eleição havia um aplicativo e um telefone disponível para receber essas denúncias.

    Fonte: Amilton Kufa, advogado eleitoral e pesquisador do tema
     

'Evitar é complicado', diz vice-procurador

Dino fala que é difícil prevenir esse tipo de crime, mas assegura que remediar é a saída. "Evitar é complicado. As situações são sempre detectadas depois. São situações que contaminam o processo eleitoral e dificilmente podem ser prevenidas. Elas devem ser fiscalizadas, o que devem resultar em procedimentos", afirma.
Diferentemente do que muitos juristas defendem, Dino afirma que não há necessidade da criação de leis que prevejam a tipificação.
"Acho que a lei já permite [a identificação]. Ela coíbe a utilização de mecanismos de fraude condizente à distorção da vontade do eleitor. O abuso de poder tem diversas formas de manifestação. Se a legislação já trata, evidentemente que ela vai considerar todas as formas do abuso, entre as quais de poder religioso", afirma.
Últimas Ciência e Saúde Economia Inter Jornais Política UOL Confere Tecnologia Tabloide Loterias + Canais Procuradoria-Geral Eleitoral vê abuso de poder religioso como "frequente" e d... - Veja mais em https://noticias.uol.com.br/politica/ultimas-noticias/2017/08/12/procuradoria-geral-eleitoral-ve-abuso-de-poder-religioso-como-frequente-e-dificil-de-evitar.htm?cmpid=copiaecola
Últimas Ciência e Saúde Economia Inter Jornais Política UOL Confere Tecnologia Tabloide Loterias + Canais Procuradoria-Geral Eleitoral vê abuso de poder religioso como "frequente" e d... - Veja mais em https://noticias.uol.com.br/politica/ultimas-noticias/2017/08/12/procuradoria-geral-eleitoral-ve-abuso-de-poder-religioso-como-frequente-e-dificil-de-evitar.htm?cmpid=copiaecola

O Globo: Diante de crise política, partidos mudam de nome para atrair eleitores em 2018

 

http://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/diante-de-crise-politica-partidos-mudam-de-nome-para-atrair-eleitores-em-2018.ghtml

 

Diante de crise política, partidos mudam de nome para atrair eleitores em 2018

Legendas tiram a palavra “partido” e adotam palavras como “Podemos”, “Avante” ou “Patriota”; cientistas políticos veem estratégia como jogada de marketing

A simples mudança de nome, porém, é vista com ceticismo por cientistas políticos, que consideram a estratégia somente uma jogada de marketing. Na avaliação de David Fleischer, Universidade de Brasília (UnB), alterar o nome representa “apenas uma mudança de fachada” e que é preciso haver uma reforma política profunda. 

 Roberto Romano, professor de política e ética da Universidade de Campinas (Unicamp), também considera ser algo pouco eficaz para o eleitor brasileiro. 

 “Os marqueteiros acham que mudando a sigla ou trocando por uma palavra mais significativa vão atrair a atenção dos eleitores. Mas o eleitor brasileiro foi acostumado, e isso é muito ruim, a não votar tanto em legendas, mas em indivíduos”, pondera. Dessa forma, ele acredita que o nome é “o que menos importa nesse momento de crise”.

De acordo com Romano, a tendência de trocar as siglas por palavras também tem uma explicação ligada às coligações partidárias.

Como é comum partidos usarem no nome termos como “socialista” ou “liberal” para indicar o seu posicionamento político, na hora de fazerem alianças, causava um certo estranhamento a união de partidos com ideologias diferentes. Com a mudança do nome por palavra, isso ficará menos evidente.

“Antes, os partidos utilizavam o nome como uma condensação do programa. Se era socialista, carregava isso no nome. Hoje, os partidos buscam palavras mais genéricas para representar a sigla, ao invés de carregar no nome ideologias”, diz Romano.

 

sexta-feira, 11 de agosto de 2017

i HU/Unisinos. Acabou o dinheiro: universidades públicas estão perto do colapso

10 Agosto 2017
A luz amarela está acesa nas universidades públicas federais brasileiras. Não há recursos assegurados para cobrir todas as despesas até o fim do ano. As bolsas para pesquisadores podem não durar até o mês que vem. Em algumas instituições estaduais, a situação é ainda pior: simplesmente não há de onde trazer dinheiro.
A reportagem é de Gabriel de Arruda Castro, publicada por Gazeta do Povo, 08-08-2017.
O orçamento do Ministério da Educação para 2017 era de R$ 35,7 bilhões. Mas, em março, o governo congelou R$ 4,3 bilhões (12% do total). O objetivo era reduzir o déficit nas contas públicas. A matemática é simples: o Executivo tem gastado mais do que arrecada e, para tentar equilibrar as contas, contingenciou recursos de todas as áreas. A educação não foi poupada.
O corte reduziu principalmente as despesas de custeio, que perderam 15% do orçamento inicial, e de capital (como a aquisição de equipamentos), com uma redução de 40%. Como consequência, muitas universidades federais têm sofrido para pagar despesas como água, luz, segurança e limpeza.
A situação na UFS (Universidade Federal de Sergipe) é tão séria que a reitoria teve de emitir uma nota negando que a instituição vá suspender as atividades por falta de dinheiro. Mas, no comunicado, o comando da universidade diz que só poderá encerrar o ano com as contas em dia se contingenciamento acabar.
“Caso não haja liberação integral de 100% do limite orçamentário relativo a custeio, haverá, inevitavelmente, sérios problemas de execução de despesas de energia, bolsas, pessoal terceirizado (limpeza, segurança, apoio operacional etc)”, diz o texto.
A Universidade de Brasília (UnB) já está no vermelho: tem um déficit acumulado de mais de R$ 100 milhões de reais no ano.
Cerca de 250 funcionários terceirizados já estão de aviso prévio e devem ser desligados. Segundo o sindicato da categoria, a força de trabalho terceirizada caiu quase que pela metade desde 2015.
A crise também atinge a UFSM (Universidade Federal de Santa Maria), que demitiu cerca de 70 vigilantes no início do ano e suspendeu obras em andamento.
Com o congelamento de parte dos recursos, o cenário de incerteza se repete em outras universidades federais. A regra vale para a UFPR, apesar de a instituição paranaense ter menos sinais visíveis da falta de recursos.

Estaduais

Mesmo com o corte orçamentário, as universidades federais continuam com salários de professores e servidores em dia, já que o pagamento é feito diretamente pelo Executivo federal. Em algumas instituições estaduais, entretanto, nem isso acontece.
O caso mais grave é o da UERJ (Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro). Uma combinação de má gestão, corrupção e redução orçamentária (em parte por causa da nova divisão dos royalties do petróleo) empurrou o governo estadual para a penúria e levou junto a universidade estadual.
O primeiro semestre de 2017 simplesmente não existiu. O reinício das aulas, marcado para o começo de agosto, foi adiado novamente por absoluta falta de condições. Os serviços terceirizados estão suspensos por falta de pagamento, o restaurante universitário não abre há meses e os docentes e funcionários ainda não sabem quando vão receber o salário de maio.
No Paraná, um bloqueio orçamentário afetou as universidade estaduais de Londrina, Maringá e do Oeste Paranaense. O governo quer que as instituições passem a integrar o sistema de gestão de pessoas do Executivo estadual, o que em tese melhoraria o controle sobre as despesas. As universidades alegam que isso fere a autonomia de que deveriam desfrutar.

CNPq

Paralelamente à crise das universidades, os 100 mil bolsistas do CNPq têm outra razão para se preocupar. Se não entrarem mais recursos, eles podem ficar sem receber já em setembro.
Na semana passada, o presidente da entidade, Mario Neto Borges se reuniu com o ministro de Ciência e Tecnologia, Gilberto Kassab, para tratar do assunto. Ouviu apenas que há um “diálogo permanente” com a área econômica do governo sobre o tema.
A UFRJ (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) emitiu recentemente um alerta a seus bolsistas de iniciação científica. Se nada mudar, diz o texto, o pagamento de agosto será o último.
Já há sinais de que os recursos estão perto do fim: bolsas que deveriam ter sido pagas nesta segunda-feira atrasaram, e a promessa é que depósito seja feito até o fim da semana. O problema afeta bolsistas de Produtividade em Pesquisa (PQ) e Desenvolvimento Tecnológico e Extensão Inovadora (DT).

Crise

A crise financeira na educação pública está profundamente ligada à crise econômica que o país atravessa. A expansão acelerada das instituições federais durante o governo do PT deixou uma conta alta quando a maré da economia baixou. Já em 2015, o governo de Dilma Rousseff promoveu um forte contingenciamento de recursos. E, com o governo federal em dificuldades, os estados ficam sem ter a quem recorrer.
“Era uma tragédia anunciada”, diz José Matias-Pereira, professor de finanças públicas na Universidade de Brasília. Ele diz que, além do corte repentino de recursos, as universidades sofrem com a falta de gestores preparados. Em vez de eleições diretas, sugere, talvez seja a hora de os reitores serem escolhidos levando em conta sua capacidade de gestão.
Na avaliação de Matias-Pereira, mais cedo ou mais tarde as universidades públicas terão de fechar alguns cursos. “Diante da crise que nos estamos vivendo, um número significativo delas vai entrar em colapso”, afirma ele.

Nota

O Ministério da Educação alega que, mesmo com o contingenciamento, trabalhar para liberar 100% dos recursos previstos para as universidades. “Para 2017, o limite de empenho previsto inicialmente para as universidades é de 85% do valor previsto para despesas de custeio e de 60% para despesas de capital. No entanto, o MEC está trabalhando para aumentar esse limite, assim como fez no ano passado, onde, mesmo após o contingenciamento feito pelo governo anterior, conseguiu liberar 100% de custeio para as universidades”.
O MEC afirma também que, apesar do corte, “o valor disponível para estas instituições será 5,3% maior do que o disponível à época do contingenciamento em 2016 - o que corresponde a um aumento de R$ 385,7 milhões”.

quinta-feira, 10 de agosto de 2017

As 3 igrejas, Roberto Romano



A Reforma protestante abriu um abismo na vida cristã e gerou pelo menos três tipos distintos de igreja. A primeira, com sede em Roma, tem no Papa o antigo postulante à plenitudo potestatis, o máximo poder político e religioso. A segunda, a luterana, rompe com Roma e quarda alguns traços da antiga forma católica, mas modifica pontos essenciais dos dogmas e da disciplina antigos. A terceira, calvinista, radicaliza a ruptura com a matriz católica e modifica fortemente as bases das estruturas hierárquicas, dogmáticas e políticas do cristianismo. 

A doutrina que fundamenta a pretensão católica na área política, especialmente em plano internacional, antes do cisma luterano, surge em plena Idade Média, quando os juristas da Igreja afirmam ser  a missão do papa mais elevada do que a do imperador.  O primeiro, afirmam eles, tem jurisdição sobre o segundo in spiritualibus (no âmbito religioso), mas o imperador não teria jurisdição política sobre o pontífice.

 A Santa Sé desempenhou durante séculos o papel de árbitro entre soberanos. ([1]) Mas o papa governava extensos territórios cobiçados pelas várias potências que lutavam entre sí pela posse e domínio  da Itália e pela hegemonia européia. A grande ambigüidade no papel do Sumo Pontífice (juiz e parte ao mesmo tempo) levou à desconfiança cada vez maior dos príncipes na sua magistratura internacional, sobretudo após o reinado de Júlio 2º (1503-13) papa guerreiro inflexível diante de cidades como Bolonha, e que nelas aplicou a lei de ferro gerada pela sua vontade de vencedor. ([2]) O mesmo papa aproveitou a revolta de Faenza e Rimini contra Veneza e exigiu dos venezianos a devolução daquelas cidades à Igreja. Ao fracassar sua iniciativa, organizou a Liga de Cambrai com Luis 12º da França, Ferdinando de Aragão e Maximiliano 1º, imperador germânico. O santo padre, com esta providência, iniciou as Guerras Italianas, quatro no todo, que envolveram Estados relevantes e terminaram em 1530. Julio 2º iniciou os planos da Basilica de São Pedro, o que ocasionou a ruptura de Lutero, com a venda de indulgências na Alemanha, para obter fundos destinados à construção da Basílica de São Pedro. Tanto no ângulo religioso, com a evidente simonia, quanto no diplomático, a Santa Sé perdeu qualquer veleidade de isenção nos julgamentos entre soberanias.

Antes da Reforma protestante, o papa era a grande figura internacional. Por não ter ligações com esta ou aquela potência em conflito, seu arbítrio era  geralmente acatado. Assim ocorrera na guerra dos 100 Anos, quando foi concluido o Tratado de Arras (1435), entre Filipe da Borgonha e Carlos 7º da França, contra os inglêses.  Os legados papais libertaram o duque Filipe do juramento feudal aos nobres da Inglaterra. O papa Clemente 7º formou uma Liga com o rei da França contra Carlos 5º da Espanha, para livrar a Itália da dominação imperial.  O papa Clemente 6º (1342-52) escrevera ao bispo de Verceil que as convenções concluídas em prejuízo da Santa Sé eram nulos, mesmo se confirmados por juramentos.

