wfn.org | 350 years ago: A breakthrough for religious tolerance

[FRANK_IMHOFF.parti@ecunet.org (FRANK IMHOFF)]

The Peace of Westphalia ended the wars between confessions in Europe

GENEVA, 2 November 1998 (lwi) - Three treaties, 350 years ago, put an end
to a devastating war and laid the foundation for the Europe of today. On
October 24, 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed in Munster and
Osnabruck. Today's historians identify the diplomatic agreement which ended
the Thirty Years' War as a milestone leading to the federal system in
Germany and among the European states, as the first constitution to
guarantee freedom of religion and of conscience, and as a landmark in the
recognition of different confessions and the independence of religious
affiliation from the power of the state.

After seven years of negotiations, three treaties were finally signed in
two different cities, in order to accommodate the various parties: the
peace between Spain and the Netherlands in Catholic Munster, that between
Sweden and the Emperor in Protestant Osnabruck, and that between France and
the Emperor again in Munster. For the Netherlands and Switzerland, the
Peace of Westphalia brought independence from the "Holy Roman Empire of the
German Nation."

With the signing of the peace, the Thirty Years' War was over, after having
spread terror, destruction, hunger and disease across Europe. Mercenary
armies had plundered conquered areas and terrorized populations with
arbitrary brutality. Epidemics of plague such as the "Black Death" had done
the rest. Of a previous population of 20 million, only eight million
survived.

Peace only after economic ruin and exhaustion

This horrific 17th-century war had a mixture of political and confessional
causes. It was triggered by the pretensions to power of the Habsburg
dynasty in Austria. The office of Holy Roman Emperor was theirs, but they
were especially concerned with forcing the Protestant lands of the Empire
to return to the Catholic faith. The spark that set off the war was the
"Prague Defenestration" of May 23, 1618: Bohemian Protestant noblemen
pushed two of the Emperor's Catholic governors out of the window of the
Hradchin, the royal castle in Prague.

The various princes of the empire fought one another in shifting alliances,
and religious motives provided the background for political power
struggles. When the Protestant Danish king Christian IV intervened in 1625,
the war took on European dimensions. In 1630 the Swedish King Gustavus
Adolphus intervened, out of fear for the Protestant cause, and Catholic
France allied itself with Sweden against the Catholic Habsburg emperor.
After 13 separate wars and total economic ruin, the battle-weary warring
parties finally began looking for peace terms which both sides could
accept.

The peace agreement established the year 1624 as "normal": the conditions
obtaining on January 1 of that year were to be those for the future.
Princes could no longer determine the confession of their subjects,
invalidating the ancient principle of cuius regio eius religio. Those of a
different faith could practice their religion, or they could emigrate
without losing their possessions. In the "Holy Roman Empire of the German
Nation," Catholic and Protestant confessions had thenceforth the same right
to exist. For 150 years Germany was moulded by the basic law which the
Empire then adopted, longer than by any subsequent constitution. The
federal structure and the tolerance between confessions which the treaties
established have influenced Europe up to the present day.

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