determinate-negation:

Generations of international relations students have absorbed the idea of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia as a pan-European charter that created the political structure that now spans the entire globe: a system of legally (if not materially) equal sovereign states. Along with this political structure, this story goes, came other important features, from the doctrine of non-intervention, respect of territorial integrity, and religious tolerance to the enshrinement of the concept of the balance of power and the rise of multilateral European diplomacy. In this light, the Peace of Westphalia constitutes not just a chronological benchmark but a sort of anchor for our modern world. With Westphalia, Europe broke into political modernity and provided a model for the rest of the world.

Over the last few decades, scholars working on the history of international order—in a variety of disciplines, including global history, international relations, and international law—have shown that this traditional account is not only false but diametrically opposed to historical reality.

[…] how did the misleading story become so popular? The treaties were only properly mythologized in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when European historians turned to the early modern period in order to craft stories that served their own worldview. As scholars such as Richard Devetak and Edward Keene have explained, conservative historians of the period—particularly the Göttingen-based German historical school—were keen to depict the pre-1789 European continent as an orderly system of states, characterized by restraint and mutual respect, that had come to be threatened by Napoleon’s expansionist imperialism. This reinvention of early modern European history was part of a larger and now well-studied trend that sought to make both the rise of the states-system and of global European power seem like a linear, inevitable, and laudable process. Europeans, the story went, were uniquely modern in their political organization, and they would bring this gift to the rest of the world. As Osiander explains, the Peace of Westphalia came to be given pride of place in this new historical narrative by means of recycled seventeenth-century propaganda. Looking for a story of states fighting for their sovereignty against imperial domination, nineteenth-century historians found exactly what they needed in the anti-Habsburg fabrications that had been disseminated by the French and Swedish crowns during the Thirty Years’ War.