Nas relações internacionais da Idade Média, o direito canônico e o papa é a autoridade suprema. Os soberanos laicos não constituem uma sociedade internacional independente da Igreja. A Santa Sé determina o fim das guerras e as disputas são examinadas no tribunal do papa. Isto ocorreu, por exemplo, quando Inocêncio 3º, em 1199, ordenou a Filipe Augusto (1180-1223) da França e a Ricardo 1º ( 1189-99) da Inglaterra que acabassem suas guerras e submetessem a ele as suas disputas. Assim deu-se também nas controvérsias territoriais entre Portugal e Espanha, quando Alexandre 6º (1492-1503), dividiu terras coloniais entre as duas potências marítimas.
Mas em 1648 o Núncio Chigi só consegue protestar contra a paz de Westfália e seus acordos. o mesmo Chigi, eleito papa com nome de Alexandre 7º, nem é representado nas negociações sobre a sorte dos Pirineus. No Tratado Utrecht, os feudos papais da Sicilia e Sardenha são dispostos como se a Santa Sé não existisse. Perto das potências protestantes, com seus exércitos e territórios, a Santa Sé compõe uma força menor. E mesmo se comparado às católicas Espanha e França, ela não  impressiona.

A origem dos tratados que decidiram Paz de Westfália encontra-se na guerra  religiosa, fruto da Reforma e da divisão da fé cristã nas três igrejas mencionadas acima. O fenômeno bélico por motivos de ordem eclesiástica abalou a vida civil e internacional nos instantes decisivos em que se constituía o mundo moderno.
A Guerra de Trinta Anos (1618-1648)  mobilizou de início soldados católicos e imperiais. 
Por seu Edito de 1629, o imperador Ferdinando 2º  determinava que todas as igrejas católicas tomadas pelos protestantes voltariam para a administração da Santa Sé. Com este ato, o imperador  parecia ter-se tornado potente em demasia, o que excitou a oposição, contra ele, dos soberanos católicos, os quais o forçaram a demitir o general Wallenstein, seu grande apoio militar.  O rei protestante da Suécia, Gustavo Adolfo, entra na guerra a pedido da França católica e dos protestantes alemães. Ao se tornarem ameaças graves para a Alemanha, os soldados suecos precisaram enfrentar Wallenstein, readmitido pelo imperador.  O general decide assumir o controle das negociações de paz, sendo acusado pelos próximos do imperador de alta traição. Ele foi novamente demitido e assassinado por ordem imperial em 25/02/1634. ([3]) A guerra se transforma em pura e simples pilhagem da Alemanha pelos francêses e suecos.


Além das questões religiosas, problemas de potência estatal definiram a Guerra de Trinta (1618-48).  O conflito não opõe de modo absoluto católicos e protestantes, visto que soberanos protestantes (como o da Suécia) unem-se a católicos (como o da França). A França é preocupada com o cerco pemanente dos Habsburgos que dirigem o Sacro Império e dominam a Europa central, mas que também comandam a Espanha. Ao Norte, ao Sul e no oeste do continente europeu, eles ocupam o poder de Estados limítrofes da França. Um ponto estratégico é a passagem desejada pelos Habsburgos, pelo território francês, rumo às possessões da Espanha no espaço italiano e da Europa central.

Além desses conflitos de ordem bélica e geopolítica, existe um ponto doutrinário relativo à legitimidade do poder imperial e dos reis. Os Habsburgos defendiam a idéia imperial cristã, segundo a qual os príncipes subordinam-se ao imperador, o qual exerce o poder laico e segue as determinações do Sumo Pontífice romano. Nenhum monarca pode, neste ideário, ter soberania plena em seu território e sobre seus cidadãos, e deve aceitar o poder de inspeção do imperador (ou seja, como se trata de uma família hegemônica com ramo em Viena e Madrid) da Espanha, subordinado nominalmente ao papa. Os contrários à semelhante doutrina defendiam a tese, também antiga, de que “o rei é imperador em seu reino” e a concepção de que o rei dispõe de soberania plena e só deve prestar contas a Deus. ([4])

Em terceiro lugar ocorrem, na gênese da Guerra dos Trinta Anos, o elementos propriamente religiosos. A França pode servir como um ponto de partida para entender a lógica que determinou a Paz de Westfália. Ela, como todas as potências católicas no debate que preparou aquele tratado, desde longa data enfrentavam problemas internos e diplomáticos graves.
Já antes de Henrique 4º a França se debatia em lutas religiosas com ligações internacionais.  O sentido da sobrevivência do Estado tornou-se a cada momento mais claro: era preciso desligar o soberano dos conflitos teológicos e disciplinares das igrejas e seitas. Desde longa data Michel de l ´Hospital advertira os juízes francêses em Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1562) : nada resultaria de bom para o país se a discussão fosse mantida no plano das crenças particulares e não fosse dirigida para o plano da eficácia estatal. “Não é preciso considerar se a lei é justa em si, mas se ela é conveniente aos tempos e aos homens, para os quais ela é feita…o Rei não quer que entreis

em disputa para saber qual é a melhor opinião; pois não se trata de constituenda Religione (de instauração religiosa), mas de constituenda Republica (de instauração da coisa pública): e muitos podem ser Cives (cidadãos) embora não cristãos, e pode-se viver em repouso com os que ostentam opiniões diversas, como vemos numa família onde católicos não deixam de viver em paz e amar os da Nova Religião”. ([5])
Foram inúmeras as tentativas do poder real para diminuir a violência religiosa. Entre elas, as incursões de magistrados nas províncias em que as lutas eram mais graves. Este é o caso de Etienne de la Boétie, enviado pela Corte à Guiana para pacificar a região com base na tese da tolerância patrocinada pelo soberano e mantida pelas sentenças dos Parlamentos, os tribunais onde a justiça era aplicada. Governava a regente Catarina de Medicis, em nome de Carlos 9º. Indecisa sobre qual setor apoiar, o protestante ou católico, ela acirrou as divisões em vez de coibí-las. Suas preocupações, mais dinásticas e de ordem econômica do que teológicas, conduziu-a a editar normas de tolerância em 1561, nas quais se previa a liberdade de culto privado e libertação dos presos por motivos religiosos. O remédio não surtiu efeito e as violências aumentaram. A regente promulga outro edito, proibindo as pregações dos protestantes e as manifestações contrárias dos católicos. O resultado foi desastroso para o reino.
Na Guiana as confusões eram particularmente exacerbadas. Os reformados invadiam igrejas católicas e nelas exerciam seus cultos, sem licença do poder público. Isto ocorreu, entre outros lugares, no convento dos jacobinos. Buri, o enviado pela Corte e seguido por La Boétie, retira os protestantes dos jacobinos, na cidade de Agen, e lhes destina outra sede católica, a Igreja Sainte-Foix, na mesma cidade. A decisão dos emissários reais previa que, se houvesse carência de templos, ou se existisse apenas um no local, os cultos deveriam ser efetuados em rodízio, uma confissão a cada vez, sem lutas. No texto redigido por La Boétie sobre o problema, é possível notar o quanto ele, como L´Hospital, desejava a liberdade dos cultos, desde que os reformados e católicos respeitassem a lei do Estado. Este alvo, perseguido pelos governantes francêses, era obstaculizado pelo fanatismo de ambas as partes, católica e protestante.
É nesse plano que La Boétie critica a massa dos sectários que esfacelavam o corpo político e desafiavam a lei do soberano e os juízes do Parlamento. Todo o mal das lutas civis, diz o relatório redigido por La Boétie, “reside na diversidade de religião. Esta avançou tanto que um mesmo povo, vivendo sob um mesmo príncipe, dividiu-se claramente em duas partes, e não se deve duvidar que os de um lado consideram adversários os do outro. Não apenas as opiniões são diferentes, mas já existem diversas igrejas, diversos chefes, contrárias observações, diversas ordens, contrária administração religiosa. Logo, com este olhar, surgem duas repúblicas opostas, uma diante da outra.” Deste malefício dissolvente que destrói as bases da comunidade política, afiança La Boétie, surgem outros como a raiva de todos contra todos, com “tristes efeitos”.
Outra calamidade, diz o relator, é o fato seguinte: com o fanatismo das igrejas, o “povo se acostuma à uma irreverência diante do magistrado e com o tempo aprende a desobedecer voluntáriamente e se deixa conduzir pelos atrativos da liberdade, ou melhor, licença, o mais doce e gostoso veneno do mundo. Isto ocorre porque o povo, ao saber que não é obrigado a obedecer seu príncipe natural no campo religioso, usa de modo péssimo esta regra a qual, por si mesma, não é má, e dela extrai uma falsa consequência, a de que só é preciso obedecer os superiores nas coisas boas. E depois o povo se atribui o juízo do que é bom ou ruim e chega a não ter outra lei além de sua consciência, ou seja, na maioria, a persuasão de seu espírito e suas fantasias (…)  pois como nada é mais justo e conforme às leis do que a consciência de um homem religioso e temente a Deus, probo e prudente, também nada é mais louco, mais vão e mais monstruoso do que a consciência e a superstição da multidão indiscreta”.  ([6])
Se os choques religiosos ameaçavam a existência do Estado dentro de seu território, no plano externo os desafios eram mais graves. Embora convertido ao catolicismo, um rei anteriormente protestante como Henrique 4º tinha inimigos católicos para combater se desejasse garantir o espaço francês e o papel de seu reino no âmbito mundial. Entre os adversários mais perigosos estavam os Habsburgo. Na Áustria, aquela família mantinha plena hegemonia com possessões hereditárias como a Alta e a Baixa Austria, os principados de Estiria, Carintia, Carniola, Tirol, a Boêmia, a Hungria, e bens na Alsácia. Nominalmente, o chefe da Casa da Austria teria imensos poderes, supostamente herdados do império romano —mas oriundos do ser divino— e que lhe dariam mando supremo sobre todos os reis. Mas na verdade os Habsburgo da Espanha eram mais fortes do que os da Austria. O rei da Espanha também é rei de Portugal desde 1580, domina a Itália como rei de Nápoles e duque de Milão, conserva a região de Franche-Comté e os Países Baixos, a Flandres e o Artois, antes províncias francêsas.  Dessas posses, os Habsburgos arrancam ¾ de seus recursos, mas ¼ vem das Américas e das Filipinas. As casas da Austria e da Espanha se entendiam bem quando se tratava de impôr o poderio da monarquia no solo europeu.
O lado mais saliente na política internacional da família Habsburgo, era a  defesa do catolicismo. “Contra o herético, luterano ou calvinista, os Habsburgo lideravam uma cruzada comum, ajudando-se mútuamente, os de Viena especialmente contra os protestantes do Sacro império, o da Espanha, ´rei católico´, sobretudo contra os protestantes dos Países Baixos, da Inglaterra, da França.” ([7]) A França, cercada pelas possessões espanholas, estava ameaçada de fato, sobretudo porque o seu possível domínio pelos Habsburgos resolveria o problema estratégico número um da família: os transportes que garantiriam a presença de tropas espanholas na Holanda, na Alemanha, nas fronteiras da Austria, na Boêmia ou na Hungria. ([8]) A Espanha chegou a propôr o seu rei, Filipe II, como candidato a “Protetor do reino de França”em 1590.
      É instrutivo, para entender o xadrez da política internacional da época, seguir os passos do estadista e militar Henri de Rohan. Este pensador conhecia profundamente a situação da França e da Europa, fato aceito pelos mais importantes analistas da raison d´ État. ([9]) A primeira potência examinada por Rohan é a Espanha, na optica do sistema instaurado por Filipe 2º, menos militarista e mais jurídico-institucional. Rohan nota que a política espanhola visava instaurar sua dominação sobre um ordenamento racional, dirigido por máximas de poder. A primeira destas máximas era o uso político e diplomático da fé católica. Assim, a Espanha assegura o apoio do Papa e dos príncipes italianos de que tanto as terras pontifícias quanto as principescas estariam seguras com o sustento espanhol.
Na França, o labor espanhol consiste em apoiar o rei contra os protestantes, mas sigilosamente ajuda os huguenotes contra o soberano. Na Inglaterra, dominada pelo protestantismo, o alvo era manter a paz para não ter incômodos no tráfego dos tesouros vindos das Indias ocidentais e orientais. Sigilosamente, no entanto, a atividade escolhida era apoiar os católicos, mantendo em Flandres e na Espanha escolas para os jovens católicos inglêses. Na Alemanha, o essencial era reforçar o poder Habsburgo, além de ajudar os católicos suiços, dirigindo-os contra os protestantes. Na Holanda, o objetivo era conseguir um cisma entre protestantes. Em suma, sobre a Espanha, indica Rhan que “a fama sobre o seu grande zelo na manutenção da religião católica cobre com o manto da piedade todos os seus alvos e mantem o povo numa veneração espantosa”. A política “religiosa”, diz ainda, “é coisa vã na aparência, mas produz sólidos efeitos”. Mas a análise final de Rohan sobre a Espanha é importante: “Esta grande máquina composta de tantas partes e como que impedida por seu próprio peso, move-se por mecanismos secretos, que perdem força a medida em que são descobertos”. ([10])



Desde a paz de Augsburgo (1555), recrudesceram os choques entre protestantes e católicos, tanto na França quanto nas terras dominadas pelos Habsburgos, como é o caso da Boêmia. Na França, após o Edito de Nantes, cuja aplicacão foi árdua (em especial depois do assassinato de Henrique 4º pelo católico Ravaillac) brotam violências devidas, a dar crédito aos protestantes, à aproximação da Regência com a Espanha, o que teria inclusive abalado as relações internacionais francêsas com potências reformadas. Os protestantes realizam assembléias mais políticas do que religiosas contra o poder central, o que resulta nas guerras do Languedoc (1621-1629), no cerco de La Rochelle (1627-1628), o que aumenta a fragmentação da opinião pública francêsa. Como seria possível manter os mandamentos do Edito de Nantes, que admitia liberdades relativas para os protestantes, com a sua sublevação contra a Regência e logo após contra o governo de Richelieu? A solução foi a de manter o Edito, mas garantir o poder central. Assim, foram mantidas as alianças da França com as potências reformadas, o que determinava certa garantia aos protestantes francêses. Estes últimos, após o Edito de Graça de Alès (1629), tiveram confirmados os pontos essenciais do Edito de Nantes, inclusive com a restauração das escolas reformadas com ajuda do poder real. A contrapartida foi drástica, no entanto, pois as assembléias protestantes não poderiam mais adquirir cunho político, mas apenas religioso, e foram suprimidas suas bases militares. ([11])

A França entra na Guerra dos Trinta Anos em 1635, em luta direta contra a Espanha. Os francêses ganham várias batalhas, como em Rocroi (1643), Dunquerque (1646), Lens (1648). A Espanha perde as Províncias Unidas e a sua derrota em Dunes (1639) perde o território que ia da zona milanesa ao Franche-Comté e à Flandres. Ela também perde força com inssurreições internas, como a que se deu na Catalunha, pelos levantes em Portugal (1640) e depois pela expulsão de Olivares (1643). Após as vitórias da Suécia (1636, 1645, 1648) na Alemanha o Império caminha para a confissão da derrota e se prepara para as negociações de paz. Morto Ferinando 2º (1637), assume Ferdinando 3º, o qual decide aceitar um tratado de paz.


