How Great Wars End: Legacies and Lessons: German Studies Association Presidential Address 2018

2018 celebrated the centenary of the armistice that halted hostilities in WWI; it also marked the four-hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. Such commemorative years offer the occasion for historical reflection and these two wars are no exception. There is, however, more reason to discuss the two wars and their aftermaths together, besides this convenient numerical coincidence of terminal digits. By examining the two "Great Wars" in tandem, I want to suggest ways in which scholars of both the modern and early modern worlds can benefit from each other's insights and bridge the divide that putatively separates them.

In many ways, of course, the two wars could not have been more different. World War I (at least in Europe) was an industrialized war, of comparatively short duration, fought by national, often conscripted, armies, and pitted the nineteenth-century "isms"—nationalism, liberalism, socialism (and later Bolshevism)—and the great nineteenth-century powers against each other; it was also, for that matter, a world war or even a global conflict.¹ The Thirty Years' War was, of course, eponymously long, yet neither a war of nations, nor ideologies, nor global. Thus, putting them in bed with one another may seem like creating a particularly unhappy relationship. These rather striking differences may be, however, as I argue here, not so striking as they first seem, especially when one considers not only the conflicts themselves but also their aftermaths and legacies.

Of course, there has long existed a tradition of using the Great War of the seventeenth century to understand and contextualize events in subsequent German history, in ways that move far beyond the interpretation that the war contributed to German backwardness and set it early onto a separate and disastrous path: the Sonderweg. Still, and even if the historical memory of the Thirty Years' War may have become attenuated by the more recent, if not necessarily greater horrors of World War I and World War II,² that of the Peace of Westphalia has not; in 2018 it became the Liebling (favored theme) of historians, politicians, and political pundits alike (in ways that the Treaty of Versailles certainly has failed to do). Just twenty-four hours after President Trump announced that the United States would pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement (ironically on V-E Day), the political scientist/historian Herfried Münkler, in an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau, spoke of the Peace of Westphalia as a "success story" bearing lessons for peacemakers in today's Middle East.³ Münkler is not alone, by any means, in turning to that seventeenth-century European peace for guidance in seeking to solve the problems of today's world.⁴ At a podium discussion earlier that year, the then Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, suggested that "the Near East today needs a Westphalian peace," based on the principles of religious freedom, tolerance, and federalism.⁵

I hardly wish to review the lengthy debates on the Peace of Westphalia or assess its value as a model for solving contemporary problems; I will leave these debates and proposals to political scientists and policy makers and wish them well.⁶ I remain skeptical, however, that many of the lessons learned from that great peace will allow us to deal more effectively with current dilemmas. George Santayana's striking, and almost invariably misquoted, phrase—"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"⁷—has encouraged many facile conclusions and, unwittingly, perpetuated much foolishness. I have no desire to add to them by arguing that the history of the Thirty Years' War is a reliable guide through tangled contemporary political quandaries. Even the most subtle attempts to draw relevance from the peace concluded in 1648 will inevitably founder on the hidden sharp rocks of context and contingency. Moreover, the Peace of Westphalia and the much-praised "Westphalian settlement" have not been universally admired. In 1998 (another anniversary year), the then-secretary-general of NATO, Javier Solana, pointed out "the Westphalian system had its limits. … [Its] principle of sovereignly … also produce...