Em Westfália os príncipes católicos e protestantes concordam em ignorar os protestos do Papa contra as negociações ocorridas simultâneamente nas cidades de  Münster e Osnabrück. Tais encontros produzem uma nova lógica normativa nas relações internacionais e nos assuntos internos de cada país.  Os Estados soberanos anulam a influência da Santa Sé nos temas políticos europeus. A pretensão teocrática do Pontífice romano, na verdade, for a dissolvida lentamente num processo histórico com início na Idade Média.  Mas em Westfália, pela primeira vez, a Igreja foi intencionalmente ignorada nas decisões. ([12]) Não é por acaso que o papa Inocêncio 10º fulminou a Paz de Westfália com um Breve,  em 1650. ([13])

Na Guerra dos Trinta Anos  foram ampliadas as incertezas sobre os limites territoriais da Alemanha  e da Europa central, o que exacerbou as dúvidas sobre o futuro das três grandes confissões religiosas do continente. A devastação física e moral dos povos e príncipes levou os governos à mesa de negociação.  Os plenipontenciários precisaram usar de muita cautela para conseguir a redação de dois textos, o de Osnabrück e o de Münster, hoje conhecidos no singular como o Tratado de Westfália. As duas localidades serviram para reunir em separado os católicos e os protestantes. As bases do acordo foram mantidas em vigor até 1792.

A guerra dos Trinta Anos, “maior catástrofe demográfica conhecida pelo mundo alemão em sua história” ([14]) tem seu início marcado pelo fracasso da Paz de Augsburgo (1555), na qual o Sacro Império decidiu o princípio conhecido como “cujus regio ejus religio” (a religião do povo é a do príncipe), definindo a existência da religião luterana à exclusão do calvinismo e demais setores reformados. Os calvinistas, na Boêmia, onde adquiriram forças consideráveis, resistiram aos esforços da Contra reforma, movimento católico que resultou do Concilio de Trento (1545-1552), o que suscitou uma série de incidentes, os quais levaram ao choque entre as potências católicas e protestantes. Gradativamente as potências protestantes entraram na luta, cada uma com suas ambições territoriais e planos políticos, como é o caso da Suécia e da Dinamarca. Após anos tremendos de fome, insegurança, violências diversas, os dirigentes politicos dos Estados protestantes e católicos, lentamente iniciam as conversações de paz. O processo técnico e diplomático exigiu prudência excepcional.
As cidades de Münster e de Osnabrück foram declaradas zona neutra, salvo condutos foram dados aos diplomatas e aos seus auxiliares. Também a estrada que unia as duas cidades foi dita neutra. A logística para abrigar, alimentar, vestir, fornecer correio e todo o aparato necessário às conversações foi das mais complicadas. Só a delegação francêsa incluia quase duzentas pessoas. Estavam presentes 194 potências soberanas, das menores até as mais relevantes na cena internacional. ([15]) Das formações estatais apenas a Rússia, o império Otomano e a Inglaterra estavam ausentes.
Os católicos (representantes do imperador, a França, a Espanha, os Eleitores e principes catolicos alemães, os representantes das Províncias Unidas, reuniram-se em Münster. A França, dirigida pelo cardeal Mazarino, desejava obter do Congresso de Westfália a segurança de suas fronteiras do lado espanhol e do Santo Império. Ela reivindicou as regiões da Lorena e da Alsácia, além do Pignerol nos Alpes. E também queria manter as conquistas feitas contra a Espanha em Artois, Flandres, Roussillon. Mas o alvo primordial francês era atenuar ao máximo o poderio da família Habsburgo.
 O tratado final de Westfália deu à França resultados importantes. Ele enfraqueceu os Habsburgos austríacos e espanhóis, descentralizando ainda mais o já fragmentário Sacro Império. Cada um dos seus 350 príncipes garantiu a soberania local.  O tratado permitia alianças entre eles e com potências estrangeiras, desde que não fossem feitas em prejuízo do imperador. Desaparecia o sonho de um Estado imperial centralizado. ([16])
A Alemanha ficou ainda mais enfraquecida territorialmente com a perda da Holanda e da Suíça. A França, de seu lado, conseguiu a soberania sobre os bispados de Metz, Toul, Verdun e, no Reno amealhou os territórios de Breisach, Philippsburg, Alsácia, estratégicas para impedir a movimentação da Espanha, suas tropas e comércio pelo Reno, rumo à Holanda espanhola e à Itália. A Suécia, aliada da França, ganhou território na Alemanha do Norte, contolando as embocaduras dos rios Weser, Elba e outros. A Austria, por força do Tratado de Westfália, saiu temporariamente do cenário. Ela aceitou não intervir quando Espanha e França continuaram sua guerra até 1659, com a vitória francêsa.

O tratado de Westfália (1648) é visto comumente como o primeiro acordo  internacional tendo em vista garantir a soberania dos Estados, com as promessas de não intervenção entre eles e separação entre  mundo politico e religioso. Após a Guerra dos Trinta Anos,  cujas razões encontram-se ao mesmo tempo em formas confessionais, econômicas e politicas, aquele pacto deu condições para uma atividade diplomática ou bélica mais sistemática do que a vigente nos tempos em que os Estados  ainda construiam a  sua soberania. ([17])  Pode-se afirmar que ele permitiu ao  Estado moderno a completude dos pontos essenciais à sua existência independente, com os monopólios da violência legítima, da norma juridica, dos impostos.

A luta comum das soberanias contra as Igrejas concorrentes, as seitas e os privilégios da nobreza (fontes de guerras civis e internacionais até então) levou os dirigentes ao acordo mínimo que lhes permitiu administrar a nova realidade instaurada pela Reforma no século XVI. A partir daquele evento, em vez da única Respublica christiana conduzida pelo bispo de Roma, o mundo cristão se esfacelara em múltiplas confissões, todas dispostas a expulsar da cena pública as doutrinas “hereticas”. Estas, por definição, seriam as que delas discordavam no relativo aos dogmas, aos costumes, à disciplina eclesial. A intolerância dos púlpitos seguiu para as pontas das armas. A Guerra dos Trinta Anos é o resultado catastrófico da frágil unidade política interna dos Estados e da intensa divisão, no plano espiritual, da Europa. Na verdade, trata-se de uma sequência de guerras iniciada em 1618. Os governantes Habsburgo da Austria desejavam que os protestantes da Boêmia se convertessem ao catolicismo, o que serviu de estopim para a expansão do belicismo nas relações entre católicos e protestantes, entre príncipes alemães e Império Romano Germânico, entre este e a França, incluindo os Habsburgo da Espanha. Foram conduzidas às batalhas a Suécia, a Dinamarca, a Polônia, a Rússia, a Holanda e a Suíça. ([18])

A França foi liderada no período por estadistas e guerreiros do porte de Richelieu e Mazarino, o Marechal Turenne e o príncipe Conde. Wallenstein conduziu os exércitos do Império e a Liga Católica teve em Tilly um coordenador importante. Os imperadores Ferdinando II e Ferdinando III, o rei Christian IV da Dinamarca, Gustavo Adolfo e  Cristina da Suécia, the Great Elector of Brandenburg, Filipe IV da Espanha. O personagem mais trágico foi Wallestein assassinado em 1634, com a mancha de traidor.

A cadeia bélica deu-se especialmente no campo alemão, onde as misérias de todas as guerras,  denunciadas por Erasmo de Rotterdam, ([19]) chegaram ao máximo com os mercenários que assaltavam as casas, praticavam a rapinagem e deixavam as famílias na pior fome. Rumores cada vez mais insistentes de canibalismo passaram a circular em panfletos, sermões, desenhos, versos. O canibalismo, apanágio até então dos indios americanos, passa a ser denunciado entre europeus que pisavam o solo alemão. “Por volta de 1635, o canibalismo (…) parecia reinar entre cristãos ; ele tornou-se a grade pela qual o presente era percebido. Merian em 1639, introduzia a descrição do canibalismo em Worms com as seguintes palavras : ´quem, ao ler em Münster e outros as narrativas dos canibais africanos e das Indias ocidentais, não sente os cabelos arrepiados e não se espanta ao máximo? Mas que importa! Quando buscamos os canibais não na África ou em outra parte, mas diante da porta de nossa casa, e devemos julgá-los com os nossos próprios olhos, quando consideramos a coisa de mais perto, quem ignora o que se produz desde o começo deste ano de 1637 ao redor da atormentada cidade de Worms ?’”. ([20])

A velha e superada Respublica christiana tinha no Sacro Império Romano Germânico a sua expressão política imperfeita e inconsistente. Como este sistema deixou de ser eficaz nas relações entre os reinos e as religiões, e sua presença não conseguiu atenuar os pressupostos e efeitos dos conflitos armados, a Paz de Westfália é vista como o primeiro passo mundial de uma cultura política autônoma diante das formações religiosas, política que inaugurou o sistema europeu de Estados e posteriormente definou a maioria dos poderes nacionais no Ocidente.  Ela pode ser dita o ato de nascimento do sistema estatal, porque nela foi reconhecido o principio da soberania do Estado.

Os principais países envolvidos no Tratado de Westfalia incluiam a França e a Suécia, que na época eram aliados. No outro polo das negociações encontravam-se a Espanha e o Santo Império Romano com as suas partes envolvidas na Guerra dos Trinta Anos, além da Holanda. Na chamada Paz de Praga (1635), o Império tentara conseguir a unidade em seu interior. Mas o imenso e complexo organismo politico imperial não conseguiu reunir forças para o combate contra a França e a Suécia. Em 1641 deu-se um Tratado prévio, com alguns Estados participantes reunidos em Münster e outros em Osnabrück. Após reuniões infrutíferas nos anos 1643, 1644 e 1645, o Tratado de Paz foi definido em 1648.



Os trabalhos preparatórios envolveram mais de 194 Estados, representados por 179 plenipotenciários e um número imenso de auxiliares que deveriam ser alimentados, apesar da fome que os rodeava. A conferência foi presidida pelo Núncio papal, Fabio Chigi (mais tarde eleito papa, com o nome de Alexandre VI) e pelo Embaixador de Veneza. Tempo enorme gasto em precedências e minúcias, os representantes da França e da Espanha não estiveram em todas as reuniões, porque seria impossível seguir o protocolo rigoroso a que eram submetidos pelas suas respectivas cortes. Correio especial foi providenciado. Só para a cerimônia da assinatura do texto foram gastas três semanas de negociações.

Os maiores beneficiários em Westfalia, a França e a Suécia, conseguiram dissolver o Santo Império Romano, atenuando ao máximo o poderio da família Habsburgo que o dirigia. A potência francêsa manteve o controle das regiões situadas em Metz, Verdun, Toul, Pinerolo, Alsácia.  A Suécia. Conseguiu a Pomerânia, os arcebispados de Bremen e Verden, Wismar e a ilha de Pöl. Foram reconhecidas a Holanda, como independente da Espanha, e a Confederação Suíça. No mesmo ato, foi assegurada a Kleinstaaterei nos territorios alemães, com  pequenos Estados cujos interesses eram  particulares e conflitantes.

No setor religioso, o  princípio formulado na Paz de Augsbourg,  segundo o qual cujus regio, eius religio (a religião do governante é a religião do país) foi confirmado, estabelecendo-se que os governados eram livres para exercitar o culto privado ou público, nos Estados onde esta liberdade  existia em 1624.  Os calvinistas passam a ser tolerados, os governos poderiam permitir a tolerância nos seus territórios.  As disputas confessionais deveriam ser reguladas  em negociações, e não mais nos campos de batalha.

As  primeiras sentenças do Tratado de Westfália rezam que a paz deve ser “cristã, universal, perpétua e que ela seja uma amizade verdadeira e sincera” entre todas as partes. Houve inovação nos itens aprovados, pois o escrito não define a paz nos limites de um território preciso (como era usual na Idade Média, com as Landfrieden), mas determina um contrato amplo entre governantes de povos distintos. ([21]) Sem um organismo internacional jurídico ou religioso (como era o caso anterior da Santa Sé) para garantir o pacto, a paz de Westfália foi ideada como equilíbrio a ser subordinado à amizade e à visinhança confiante de cada um. Trata-se, como em Grotius de uma obrigação civil entre soberanos que se definem, então, ao mesmo tempo como juízes e partes. Os Estados do Império poderia, a partir de então, estabelecer relações diplomáticas com qualquer outro país, desde que não prejudicasse o Imperador. As potências aliadas, França e Suécia, determinaram o equilíbrio no interior do Império, fazendo-o seguir, então, uma política de respeito constitucional.

Se houve inovação nesse aspecto, a qualificação de “cristã” para a Paz de Westfália a colocou na ordem da antiga “paz religiosa” instituída em 1552 no Tratado de Passau e em 1555 na paz de Augsburgo. Assim, cada confissão religiosa teve suas perdas e compensações.


















Diplomatic Europe since the Treaty of Versailles Carlo Sforza; Yale University Press, 1928. 130 pgs.


Of what did those traditions and temptations consist? Of this: that French diplomacy sometimes pays the penalty for having an almost too finished historical and political culture. I have often fancied thatthe pigeonholes of the Quai d'Orsay must each contain, ready to hand, a copy of the Peace of Westphalia, the ideas of which, inspired as they were by the period corresponding to the end of the Thirty Years War ( 1648), still seem to have some part in directing the trend of French political thought. The Westphalian idea was to keep the Germanic race broken up in fragments; what a temptation, then to make use. of an Austro-Hungarian Monarchy which might eventually have absorbed Bavaria and other countries of the Reich, on the strength of its Catholic characteristics. As frequently happens, even the great newspapers gave the impression of sharing these illusions, blind terrors and pleasant lies being the alternate menu of the upper classes' daily intellectual food. A most unique and certainly the most courageous exception was the old Journal des Débats which strongly denounced the vain hopes of playing Austria against Germany and, by doing so, served the interests and the honor of France as well as the Italian national cause. (p. 36-37).

Policy Point-Counterpoint: Is Westphalia History?

by Laura Cruz
Policy Point-Counterpoint: Is Westphalia History?
 Laura Cruz; International Social Science Review, Vol. 80, 2005.
Does a discussion of the Treaty of Westphalia, promulgated in 1648, rightfully fall under the parvenu of a social science journal? The question arises because of the rather uneasy relationship between historians and social scientists. If one were to search the various history departments across the United States, for example, some are organized under colleges of social science and others under humanities. This ambiguity stems from the belief that there are fundamental assumptions in the modern practice of history that are largely incompatible with the tenets of social science but historians are certainly not adverse to borrowing liberally from their theories and practices, and vice versa. (1) Nearly despite themselves, however, historians have much to offer current debates about the future of the modern state system and its alleged origins in the Treaty of Westphalia.
The Treaty of Westphalia is used by social scientists as the foundation of several theoretical schools. Both realist and neo-liberal theories of international relations use the Westphalian state system as one of their most fundamental assumptions (though, of course, with different intentions). (2) Theorists of nationalism also consider the settlement of some significance. By linking religious identity to state identity, they argue, Westphalia was part of a long-term process that led to the ideology of nationalism in the nineteenth century and the primary identification of most ordinary Europeans with their nation-states. (3) The term has been used so often that most introductory political science texts treat its use as axiomatic. (4) The historical origins and context of the term, on the other hand, are generally not deemed of sufficient import to convey.
Historians view Westphalia quite differently. The Treaty of Westphalia itself was not the only agreement concluded at the peace negotiations held in the town of Muenster in 1648. In addition, the Treaty of Muenster, recognizing the independence of the United Provinces of the Netherlands and ceding territory to France, and the Treaty of Osnabruck, granting Sweden its spoils of victory, also came out of what is more properly called the Settlement of Westphalia. Many of the precepts ascribed to Westphalia, such as state sovereignty and enforcement and regulation of international law, come from these two treaties rather than the Treaty of Westphalia itself. (5) The treaty ended the Thirty Years' War, which had physically devastated much of the Holy Roman Empire, and marked the twilight of the power of the Holy Roman Emperor and the rise of powers such as France, the Netherlands, and, briefly, Sweden in the latter part of the seventeenth century. (6) By the eighteenth century, however, these powers were eclipsed by the rise of England and the increasing economic importance of the Atlantic seaboard over continental markets. As an indicator of the balance of power in Europe, the consequences of the treaty were, for the most part, short-lived. The religious outcome of the treaty was based on the same principle of cuius region, cuius religio (whose region, his religion) established at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, though it granted formal recognition of the Calvinist faith which the Augsburg treaty had denied. In short, when placed in its historical context, the Settlement. of Westphalia was neither innovative nor especially enduring. For most historians, it appears as a footnote in an entire century that is largely glossed over as a period of disorganization and crisis sandwiched between two centuries of greater interest and significance. (7)
Political scientists and international relations specialists, however, have referred to the Settlement of Westphalia as "the majestic portal which leads from the old world into the new," in other words, a watershed in Western history. (8) The treaties, they argue, contain the genesis of the modern political order through which the West would come to triumph over the rest of the world and represented a sharp and clearly evident break from medieval practices. Few historians would give credence to this conception. Delineating the divide between the medieval and modern worlds is a contentious issue that revolves around disagreement over the conceptually ambiguous term "modernity," but most scholars concede that modernity is multi-faceted and the break between the two worlds was the result of numerous processes that occurred over a period of decades, if not centuries. (9) The current consensus seems to focus on the more-or-less simultaneous impact of Renaissance humanism, the voyages of discovery, and the Protestant Reformation as indicators of profound change, all of which occurred or were in process well before 1648. (10) This conceptual difference can be attributed to changes in the historical profession. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the first few generations of professional historians tended to give preeminence to political and legal history in their explanations of long-term trends, which would be consistent with using Westphalia as a turning point. Since World War I, however, historians turned first to social and economic history and now cultural beliefs as their primary explanatory lens. The emphasis has turned from precept to practice and from law to understanding. Because Westphalia resulted in few, if any, changes in the lives of ordinary Europeans, historians are no longer inclined to give primacy to any particular treaty, but rather to the long-term forces and antecedents that shaped it. (11) The changes in legal practice represented by Westphalia, for example, are now known to have deep medieval roots. Italians of the late middle ages were well acquainted with the practices of balance of power politics outlined in the treaty. Sovereignty was a concept that could be traced back to the ninth century and the age of Charlemagne. The idea of a universal European empire, the death of which is often attributed to Westphalia, died as a realistic possibility with the retirement of Spain's King Charles V in 1555. As Andrew MacRae suggests, political scientists, with few exceptions, have not reconciled their conceptual tools with evolving historical practice. (12)
The argument presented above is largely semantic, however, as it calls into question whether or not the modern state system can be properly attributed to the particular settlement at Westphalia, not whether or not the origins of the modern state system can be traced back to the early modern period. If calling the system of sovereign states "Westphalian" is simply a "reference point or convention,"" then the issue is not what the system is called but its consequences. Stephen Krasner, who has written extensively on the history of Westphalia, claims that even if one accepts that many of the foundations of modern state systems were laid down at Westphalia (which he denies), those principles were often contravened and the triumph was by no means assured even into the early twentieth century. (14) Competing ideas of sovereignty and violations and exception to the principles of sovereignty abound in history as they do in the present day. (15)
Krasner is a political scientist but his approach is compatible with historical practice. Historians are far more inclined than most social scientists to privilege the particular over the general and tend to be skeptical about advancing universal laws or principles. (16) Similarly, George Santayana's famous precept, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is no longer subscribed to in historical theory. (17) History is not studied to teach us about the present, but rather to better understand the past, an idea that is at odds with basic social science methodology. To argue for continuity between states and state systems of the past and modern arrangements is to belie the unique historical contexts in which those systems operated and to take the outcomes of historical processes as assured even when they were not.
Despite their skepticism and their sensitivity for historical specificity, modern historians will (albeit cautiously) recognize long-term trends. Westphalia was, in many respects, a culmination of prior processes, but it did represent an aggrandizement of the scope of political actors and systems. By including a multiplicity of states in its agreements, outlining the responsibility of states vis-a-vis each other, and affirming the state as the locus of nascent forms of collective identity (in this case, religious), Westphalia was innovative and prescient. As Jason Farr argues, Westphalia represented the recognition of a system that applied to all European states who could only afford to ignore it at their peril. Prescient should not, however, be confused with presentist. In eighteenth and nineteenth century diplomatic negotiations, Westphalia is not referenced as a benchmark in practice. Only with the promulgation of the charter for the League of Nations was Westphalia trumpeted as a shining historical model, when its inclusive example served to counteract the elitist tendencies exhibited by the Congress of Vienna and the subsequent Concert of Europe. (18) Liberals touted the "Westphalian" ideology of toleration and saw Westphalia as the forerunner of the type of beliefs that were enshrined in documents such as Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. (19) Both are examples of 'Whig history' which looks at modern history on a grand scale as the gradual unfolding of progress, education, and freedom. (20) Progress and freedom, however, are words whose meanings change in historical context. (21) The conception of religious and other freedoms as inherently good would have been alien to the peacemakers at Westphalia. (22) Understood in terms of the mindset of the day, the religious settlement of 1648 was essentially practical and served as a recognition of political and military limitations, not moral commitments.
In the end, however, what is really at stake if the historical reality of the state system outlined at Westphalia does not exactly match up to the conceptual baggage often consigned to it by modern theorists? Westphalia seems to be evoked most often when the state system it purports to represent is at its most triumphant, as with the founding of the United Nations, or at its most threatened, as many believe that it is today. Multinational corporations and globalism in general appear to be on the brink of superceding the state as the basis of international affairs and social scientists are diligently endeavoring to make sense of the transition. As popular titles such as Jihad vs. McWorld and The Lexus and the Olive Tree suggest, the tendency is to portray this transition as strictly dichotomous, i.e., there can be a Westphalian state system based on the primacy of the nation-state or there can be a global system, but the two can not co-exist. (23) As this essay has argued, modern historians believe that history is much messier and far more complex than general theories and concepts are capable of allowing. The historical record is testament to the endurance of the state and its chameleon-like ability to adapt to changing circumstances. The state and the competitive state system, whether born at Westphalia or not, have proven to be remarkably resilient despite numerous crises and potential threats over the past three hundred plus years. (24) Modern national identity (now variously characterized as "ambivalent," "Janus-faced," or personal), too, has expanded to fit the diverse culture of the twenty-first century. (25) The more we understand and appreciate the intricate historical processes that led to their development, the better we can understand their potential endurance and adaptability.
ENDNOTES
(1) For fundamental assumptions of modern historical practice, see Alun Munslow, The New History (Harlow: Pearson-Longman, 2004). For the borrowing of theories from social science, see Peter Burke, History and Social Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). There are some who dare to cross the divide between history and social science, often rather inconveniently called historical sociologists. Two prominent practitioners are Charles Tilly and John Hall.
(2) Stephen D. Krasner, "Compromising Westphalia," International Security 20:3 (Winter 1995-96):121.
(3) For an overview, see Laura Cruz, The Nation in History: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Pearson-Longman, forthcoming 2006). For the ties between confessionalization (religious identification) and national identity, see R. Po-Chia Hsai, Social Discipline and the Reformation, 1550-1750 (New York: Routledge, 1992). For a theory of nationalism that takes religious politics as the first stage, see Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, v. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
(4) See, for example, Walter A. McDougall, "Religion in Diplomatic History," Orbis 6:3 (Spring 1998):3.
(5) Leo Gross, "The Peace of Westphalia, 1648-1948," American Journal of International Law 42:1 (January 1948):28.
(6) See Richard Dunn, The Age of Religious Wars 1559-1715, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979). See also, Geoffrey Parker, The Thirty Years' War, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1997). (7) For literature on the age of crisis, see Christopher Hill, Geoffrey Parker, and Lesley M. Smith, eds., The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1997); Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
(8) Gross, "The Peace of Westphalia, 1648-1948," 28.
(9) David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003
(10) See, for example, Eugene E Rice and Anthony Grafton, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994).
(11) Stephen D. Krasner, "Westphalia and All That," in Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, eds. Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 235-64.
(12) For a good attempt at reconciliation, see Daniel Philpott, "The Religious Roots of Modern International Relations," World Politics 52:2 (January 2000):206-45.
(13) Krasner, "Compromising Westphalia," 115.
(14) Ibid., 155-51; Krasner, "Westphalia and All That," 235-64; Stephen D. Krasner, "Sovereignty and Intervention," in Beyond Westphalia? State Sovereignty and International Intervention, eds. Gene M. Lyons and Michael Mastanduno (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 228-49; Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1999). Andreas Osiander also disputes the importance of Westphalia in "Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth," International Organization 55 (Spring 2001):251-88.
(15) David Lake, "The New Sovereignty in International Relations," International Studies Review 5 (Fall 2003):303-23. Lake surveys recent writings and re-conceptualizations of the meanings of sovereignty.
(16) See Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985).
(17) George Santayana, Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense (New York: Scribner's, 1903), 284.
(18) Gross, "The Peace of Westphalia, 1648-1948," 20.
(19) Ibid., 22.
(20) Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1973).
(21) R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). The use of language and ideas and context is the hallmark of the Cambridge School of intellectual history, including the works of historians Quentin Skinner and J.C.A. Pocock.
(22) Modern historical practice recognizes the futility of true objectivity and instead emphasizes the role of the historian in the creation of the historical narrative, as suggested here. For a discussion of this change, see Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). For an overview of the objectivity debate in American academics, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). (23) For confirmation of this view, see Lyons and Mastanduno, eds., Beyond Westphalia. For some controversial qualification, see Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998). For a defense of globalization, see Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W Norton & Company, 2003).
(24) David McCrone, The Sociology of Nationalism: Tomorrow's Ancestors (New York: Routledge, 1998), 169. See also Charles W. Kegley and Gregory A. Raymond, Exorcising the Ghost of Westphalia: Building World Order in the New Millenium (Upper Saddle River, N J: Prentice Hall, 2001).
(25) Homi Bhabha, "Narrating the Nation, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 1; Tom Narin, "The Modern Janus," New Left Review 94 (November-December 1994):3. See also Tom Narin, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London: Verso Press, 1997).
LAURA CRUZ is an Assistant Professor of History at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC. ANDREW MacRAE is a graduate student in political science at Western Carolina University. JASON FARR is a graduate student in history at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina

Counterpoint: The Westphalia Overstatement.

by Andrew MacRae
Counterpoint: The Westphalia Overstatement
 Andrew Macrae; International Social Science Review, Vol. 80, 2005

Westphalia is no more. This is not the result of any one particular cause, but an acknowledgement that the conceptualization of 'the Westphalian state system' is a pedagogical oversimplification that is based on flawed assumptions. By referring to modern politics as "Westphalian," international relations specialists employ a term that no longer provides an accurate view of history and is incompatible with the two primary ideologies of international relations, namely, realism and international liberalism. The great Wesphalian overstatement no longer serves as the progenitor of our descriptive map of the Western world, if it ever did.
Westphalia has been seen as epochal for many scholastic disciplines, but none so much as international relations. Leo Gross, for example, refers to this treaty as the first "World Charter," a precursor to the United Nations and other European attempts to establish a world order of sovereign states. (1) This inaccurate perception of history has codified many mistaken assumptions within the lexicon of international relations, and is responsible for keeping the discipline from understanding globalization and other postmodern twenty-first century trends.
Among the chief claims Westphalians make is that the peace of 1648 created the first sovereign states. These states are supposed to have exercised "untrammeled sovereignty over certain territories ... subordinat[e] to no earthly authority." (2) Historically and presently, this is Enlightenment fiction at best; at worst, it highlights a substantial lack of historical knowledge weakening the foundations and relevance of the discipline of international relations.
The rise of the sovereign state was over three centuries old by the time of Westphalia. Beginning in Italy after the decline in temporal power of the Papacy, "a gap in the medieval system of hierarchy" created a vacuum, which was "filled by the political inventiveness of Italians." (3) Many components of these "omnicompetent, amoral, sovereign states" and the environment of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy refute the primacy Westphalia, however other pre-Westphalian examples of sovereignty exist as well. (4) The most comprehensive example of a sovereignty existing prior to Westphalia is England which achieved "political unity by the tenth century, emphasis of central institutions by fourteenth century, and national identity beginning in the fifteenth century." (5) English political unity suffered a setback with the War of the Roses (1455-1487), but by the sixteenth century Henry VIII severed his allegiance to Rome, thereby removing the largest external threat to domestic sovereignty. (6) During this time, England became the first country to embrace nationalism in the sense of identifying itself as a "unique, sovereign people." (7) Elements of this new form of identity were "individualistic and civic minded" in that both "commoners and the elite now saw themselves as part of the same social contract." (8) After this evolution, England relied on the collective sovereignties of its citizens. This sovereignty came into existence prior to Westphalia as well as before other modern Europeans discovered sovereignty, nationality, liberal democracy, or even a new modus operandi of economics, capitalism. (9)
The Tudors used religious identity, in this case Anglican, to sculpt national identity. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Latin Christendom was locked in a struggle between two competing ideological positions, Protestant and Catholic, which permeated Christian Europe. The Westphalian outcome was not new. The religious settlement produced a varied version of cuius region, cuius religio (whose region, his religion) established at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. While the treaties concluded at Westphalia provided a measure of religious freedom to the rulers of the German principalities, restrictions were made and pluralism was denied, thus preventing these rulers from possessing sovereignty even within their own territory. And legal scholars maintain that both Augsburg and Westphalia were based on older, Augustinian notions of Christian peace, which references the authority of the wider Christian community. (10) Not only did Westphalia fail to provide history with the first sovereign nation-states, it also failed to provide history with states at all. Within the treaties concluded at Westphalia, sovereign states are not found. Instead, German principalities were required to swear an oath of loyalty to and grant the Holy Roman Emperor certain legal jurisdictions. The provisions of the treaties call for the removal of trade restrictions and the easing of transportation obstacles such as tolls. In exchange, the Holy Roman Empire was forced to recognize the de facto reality of its waning power. German principalities were given de jure authority to conduct their own foreign policies, a right the more powerful principalities had already been exercising. (11) Nowhere in the treaty is the creation of any sovereign state mentioned. (12)
Even if the treaties had created a state, then that state would forever have devised its own sovereignty from international law, and hence would not be sovereign. International law, as opposed to the canonical law of the medieval world, emerged in the seventeenth century, the product of contributions by both Hugo Grotius on commercial and maritime laws and Franciscus de Victoria on laws on international war, not from Westphalia. (13) History is littered with peace treaties akin to Westphalia, including the Peace of Lodi (1454) and the Peace of Augsburg (1555), however, the establishment of international norms of commerce and war were most significant. Most European states began and continued to be empires as well as states throughout their existence. The law of the seas provided de jure protection for explorers fueling Europe's insatiable quest for new lands and trade routes. While placing limitations on states after great wars has been a reoccurring theme especially in modern times, this new international law required the state for ratification, thus strengthening and legitimizing the state as an international body. This came with a loss of sovereignty.
The erosion of the notion of sovereignty arising out of Westphalia also leads one to question the state system which it allegedly created. The rise in international law with the state as its prime signatory contributes to the second assumption of the realist, namely, that the "nation-state is the primary actor of the international system." (14) However, if the nation-state becomes primary in the international system through the means of international law, then it again follows that the nation-state owes its very existence in the international system from that same international law. Thus states, like corporations and international organizations, are merely another form of organizational entity recognized by international standards.
Examples of the ascendancy of international law and custom over state sovereignty are replete throughout the history of the Western world, from witch trials to the Nuremburg trials. (15) While the mere shadows of Gross's sovereign states may have existed prior to World War II, its aftermath clearly shows that in this postmodern world states are bound by the judgments of the powerful, and that international law established and enforced by the powerful is ever binding beyond the myth of seventeenth century state sovereignty..

Without a Westphalian leg to stand on, the imagined absolute sovereigns of Leo Gross have no genesis other than as a Platonic conceptualization. The Westphalian state is supposed to have two separate spheres of activity. In its domestic sphere, the state is sovereign over its own territory. In the international sphere, its relations with other states would be more tenuous, though conducted on the basis of assumed equality among them. This bifurcated assumption of Westphalia, i.e., that there exists a "separation between domestic and international spheres of political life," is a fundamental tenet of realism. (16) Neo-liberal theorists, on the other hand, believe in the existence of one sphere, with multiple actors and that the 'foreign' policy of a state can said to be a continuation of 'domestic' actors preferences. (17) Instead of dogmatically accepting a two-sphere state centric model, the theory of international liberalism approaches the subject of states, institutions, and non-governmental actors in a contextual manner which allows for the existence of non-state actors. (18) Because the two-sphere model of domestic and foreign policy requires an imaginary Westphalia creation that did not occur in 1648, the accompanying realist notion ought to be jettisoned as well.
Intertwined with the notion of state sovereignty and preeminence in the international system is a final assertion of the significance of Westphalia that it created a balance of power among states, placing them on equal footing. This new system was in part due to "a law operating between rather than above states, and a power operating between rather than above states." (19) This concept seems folly. Without the misconception of the territorially sovereign state, and with the recognition that the significance of the state in the international system has as much to do with the new international law created by both Grotius and Victoria as it did Westphalia, this notion of a balance of power is untenable.
Beyond the fragile nature of the Westphalian balance of power is another fault with its primacy. The Italian city-states operated under this principle for quite some time. As these city-states developed their sovereignty, the Italian peninsula became an increasingly competitive and dangerous political coliseum. To compensate for this, politicians employed and developed "jungle law ... a new style of diplomacy." (20) Thus "by about 1400 ... Italy was beginning to become such a system of mutually balanced parts in unstable equilibrium as all Europe was to be three hundred years later." (21)
The Thirty Years' War had clear winners and losers. The losers, the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy, were forced to cede land and authority to France, Sweden, and German principalities. While this cessation by the monopolistic power of the Catholic Church in Latin Christendom encouraged continental peace; that peace was anything but lasting. New powers such as England, the Netherlands, and Prussia were on the rise, while the Holy Roman Empire staggered on until its death in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna. Sweden and the Papacy also suffered a decline in power, while France maintained significant continental power. Far from a state system based on equally significant members, Westphalia is an example of power politics. The former hegemonic powers no longer possessed the strength to force all of Christendom to comply with their monopoly of temporal and spiritual power. These various political entities rebelled, and forced their former master to capitulate, ceding power to the local governing bodies. This was not the magnanimous creation of a modern state system, but the rise and fall of the powerful. This thematic drama is precisely what realism is committed to studying. Beyond the first two mistaken assumptions of realism is the belief that "international relations is the struggle for power and peace." (22) Though blindly committed to the Westphalian order, realism merits its significance by focusing on such a vital and unique aspect of international relations. Great power politics and the study thereof, however, is not all that exists in international relations. Even at Westphalia, non-state-actors were present and/or exercised great influence over the course of events. As the world embarks down the path of globalization, many new political actors have gained legitimacy and visibility. The principles of power and peace do not, however, mandate all of their attention. (23)
It thus seems that the two paradigms of the international relations discipline do not necessarily replace each other, but instead are two sides of the same coin. Realism will benefit from a reassessment of history, especially Westphalian, and a reexamination of its seemingly dogmatic commitments which mire it unnecessarily to an outdated philosophical position. International liberalism, however, while maintaining an approach more consistent with the contextual nature of history and present, does not provide an effective approach to studying the thematic nature of power in shaping human interaction. Thus beyond the collective preferences of actors within political bodies deciding that war is the correct action to achieve those preferences, the sum of the Thirty Years' War and its corresponding Peace at Westphalia equals something greater than its mere parts.
The conceptual importance of the Peace of Westphalia must be called into question. Historically, the evidence does not suggest that Westphalia was "the majestic portal which leads from the old into the new world." (24) Conceptually, the erosion of the historical significance of Westphalia has major implications on current international relations theory as scholars attempt to bring the paradigms of their discipline into the postmodern and globalized world. For these reasons, Westphalia contradicts its own usefulness; instead of serving as the paragon of analytic tools, it is the dead weight anchoring international relations to the gross failure of the Enlightenment.
ENDNOTES
(1) Leo Gross, "The Paece of Westphalia, 1648-1948," American Journal of International Law 42:1 (January 1948):1.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Garret Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Oxford: Alden Press, 1955), 56.
(4) Ibid., 57. For further discussion of medieval origins of the doctrine of the sovereignty, see Patrick I. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 2001).
(5) Stephen D. Krasner, "Westphalia and All That," in Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, eds. Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 254.
(6) Ibid.
(7) Leah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 8. (8) Leah Greenfeld, "Nationalism in Western and Eastern Europe Compared," in Can Europe Work? Germany and the Reconstruction of Postcommunist Societies, eds. Stephen E. Hanson and Wilfried Spohn (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 18.
(9) Ibid., 25.
(10) Laurens Winkel, "The Peace Treaties of Westphalia as an Instance in the Reception of Roman Law," in Peace Treaties and International Law in European History: From the Late Middle Ages to World War I, ed. Randall Lester (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 222-40.
(11) Krasner, "Westphalia and All That," 246.
(12) Randall Lester, "Conclusion," in Peace Treaties and International Law in European History, ed. Lester, 399-411.
(13) Gross, "The Peace of Westphalia, 1648-1948," 1-32.
(14) Richard W Mansbach and John Vasquez, In Search of Theory: A New Paradigm for Global Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 5.
(15) Stephen D. Krasner, "Compromising Westphalia," International Security 20:3 (Winter 1995-96): 121.
(16) Mansbach and Vasquez, In Search of Theory, 5.
(17) Andrew Moravcsik, "Liberal International Relations Theory: A Scientific Assessment," in Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field, eds. Colin Elmana and Miriam Fendius Elman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 159-204.
(18) Ibid., 165.
(19) Gross, "The Peace of Westphalia, 1648-1948," 29.
(20) Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, 58-59.
(21) Ibid., 60. See also Lauro Martinez, Power and Imagination: City States in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
(22) Mansbach and Vasquez, In Search of Theory, 5.
(23) Kimon Valaskakis, "From Westphalia to Seattle: Long-Term Trends in Global Government." Paper presented at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Forum on 21st Century Governance, March 2000, Hanover, Germany.
(24) Gross, "The Peace of Westphalia, 1648-1948," 28.
Affluence and Influence.


by Peter van Ham , Przemyslaw Grudzinski

Affluence and Influence
 Przemyslaw Grudzinski, Peter Van Ham; The National Interest, Winter 1999.
The Conceptual Basis of Europe's New Politics

THE EUROPEAN Union may, with profit, be regarded as a qualitatively new type of security organization, one that seeks to create cooperation and harmony through a high level of economic and political interdependence. Whereas NATO remains at heart a military organization, the EU defines its security concerns in terms of an ever widening "sphere of affluence", rather than a classical "sphere of influence." This distinction is more than just a play on words: it underscores the importance of economics and trade as the current basis for stability and democratic development. Although EU member states pursue what they still imagine to be their "national interests", already those interests are essentially reduced to rather modest policy preferences, constrained within a tightly bounded multilateral framework. A myriad of treaty commitments now limits the room for maneuver of European states and locks them into dense networks of activities created by institutional and political decisions. It is these sunken costs of E uropean integration that preclude "sovereign" member states from tearing up the Union's founding treaties, packing their bags, and returning to a policy of national autarky.

The EU has transformed once proud and sovereign nation-states beyond recognition, changing their role and place both in Europe itself and in the world at large. A wide range of traditionally national prerogatives is now either pooled collectively or shifted to the supranational (or federal) level. Whereas the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia inaugurated a European system of autonomous states, the 1991 Maastricht Treaty has de facto ended any hopes of saving that system.

Despite this, most analysts and policymakers continue to think about the EU, not as a radically novel entity, but as one that merely mirrors the qualities and drawbacks of the traditional nation-state. The simple fact that we continue to classify certain actors as something-national (subnational, supranational, transnational) indicates that our thinking remains based on and bound by the hegemony of the "nation-state that has characterized recent centuries. But just as employing hammer and nail to fix one's personal computer would be counterproductive, so bringing "modern" concepts to bear on postmodern European politics will prove similarly futile.

Very early in the new millennium, a new Europe will come fully into being. It will have three defining elements, already clearly visible. The first and most essential of these involves a changed attitude toward national sovereignty and territoriality. The second is a novel understanding of security, which is rapidly shifting from the traditional military concept to a much broader one. The third innovation concerns the way the Western part of the continent (which up to now has constituted the "new Europe") is adopting an open, decentered approach toward enlarging its sphere of affluence into Central and Eastern Europe. Taken together, these three changes are destined to transform not only Europe itself but the international system as a whole. The consequences, not least for America's involvement in Europe and NATO, will be momentous.

Malleable Sovereignty

THE WESTPHALTAN statecentric framework that is now being undermined by globalization and European integration relies on a territorial conception of politics. But the commandment of Romans 13:1--"let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God"--has been corrupted since Nietzsche declared God dead. Intellectual inertia in coming to terms with this systemic change has produced a somewhat schizophrenic state of affairs, one in which Europeans continue to worship the nation-state as the optimal cultural and democratic area at a time when most West European states are in the process of selling the remains of their national sovereignty to the highest bidder. European nation-states cling desperately to as much political authority, democratic legitimacy and problem-solving capacity as they possibly can, while they also seem prepared (and are occasionally coerced) to relinquish their sovereignty as the price for remaining geopolitically relevant. The EU is seen as the only available raft, not so much to ride the waves of globalization as to break up these waves into more manageable and human proportions. The hope is that the EU, by merging the power and influence of individual member states, can restore the primacy of politics over global commerce. Monetary union and the euro are considered the paramount instruments to this end. Europeanization is thus perceived essentially as a protective strategy, one devised to guard Europe against the onslaught of forces that threaten its uniqueness, its identity and the independence of its constituent states--and which involves surrendering some of that identity and independence precisely in order to prevent their total destruction.

Philip Cerny's concept of the "competition state" best captures the EU's novel role in European politics. [1] Cerny argues that the state constitutes the main agency of the process of globalization, driven by its concern both to fit into that process and at the same time to remain relevant to "its" people. More precisely, the central challenge to the EU member states is to maintain at least rudimentary domestic welfare systems while promoting the essential structural reforms necessary to improve their international competitiveness. It is not easy to maintain a balance between these two ends. In the not-so-long run, maintaining the first depends on success in achieving the second, for an increasingly expensive welfare state requires maintaining a thriving, competitive economy.

But there is a dilemma: for as Europe's competition states are inevitably driven to give the latter goal priority, they are undermining the traditional national bonds of communal solidarity (Gemeinschaft) and identity that have given the modern nation-state its deeper legitimacy, its institutionalized power and social embeddedness. The European competition state now values efficiency over equity, competitiveness over solidarity; increasingly its language is the universal discourse of commerce, which proceeds in terms of consumers, not citizens. Europe's states are turning consumption and purchasing power into the defining essence of what was until recently a polity and a community, thereby annihilating the very ideas of communality and a "public" that are central to societal relationships. Globalization does not merely scratch the surface of a democratic society, it corrodes the skeletal frame of political life.

These transformations do not call for an end to politics, but they do turn many traditional state-based political institutions into semi-obedient servants, catering to the tastes of the economic and financial performers of late-capitalism. Cerny therefore argues that the competition state has to do both more and less: it has to "reinvent government" by fostering (or even imposing) adaptation to global competitive forces; and in return it has to provide at least temporary protection and legitimacy for its citizens. It has become apparent that globalization requires a tighter monetary policy alongside a looser fiscal policy through tax cuts. lit also demands that competition states encourage mergers and industrial restructuring; promote research and development; encourage private investment and develop new forms of infrastructure; pursue a more active labor market policy; and in general deregulate--while simultaneously imposing new regulatory structures designed to facilitate global market forces.

These shifts in responsibilities of the nation-state are mirrored by similar shifts in the EU itself. It has now acquired a character similar to that of the many competition states of which it is comprised, becoming in effect a supra-competition state. The crisis faced by its constituent nation-states has required the EU to become a kind of international economic and political ninja, entering into combat on behalf of its member states against emerging trading blocs around the globe and sheltering them from global turbulence. Within the World Trade Organization, for example, the EU negotiates on behalf of all member states, trying to get the best deals for Europe as a whole. Similarly, the euro has proved to be Europe's strategic answer to the process of economic and technological globalization, based on the understanding that only a consolidated Europe will be strong enough to weather the many global economic and financial viruses that have for so long infected West European economies. The crumbling of national sovereignty is not always clear and obvious. European law more often than not crossdresses as national law, disguising its supranational origins and often deceiving citizens by presenting itself as homemade. Thus, for example, while in 1998 more than 60 percent of German legislation had its origin in Brussels as so-called "directives", it had to be transposed into national law, with a certain flexibility allowed for local circumstances but with a specific deadline imposed. Clearly, these shifting forms of sovereignty pose new challenges to the notion of democracy. Maintaining individual communication with and any degree of control over government was difficult enough in the nation-state. How can democratic citizens now enter into any sort of relationship with "the EU" to discuss the merits of its policies? And how can they hope to "throw the rascals out" when they are seriously displeased? These are simple questions that, from a democratic perspective, have a rather embarrassing answer: it is just not possible.

Then, too, the notion of "territory" seems to have lost its almost fetishistic fascination within West European countries. In this part of the world, after two disastrous wars and the loss of several empires, the impulse for territorial conquest has waned, as knowledge and information replace material resources as the main sources of wealth. This has led Richard Rosecrance to suggest that we are now entering a world of the "virtual state", one that has deliberately limited its territorially-based production capability and has almost "emancipated" itself from the land. [2] Since transnational firms locate their production facilities wherever it is most profitable, the competition state has to negotiate with foreign and domestic firms and labor organizations to entice them into its economic space. In this new era of "virtual states", territory and size no longer determine economic potential and "power." Within contemporary Western Europe, sovereignty and territoriality have lost much of their historical charm and political relevance.

Pop Security and Lite Powers

A QUESTION ARISES: Can such a Europe ever live up to its self-proclaimed aim of developing a Common Foreign and Security Policy, let alone a Common Defense Policy? This seems rather unlikely, and a strong argument can be made that contemporary Europe is incompatible with Great Power politics. Barry Buzan, for one, has argued that the European citizens of today do not put much trust in their governments and are no longer prepared to die for their countries. Individualism and a consumer ethic have transformed West European citizens into lethargic free-riders, looking mostly in vain to an illusory "international community" (a.k.a. the United States of America) to put out the many political and military bush fires that continue to flare up around the world. [3]

Post-Cold War conflicts are often murky affairs that lack an ideologically sanctioned division between the forces of good and evil. At the same time, emphasis on ethical and moral issues of a humanitarian kind, as well as the obligation to comply with international law, complicate efforts to conduct a resolute foreign and security policy. As well, the interconnectedness of the world makes it difficult for individual states and societies to sustain myths of national superiority and uniqueness. It has therefore become more difficult to engage cosmopolitan, postmodem society in military conflicts. In a relativistic world in which a public consensus rarely exists regarding the West's right and responsibility to impose its will on other peoples, domestic concerns are increasingly taking preference over international issues.

Although West European states still very much look like classical modern states, they are qualitatively different, most obviously because they emphasize wealth and welfare rather than warfare. In this new environment, traditional concerns like borders, national identity and state sovereignty are subordinated to the pursuit of prosperity, democratic governance and individual well-being. It is the EU, rather than other international organizations like NATO or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, that is now shaping people's existence and making a difference, affecting the prosaic concerns of European citizens (whether they like it or not) by dealing with everything from food labeling to pension entitlements to maternity leave regulations. In the field of heroic politics, on the other hand, and especially in its efforts to develop a more cohesive European foreign and security policy, the EU has so far hardly been able to make a fist and is unlikely to do so in the future.

Instead, Europe closely follows the strategy of building a democratic peace based on open markets and liberal democracy, the two major requisites laid down for Central European countries to join the EU. In its most profane form, Europe therefore follows the Big Mac thesis of international politics, which claims--wrongly, as the Kosovo conflict proved--that "no two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other." This understanding--or misunderstanding--of global affairs is characteristic of a world in which "politics", as a deliberate, willful endeavor to shape events, hardly matters. It is a view that has surrendered a voluntaristic approach toward politics to a doctrine based on the positive, if unwilled, effects of free trade through globalization and new technologies. WHEREAS Western Europe now concentrates most of its political energy on institution-building and monetary integration, other parts of the continent are witnessing the devolution of state authority to units of marginal power and size, often connected with atavistic ethnic strife and conflict. With the end of the East-West divide, Central European countries have gone through a phase of nationalist celebration, rediscovering their original identity after decades of communist domination.

Public opinion in these new--and in some instances still rather delicate--states clings to the old, attractive abstractions of national sovereignty and independence. At the same time, Central European political elites have committed themselves to joining Europe's key institutions (NATO, EU and WEU), realizing all too well that this implies compromise and the sharing of their recently reclaimed and highly valued national sovereignty. The institutionalized schizophrenia that results--a condition that combines the rhetoric of newly salvaged independence with acceptance of the harsh conditions of globalization--is confusing to the general Central European public, even if the two concepts are in themselves perfectly intelligible. The dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian war have served as grim reminders that claims to sovereignty and self-determination are still very much alive on the continent, even as most of its nation-states are gradually surrendering their autonomy both upward and downward.

All this serves to demonstrate that the frequently used metaphor of a "developing European security architecture" is misleading. The image conveys a sense both of progression and of a logical structure that is far-removed from reality. At best Europe's security "architecture", with its overlapping memberships and responsibilities, seems to follow the organic art nouveau style of a Gaudi rather than the straight and functional lines of a Corbusier. Anyone looking for a "grand design" for European security will be disappointed: there just isn't such a thing.

A more modest and appropriate metaphor, as suggested by the British historian Sir Michael Howard, might be that of a garden. Howard maintains that the peoples of Europe and their institutions should be regarded as distinct and living organisms, rooted in the peculiar soil of their regions, their communities and their cultures.... And as with all gardens, the work of cultivation is never ending. [4]

Thinking along these lines has the considerable advantage that it enables European security to be seen as an ongoing process of cultivation, and not (as with architecture) as something that can be given a final shape, cut in stone, and never altered. But then again, it might be doubted that many politicians will have the patience required for tending even the simplest of gardens.

No Center, No Periphery

THE well-intentioned desire to see military force eliminated as a means of settling international disputes has proved to be realistic only for a part of Europe, not for the continent as a whole. The rhetoric of Europe as a "zone of peace", in which democratic countries would thrive and prosper, has been useful in defining a political objective. But this rhetoric flourished at a time of bloody conflict in the former Yugoslavia, military clashes in Moldova, and civil wars in Georgia and Chechnya. In all those instances, the "international community" declined to adopt policies and take action to end the conflicts, only reluctantly intervening in the case of Yugoslavia after a long delay.

The security constellation in much of Central Europe and the former Soviet Union is markedly different from that in Western Europe. This does not mean that we have to think in terms of two disconnected worlds of security; if the post-Cold War era has taught us anything, it is that the fates of the different parts of Europe are intertwined. What is true is that Europe still has many different "security neighborhoods." As is the case in most cities of the world, in which conspicuously rich and safe neighborhoods can coexist with dreadfully poor and dangerous ones, soit is with Europe. Most strategic analysts--from both East and West--continue to think in terms of "borders", "boundaries" and "dividing lines" as central elements of European security. And indeed, when thinking about security and its prospects one should recognize that the diversity of Europe's nation-states places natural limits to the logic of enlargement and the process of continent-wide institutionalization. Thus, to take the most striking and important example, while Russia may be a European state according to geography and some definitions, in most respects it is not a full-fledged part of the continent's frameworks of cooperation, not an integral part of "Europe."

There is no reason, however, to exaggerate this diversity. While national borders still remain meaningful, they are fading in significance, becoming more like administrative boundaries than classic fire walls. Certainly, from now on it will be well-nigh impossible to re-create one decisive dividing line between two competing blocs, as happened during the Cold War. Instead, and as we have already begun to witness, what will characterize the future will be a variety of different borders, boundaries and perimeters, most of them ephemeral and porous.

It makes sense, then, to look at the Europe of today and of tomorrow as a continent full of delicate-looking walls, elegant hedges and fences of varying heights. These run along economic, political, cultural, religious and many other lines. They exist, and will continue to exist, to protect Europe's local patriae, its local languages, its prejudices and mores, and its distinctiveness. They serve to make Europeans feel gemutlich and safe. They stand within and between the rich and the poor regions of Europe. This idea of a multitude of small differences and fences allows Europeans to minimize the significance of any cultural "velvet curtain" that might exist between East and West, to realize that being on the other side of any boundary need not result in total exclusion or confrontation.

Indeed, the political goal should be not only to dismantle impenetrable walls, but to maintain the many elegant fences that make Europe manageable. The EU'S emphasis on "flexibility", on making its institutions more effective in an effort to prepare for enlargement, illustrates an awareness of this need. Just as it is an error to think in terms of one dividing line running across Europe, or to insist on redefining Europe's identity in one exclusive way, so it is also wrong to insist that every aspect of the process of European institutionalization should be all-inclusive, necessarily embracing all applicant countries regardless of their readiness and willingness to become fully involved. On the contrary, Europe's institutions will function best when they reflect the continent's diversity, and an awareness that not all European countries need to belong to the same set of cooperative arrangements and alliances. If things are handled properly, what will emerge over the coming decades is a Europe not of concentric circles, in which some countries are at the center and some at the periphery, but a security framework that consists of a pattern of overlapping Olympic circles, in which all countries are involved in one way or another. Like the five circles of the Olympic flag, there will be no single center but three or four--and no single periphery either. Most countries will find themselves on the margins of some activity or some arrangement, either from choice or necessity, and near the center of others. An awareness of the wisdom of such an arrangement was evident in the remarks of NATO's then Secretary-General Javier Solana in February 1998:

I would like to erase from our consciousness the words 'dividing lines.' These are words from the Cold War. They meant that some countries were 'in' and some were 'out.' Today, none are in or out--some are only partly in and partly out. [5]

For many (if not all) European countries, NATO and the EU will remain the core of Europe's developing security framework, but the flexible and ad hoc arrangements that will become increasingly more prevalent will gradually blur the practical distinctions between full membership and other qualified relationships. The borders between countries in the new Europe will not be static and permanent, but will be subject to modification to reflect changing circumstances. When Central European countries adopt and truly internalize Europe's culture of cooperation and reach a certain level of economic and political development, the institutional boundaries of Europe will alter, and this will be a continuing process. So long as Europe's key security institutions overlap with a genuine European identity, this model for a future Europe will be one of the best guarantees of its stability and prosperity. But it will be a basic and prosaic Europe, one that lacks der Wille zur Macht and that will therefore continue to lean on the United States for heroic support, both in Europe itself and further afield.

Peter van Ham is professor of political science at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies (Garmisch-Partenkirchen).

Przernyslaw Grudzinski is deputy foreign minister of Poland. The authors published jointly A Critical Approach to European Security (Pinter Publishers, 1999). The opinions expressed are those of the authors.

(1.) Cerny, "Paradoxes of the Competition State: The Dynamics of Political Globalization", Government and Opposition (Spring 1997).

(2.) Rosecrance, "The Obsolescence of Territory", New Perspectives Quarterly (Winter 1995); and "The Rise of the Virtual State", Foreign Affairs (July/August 1996).

(3.) Buzan, "The Rise of 'Lite' Powers: A Strategy for the Postmodern State", World Policy Journal (Fall 1996).

(4.) Howard, "Land of War, Land of Peace", The Wilson Quarterly (Winter 1997), p. 36.

(5.) Quoted in Washington Times, February 10, 1998.

Leading through law.

Leading through Law
Magazine article by Anne-Marie Slaughter; The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 27, Autumn 2003.
by Anne-Marie Slaughter


Does the United States need international law? At times in recent years, it has acted as if it does not. Yet international law provides the foundation not only for momentous undertakings, such as the efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons and to protect the ozone layer, but also for more routine endeavors, such as defining the boundaries of territorial seas and guaranteeing the right of diplomats to move freely. The United States needs international law acutely now because it offers a way to preserve our power and pursue our most important interests while reassuring our friends and allies that they have no reason to fear us or to form alliances as a counterweight to our overwhelming might. And we will need the law more than ever in the future, to regulate the behavior not only of states but of the individuals within them.

International law is not some kind of abstract end in itself. It's a complex of treaties and customary practices that govern, for example, the use of force, the protection of human rights, global public health, and the regulation of the oceans, space, and all other global commons. Each of its specialized regimes is based in the consent of states to a specific set of rules that allow them to reap gains from cooperation and thereby serve their collective interests. Overall, the rule of law in the global arena serves America's interests and reflects its most fundamental values. But in many specific areas, existing rules are too weak, too old, or too limited to address current threats and challenges. The United States must recommit itself to pursuing its interests in concert with other nations, according to principles of action that have been agreed upon and that are backed by legal obligation, political will, and economic and military power. At the same time, it has every right to insist that other nations recognize the extent to which many rules must be revised, updated, and even replaced.

International law provides the indispensable framework for the conduct of stable and orderly international relations. It does not descend from on high. Rather, it's created by states to serve their collective interests. Consider, for instance, the concept of sovereignty itself, which is routinely described as the cornerstone of the international legal system. Sovereignty is not some mysterious essence of statehood. It is a deliberate construct, invented and perpetuated by states seeking to reduce war and violence in a particular set of historical circumstances.

The founding myth of modern international law is that the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648, gave birth to the system of states and the concept of inviolable state sovereignty. The Thirty Years' War was the last of the great religious wars in Europe, which were fought not really between states as such but between Catholics and Protestants. As religious minorities in one territory appealed to the coreligionist monarch of another, the Continent burned for three decades, and its people bled in a series of battles among the Holy Roman Empire, France, Sweden, Denmark, Bohemia, and a host of smaller principalities. The Treaty of Westphalia restored the principle of cuius regio eius religio--that is, the prince of a particular region determines the religion of his people. In today's language, this means that one sovereign state cannot intervene in the internal affairs of another.

But in reality, it took centuries for the modern state system to develop, and absolute sovereignty has never existed in practice, as many states on the receiving end of great-power interventions would attest. The architects of the Treaty of Westphalia glimpsed a vision of a world of discrete states armored against one another by the possession of "sovereignty"--a doctrine of legal right against military meddling.

It's important to realize that the right of sovereignty did not mean the prohibition of war. States were still free to go to war, as a matter of international law, until the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 formally outlawed war (to evidently little effect). Sovereignty was the foundation on which modern states were built, but as they matured, their attacks on one another rapidly became the principal threat to international peace and security. After the conflagrations of World War I and World War II, it was evident that if interstate war continued unchecked, states--and their peoples--might not survive into the 21st century. Hence, the innovation of the United Nations Charter: Article 2(4) required all states to refrain from "the use of force in their international relations against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state." The right of sovereignty no longer included the right to make war. Further, given the apparent link between Adolf Hitler's horrific depredations against the German people and his aggression toward other states, the right of sovereignty became increasingly encumbered with conditions on a sovereign state's treatment of its own people. Thus was born the international human rights movement, which today has turned traditional conceptions of sovereignty almost inside out. A distinguished commission appointed by the Canadian government at the suggestion of the UN secretary general released a report at the end of 2001 that defined a state's membership in the United Nations as including a responsibility to protect the lives and basic liberties of its people--and noting that if a member state failed in that responsibility, the international community had a right to intervene.

Why such a shift? Because the decade after the Cold War, much like the decades before the Treaty of Westphalia, revealed a seething mass of ugly conflicts within states. The dividing lines in those conflicts were drawn by ethnicity as much as religion, and the divisions were almost always fueled by opportunistic leaders of one faction or another. But unlike in the 16th and 17th centuries, the danger as the 20th century drew to a close was not so much from one sovereign's meddling in the affairs of another as in the failure of regional and international institutions to intervene early enough to prevent the conflicts from boiling into violence--producing streams of refugees and heartbreaking pictures broadcast into living rooms around the world.

The story of sovereignty, even highly simplified, illustrates a basic point about international law. It is an instrumental rather than an essential body of rules, instrumental to achieving the goals of peace, order, justice, human dignity, prosperity, and harmony between human beings and nature--in short, those ends that reflect the changing hopes and aspirations of humankind. It is a highly imperfect instrument, as indeed is domestic law. Because international law regulates a society of states with no central authority, it lacks even the hint of coercion that's implicit in every encounter with a domestic police officer. It can be enforced by the military might of one or more nations, but that sort of enforcement is the exception rather than the rule.

Yet for all its imperfections, international law survives because it is the only alternative for nations seeking to regularize their relations with one another and bind together credibly enough to achieve common gains. International law allows diplomats to escape parking tickets in New York City because without diplomatic immunity embassies would close. It allows a nation to set aside 12 miles of territorial waters for the use of its own fishing boats rather than just three or five or seven. And it allowed the first President Bush to assemble a UN coalition against Iraq quickly and easily in 1991 because Iraq had so flagrantly violated the UN Charter by invading Kuwait.

In the 1980s, political scientists such as Robert Keohaue, Steve Krasner, and John Ruggie demonstrated more precisely what international lawyers had long believed: "Regimes," meaning everything from treaties to organizations to customary practices, allow nations to overcome a dilemma. The best solution to a problem can be achieved only through cooperation, but any individual state risks a "sucker's payoff" if it acts cooperatively and other states do not. Rules and settled practices overcome this dilemma by making it easier for states to negotiate credible commitments, to gather and share information, and to monitor one another and develop reputations for good or bad behavior.

America's Founding Fathers knew that the United States needed international law as a shield to protect a new and weak nation. They went to great pains to declare their new democracy a law-abiding member of the society of nations. The Declaration of Independence set forth the legal case for revolution out of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." The Constitution enshrined treaties as "the supreme law of the land," alongside the Constitution itself and federal law. The first Congress made it possible for aliens to sue in U.S. federal courts "for a tort only, in violation of the law of nations." The statute was originally intended to assure foreign citizens and their governments that they would find sure redress in U.S. courts for violations of the laws governing relations among countries, such as diplomatic immunity. Today, it allows foreign victims of grave human-rights violations to sue their torturers if they find them on U.S. soil. Just over a century after its founding, the United States was an emerging power with a new prominence ill world affairs. Yet its commitment to international law remained firm--much more so, in fact, than we generally recognize today. Though most accounts of the crucial period after World War I are dominated by the struggle between President Woodrow Wilson and the American isolationists who opposed his vision of world order, an important group of Republicans championed a view of international relations that rested on a commitment to international law more zealous than Wilson's. The leader of this group was Elihu Root (1845-1937), the most distinguished lawyer-statesman of his day, who served as secretary of war under William McKinley, secretary of state under Theodore Roosevelt, and as a U.S. senator front New York. As Jonathan Zasloff recalls in New York University Law Review (April 2003), more than a decade before Wilson championed his great cause, Root was developing and implementing a distinctive vision of world order based solely on law. Using the kind of rhetoric that would later be associated with Wilson, Root scornfully declared that diplomacy in the past had "consisted chiefly of bargaining and largely cheating in the bargain." But unlike Wilson, who would propose a new international system based on the global spread of democracy and the political and military power of the League of Nations, Root argued for a system based strictly on law.

During the debate over the League, Root, though retired from the Senate, was the principal architect of Republican strategy. Leading Republican senators embraced U.S. engagement with the world, but only on the basis of law, not of binding military and political obligations. They supported legal institutions such as the Permanent Court of Arbitration (established in The Hague in 1899) and the new Permanent Court of International Justice (created by the League of Nations in 1921). But they rejected the collective security guarantee that lay at the core of the League Covenant. They would vote for the Covenant only with reservations attached. Root himself denounced the Covenant for abandoning "all effort to promote or maintain anything like a system of international law, or a system of arbitration, or of judicial settlement, through which a nation can assert its legal rights in lieu of war." Wilson, however, would accept no compromise, and the Covenant was defeated.

Root worked hard throughout his life to put his vision into effect (in 1912 he won the Nobel Peace Prize, in part for negotiating treaties of arbitration between the United States and more than 40 other nations). But the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 made the shortcomings of both isolationism and pure legalism evident. In 1945, Republicans and Democrats finally came together in strong support of a new international legal order in the United Nations, but one that melded law and power. The UN Charter was written, as Time put it, "for a world of power, tempered by a little reason." The provisions giving the Soviet Union, China, Britain, France, and the United States permanent seats on the Security Council, along with veto power over Council actions, were recognition that a law-based order has to accommodate the realities of great-power politics. The interesting question is why the United States, the overwhelmingly dominant power at the end of World War II, would choose to embed itself in a web of international institutions--not just the United Nations but the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In After Victory (2000), political scientist John Ikenberry argues compellingly that the United States pursued an institutional strategy as a way of entrenching a set of international rules favorable to its geopolitical and economic interests. Along the way, however, it was repeatedly compelled to accept real restraints on American power in order to assure weaker states in its orbit that it would neither abandon nor dominate them. For instance, U.S. officials had a sophisticated strategy for rebuilding Western Europe and integrating West Germany into a Western European order but sought to keep America aloof from the process. The Europeans, Ikenberry writes, "insisted that the binding together of Europe was only acceptable if the United States itself made binding commitments to them." The power of the United States to build a political order thus required the nation's willingness and ability to tie itself to a legal order.

Since the end of the Cold War, as Americans seem never to tire of repeating, America's power relative to that of other nations has only increased. But instead of hastening to reassure weaker nations by demonstrating our willingness to accept rules that further the common good, the United States is coupling its explicit drive for primacy with an equally explicit disdain for a whole range of treaties. Consider the current U.S. opposition to virtually all arms-control treaties--land mines, small arms, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty--and to efforts to strengthen existing treaties on biological and chemical warfare. The result? Nations around the world are arming themselves, if not directly against us, then at least, as in the case of the European Union, to ensure that they have an independent military capability.

The 1945 strategy was the right one, and it is now more essential than ever. We have an opportunity to lead through law, not against it, and to build a vastly strengthened international legal order that will protect and promote our interests. If we are willing to accept even minimal restraints, we can rally the rest of the world to adopt and enforce rules that will be effective in fighting scourges from terrorism to AIDS. The Bush administration, or rather some of its leading members, have constructed and promoted a simplistic dichotomy: international law versus national sovereignty. The ridiculousness of that position is evident the minute one turns to the international economic arena, where the World Trade Organization has the power to impose enormous constraints on U.S. sovereignty. A panel of three independent trade experts, for example, can rule on the legality or illegality of a federal statute under international trade law, and then enforce its judgment by authorizing trade sanctions against the United States by all WTO members. No human rights or arms control treaty has teeth nearly as sharp. Yet the Bush administration strongly supports an expansion of the WTO regime. Why? Because the free-trade system ensured by the WTO yields benefits that greatly outweigh the costs of constraints on American freedom of action.

"That is the right kind of calculus to make, rather than resorting to knee-jerk appeals to national sovereignty and fearmongering about world government. And by that sort of calculus, at a time when the United States is frightening and angering the rest of the world, the benefits--to ourselves and to other nations--of demonstrating once again that we are a superpower committed, at home and abroad, to the rule of law far outweigh the costs of self-imposed multilateralism. nternational law today is undergoing profound changes that will make it far more effective than it has been in the past. By definition, international law is a body of rules that regulates relations among states, not individuals. Yet over the course of the 21st century, it will increasingly confer rights and responsibilities directly on individuals. The most obvious example of this shift can be seen in the explosive growth of international criminal law. Through new institutions such as the International Criminal Court, created in 2003 and based in The Hague, the international community is now holding individual leaders directly accountable for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Most important, under a provision that was insisted on by the United States, all nations that are party to the treaty have committed themselves to domestic prosecutions of potential defendants before the court. Only if the states prove unable or unwilling to undertake these prosecutions will the court have jurisdiction. Under this arrangement, for example, Chile would have had primary responsibility to prosecute former dictator Augusto Pinochet as soon as he was out of office. If the Chilean prosecutors and courts had failed to act, he would have been remitted to The Hague. (Instead, Pinochet was arrested in Britain in 1998, under a warrant issued in Spain, and after being returned to Chile was ultimately spared prosecution because of ill health.) The political effect of this provision is a much-needed strengthening of those forces in every country that seek to bring to justice perpetrators of such crimes within their countries.

But criminal law is only one field of change. A similarly radical departure from the traditional model of state-to-state relations is reflected in the 1994 North Aanerican Free Trade Agreement. Under its terms, individual investors can sue NAFTA member states directly for failing to live up to their treaty obligations. In one celebrated case, a Canadian funeral home conglomerate is suing the United States for $725 million over a series of Mississippi state court decisions that it claims deliberately and unfairly forced it into bankruptcy; the decisions allegedly violated NAFTA guarantees that Canadian and Mexican investors will be granted equal treatment with domestic U.S. corporations. The WTO grows out of a more traditional form of law in which only states can bring suit against one another, but even in the WTO, evidence of the new trend can be seen in the knots of lawyers who congregate outside WTO hearing rooms to represent the interests of individual corporations directly affected by the rulings of the organization's dispute resolution panels. And now nongovernmental organizations such as Environmental Defense and Human Rights Watch are fighting for the right to submit briefs directly in cases that raise important environmental or human-rights issues.

As they come increasingly to apply directly to individuals, future international legal regimes will have more teeth than ever before--through links to domestic courts and by building up a direct constituency of important voters in important countries. The United States has long complained about the weaknesses of international treaty regimes, worrying that they bind states with strong domestic traditions of the rule of law but allow rampant cheating by states that lack such traditions or are without systems of domestic governance that check the power of leaders disinclined to follow the rules. Now is the moment to begin putting these international regimes on a new foundation, allowing them to penetrate the shell of state sovereignty in ways that will make the regimes much more enforceable. nvestment, anticorruption measures, environmental protection, and international labor rights, it can help shape a new generation of international legal rules that advance the interests of all law-abiding nations. If it does not participate, U.S. citizens will be directly affected by international rules that ignore U.S. interests. To take only one example, suppose the EU participated with other nations in drafting an international environmental treaty that imposed sanctions on corporations that didn't follow certain pollution regulations. The United States could stay out of the treaty, but any American corporation seeking to do business in the EU would be affected.

The United States needs international law, but not just any, international law. We need a system of laws tailored to meet today's problems. The Bush administration is right to point out that the rules developed in 1945 to govern the use of force don't fit the security threats the world faces in 2003. But those aren't the only roles in need of revision. Well before September 11, politicians and public figures were calling for major changes in the rules governing the global economy (remember the cries for a "new global financial architecture"?), a redefinition of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, and major UN reform, including expansion of the Security Council's membership. All those appeals proceeded from the premise that the rules and institutions created to address the economic, political, and security problems present after World War II were inadequate, and sometimes counterproductive, in the face of a new generation of threats to world order--to name but a few, AIDS and other new contagions, global warming, failed states, regional economic crises, sovereign bankruptcies, and the rise of global criminal networks trafficking in arms, money, women, workers, and drugs.

The mismatch between old rules and new threats is even more evident today. Two years after September 11, and one year after President Bush called on the Security Council to prove its strength and relevance in world affairs by enforcing a decade of resolutions against Saddam Hussein, the UN General Assembly convened this fall in a world that had changed radically yet again. Now both the United States and the UN are targets in a country and a region that seem to be spinning out of control. It's time to end the finger-pointing and get serious about generating new rules and updating old ones. Institutions, too, must be reinvigorated and reinvented. The UN Trusteeship Council, for example, could be used to spearhead the civilian rebuilding of countries devastated by war, disease, debt, and the despair of seemingly endless poverty.

The world needs international law. The United States needs the world. The dream of a just world under law may be no more than a dream. But the United States has never been stronger than when it has led the world in trying to make the dream a reality.

ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER is dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and president of the American Society of International Law. She was formerly J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School. Copyright [c] 2003 by Anne-Mane Slaughter.


Westphalia, Peace Of
Encyclopedia article; The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2004. 52323 pgs.

1648, general settlement ending the Thirty Years War. It marked the end of the Holy Roman Empire as an effective institution and inaugurated the modern European state system. The chief participants in the negotiations were the allies Sweden and France; their opponents, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire; and the various parts of the empire (which had been riven by the war) together with the newly independent Netherlands. Earlier endeavors to bring about a general peace had been unsuccessful. The compact known as the Peace of Prague (May, 1635) marked a step in the direction of peace and signaled the belief of the Protestant powers that the Swedish forces on which they depended would not be able to maintain a preponderant role in Germany. The conditions of the compact were not in accord with Richelieu's design to break up the imperial power, however, and the war continued despite offers of mediation from the pope and the king of Denmark. Congresses were proposed and discarded. It was not until Dec. 25, 1641, that a preliminary treaty provided for two concurrent conferences—at Münster and Osnabrück. The conferences, fixed for 1643, met in 1644 and began serious work in 1645. The treaties were signed Oct. 24, 1648. Through the French and Swedish "satisfactions" the power and influence of the Holy Roman Empire and of the house of Hapsburg were lessened. The sovereignty of the German states was recognized, and the empire continued only in name. France, emerging as the dominant European power, had its sovereignty over three bishoprics (Metz, Toul, and Verdun) and over Pinerolo confirmed. Breisach was made over to France. Alsace was ceded despite ambiguity of title, and France was allowed to fortify a garrison at Philippsburg. Sweden obtained W Pomerania, including Stettin and the island of Rügen; the archbishopric (but not the city) of Bremen and the adjoining bishopric of Verden; and Wismar and the island of Pöl. It was agreed that the Upper Palatinate and the old electoral vote should remain with Bavaria, while the Rhenish Palatinate, with a new electoral vote, was assigned to Charles Louis, the son of Frederick the Winter King. The Swiss Confederation and the independent Netherlands were explicitly recognized. The elector of Brandenburg received compensation for Pomerania; the duke of Mecklenburg, for Pöl and part of Wismar. The outcome of the religious deliberations was significant. Territorial rulers continued to determine the religion of their subjects, but it was stipulated that subjects could worship as they had in 1624. Terms of forced emigration were eased; Calvinism was recognized; and rulers could allow full toleration, at their discretion. Finally, religious questions could no longer be decided by a majority of the imperial estates. Future disputes were to be resolved by a compromise between the confessions. The era of religious warfare was over, and a general attempt had been made toward religious toleration.
See C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (1938).




[1] Cf. Watt, John A. : The theory of papal monarchy in the thirteenth century. The contribution of the canonists (New York, Fordham University Press, 1965). Também o clássico de Ullman, Walter: The growth of papal government in the Middle Ages. A study in the ideological relation of clerical to lay power (London, Methuen & Co. 1955).
[2] É célebre a entrada triunfal de Julio 2 em Bolonha, no ano de 1506. Cf. Bonner Mitchell:  Italian Civic Pageantry in the High Renaissance: A Descriptive Bibliography of Triumphal Entries and Selected other Festivals for State Occasions (Florença, L. S. Olschki, 1979), pp. 15-25.
[3] Claire Gantet: Guerre, paix et construction des États. 1618-1714.  Collection Nouvelle Histoires des Relations Internationales, v. 2 (Paris, Seuil, 2003), p. 131.
[4] Para esta passagem, cf. Lazzeri, Christian : “Introduction” ao texto de Henri de Rohan, De l ´intérêt des princes et des Etats de la Chrétienté (Paris, PUF, 1995), pp.127 e ss.
[5] Discurso de L´Hospital diante da Assembléia composta pelos presidentes e conselheiros dos Parlamentos da França em Saint-Germain-en-Laye (Janeiro de 1562). Citado por Emile-V. Telle, “Introdução” à Vie de Messire Gaspar de Collygny, Admiral de France (1577) (Paris, Droz, 1987), p. 35.
[6] Etienne de la Boétie: Mémoire touchant l´ Édit de Janvier 1562, in Paul Bonnefon (Ed.) “Une oeuvre inconnue de la Boétie”, Révue d´ Histoire littéraire de la France, 24e Année, (Paris, Armand Colin, 1917), pp. 1 e ss.
[7] Roland Mousnier: 14 mai 1610, l´assassinat d´Henry IV (Paris, Gallimard, 1964), p. 102.
[8] Este ponto é exaustivamente analisado por Mousnier, op. cit. p. 103 e ss.
[9] Cf. Meinecke, Friedrich: Die Idee der Staatsräson in der Neueren Geschichte (Berlin, Druck und Verlag von R. Oldenbourg, 1924), pp. 203 e ss.
[10] Cf. Henri de Rohan, De l ´interêt des princes et des Etats de la chrétienté. Lazzeri, Christian Ed. (Paris, PUF, 1995), pp. 159 e ss. Cf. Mainecke, Friedrich, op. cit. pp. 155 e ss.
[11]Lazzeri, Christian, op. cit. p. 131. 
[12] Eckhardt, Carl Conrad: The papacy and World Affairs as reflected in the secularization of politics (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1937), p. VII.
[13] Eckhardt, op. cit. p. 46.
[14] Bogdan, Henri: La Guerre de Trente Ans, 1618-1648. (Paris, Perrin Ed. 2006), p. 11.
[15] Cf. Bogdan, Henry : op. cit. pp. 246 e ss.
[16] Eckhardt, Carl Conrad: The papacy and World Affairs as reflected in the secularization of politics (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1937).

[17] Tese explícita de Clausewitz : ao contrário dos conflitos armados da Idade Média e do mundo antigo, os exércitos modernos, em especial depois de Luis XIV, exibem dimensões enormes e são coordenados de modo racional ininterruptamente, estando sempre ao dispôr dos Estados. ”As novas guerras,  surgidas após a Paz de Westphalia, tomaram, pelo esforço dos respectivos governos, uma forma mais regrada e  unida; o alvo militar predomina geralmente em todos os espaços”.Uso a edição francêsa : De la Guerre, trad. D. Naville (Paris, Minuit, 1955), Livro V, cap. 14, p. 365. A formula sintética de Clausewitz sobre a modernidade estatal (governo, exército, povo) seria, para alguns críticos do século 20 como Martin van Creveld (Cf. The transformation of war, New York, Free Press, 1991), demasiadopresa à ordem instaurada pelo tratado de Westaphalia. Como tal, apresentaria forte obsolescência.
[18] Cf. Burckhardt, Carl. J. : Richelieu, l ´affirmation du pouvoir et la guerre froide (Paris, Robert Laffont, 1971), Volume 2, pp. 214 e ss.
[19] Sobretudo no Adágio Dulce Bellum Inexpertis (A Guerra é suave, para quem não a conhece). “Seria preciso perguntar qual gênio maléfico, qual flagelo, qual calamidade, qual Fúria do Inferno colocou um impulso tão bestial no homem (…) transformando-o em promotor e vítima do extermínio, com um frenesi tão selvagem, com semelhantes explosões de loucura”. Cf. Erasmo de Rotterdam, Adagia. Sei Saggi Politici in Forma di Proverbi. Trad. Silvana Seidel Menchi (Torino, Einaudi, 1980), p. 199.
[20] Matthäus Merian, Theatri/Europaei (1619), citado por Claire Gantet: La Paix de Westphalie (1648). Une histoire sociale, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles. (Paris, Belin, 2001), p. 122.
[21] Para toda a sequência aqui iniciada, sigo a interpretação de Claire Gantet: La Paix de Westphalie (1648). Une histoire sociale, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles, edição citada, p. 169 e seguintes.