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 PART 7:
History lesson for
the 'war on
terror'
By Henry C K Liu
(Click
here for previous
parts)
The world order of
sovereign states began with the Peace of
Westphalia of 1648 which ended the Thirty Years'
War (1618-48) during which the German Protestant
princes struggled, with the self-serving help of
foreign powers, against the unifying central
authority of the Holy Roman Empire, which was
under the Hapsburgs in alliance with the German
Catholic princes. The Peace of Westphalia
established a new world order based on the
principle of sovereign states through the
recognition of the independent sovereignty of the
more than 300 German principalities in the 17th
century. These princely states, recognized
internationally as sovereign states by the peace,
were not nation-states, as they were all of German
nationality.
The Peace of Westphalia
represented a foreign-policy triumph for France
and its Swedish and Dutch allies, since it
immobilized political unification of the German
nation and delayed it for two centuries. There are
clear indications that the "war on terrorism"
today aims for a foreign-policy triumph for US
imperium that will immobilize the political
unification of Arab states as envisaged by
Pan-Arabism.
The Peace of Westphalia
advanced the modern Staatensystem or the
system of sovereign states in international
relations and law. From the 17th century to the
unification of Germany by Otto von Bismarck in the
aftermath of the failed democratic revolutions of
1848, French foreign policy was to keep Europe
divided by the sovereign state principles of the
Peace of Westphalia, preventing a unified Germany
from emerging to threaten France and the other
established big powers. To achieve this aim,
France, although a Catholic nation, opposed the
centralization aims of the Holy Roman Emperor.
German unification was not achieved until
after the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian
War of 1870-71 when Bismarck (1815-98) united
Germany by having a group of German princes
gathering in the French Palace of Versailles
proclaim the victorious William I of Prussia
emperor of the German Empire. But Bismarck also
divided Germany by leaving one-sixth of the
Germans outside of the new German Empire, a
condition that led a century later to another
world war. Bismarck opposed liberalism and
advocated the unification of Germany under the
aegis of Prussia. Bismarck suppressed socialism
with repressive laws that prohibited the
circulation of socialist ideas, legalized police
power to put down socialist movements and put the
trial of socialists under the jurisdiction of
police courts. Yet the persecution of social
democrats only increased their strength in
parliament. To weaken socialist influence and to
implement his policy of economic nationalism,
Bismarck introduced sweeping social reform.
Between 1883 and 1887, despite strong opposition,
laws were passed for health, accident and
retirement social insurance, prohibiting female
and child labor exploitation, and limiting working
hours. These laws allowed Germany to circumvent
the evils of the Industrial Revolution that beset
Britain.
Universalist ideologies, wars
of religion
The ideology behind the "war on
terrorism" is universal democracy, and in that
respect it is analogous to the Holy Roman Empire
ideology of universal Catholicism. Yet with the
invasion and occupation of Iraq, US foreign policy
has challenged the four-century-old Westphalia
principle of state sovereignty. This principle has
kept the Middle East divided to prevent a unified
Arab state from emerging to threaten the
superpower status of the United States and the
national interests of its neo-imperialist allies.
The US invasion of Iraq, while satisfying the
myopic mania of the neo-cons who temporarily
captured US policy, unwittingly gives legitimacy
to pan-Arabism to unleash a frenzy of regime
changes unrestrained by the Westphalia principle
of sovereign states. The rise of pan-Arabism
brought about by the demise of the Westphalia
principle of sovereign states in the Middle East
will be resisted by the neo-imperialist powers and
will inevitably lead to a new global war that will
make the Thirty Years' Year look like child's
play.
The Thirty Years' War was fought on
German soil, carried out by soldiers of fortune
who aspired to create principalities of their own
with their own political agendas. The "war on
terror" today is fought on Islamic soil, carried
out by mercenary units and opportunistic local
factions hoping to carve out religious or ethnic
fiefdoms. The Thirty Years' War dragged on because
the warring parties feared each other's success
and regularly changed alliances and war aims to
keep the conflict going. Peace was not an
objective because the purpose of war was to
prevent any one party from winning, and as soon as
peace was at hand, the potential winner would be
neutralized by a new balance of power. Peace is
also not an objective in today's "war on
terrorism" because the purpose of the war was to
prevent indigenous political cultures from
overwhelming the injudicious push for universal
democracy and collateral US hegemony, which is
enhanced by continuing local conflicts with the US
as a half-hearted peacemaker and arbitrageur with
a not-so-hidden self-serving agenda.
The
"war on terrorism" today shares many parallel
attributes with the Thirty Years' War of four
centuries ago. Both are global religious conflicts
conducted with geopolitical maneuverings. Both
serve as unwitting cradles for new world orders.
While the Thirty Years' War was fought to enforce
universal Catholicism, today's "war on terror" is
being fought to spread universal democracy based
on Judeo-Christian values. Like the Thirty Years'
War, the "war on terror" today is also complex and
multidimensional. US President George W Bush has
repeatedly served notice that it will be a
protracted and difficult war. Like the Thirty
Years' War, the "war on terrorism" today also has
no clear single objective, not even the
elimination of terrorism. So far, the war has used
the threat of terrorism as a pretext to invade
sovereign states not to the superpower's liking.
The administration of president George H W Bush
launched the first Gulf War to protect the
tangible principle of sovereign states by driving
Iraq from its reincorporation of Kuwait, thus
putting the principle of state sovereignty above
the intangible principle pan-Arab nationalism. Yet
in the second Gulf War to invade and occupy Iraq,
the abstract principle of universal democracy was
used to overrule the tangible principle of state
sovereignty.
Terrorism is as old as
civilization itself and many political movements
have been forced to resort to it in varying
degrees, especially in their early stages of
struggle. Powerful, established political powers
regularly resort to state terrorism, known
euphemistically as war conducted by overwhelming
force applied with shock and awe - in other words,
terror. Thus the "war on terror" is in fact fought
with state terror. Even the most heinous war is
always rationalized with high moral justification.
In its most current manifestation, the
"war on terrorism" today is a religious war
between a faith-based Christian nation and Islamic
extremists, both groups controlled by
fundamentalists, not unlike the struggle between
the Roman Catholic Church and emerging Protestant
movements during the Thirty Years' War. It is an
unevenly matched conflict between a powerful state
military machine and clandestine cells engaged in
asymmetrical warfare reminiscent of the early
phases of the Thirty Years' War. It is an
unbalanced game between an organized system with
visible and open targets everywhere and a vast
network of disjointed cells that are impossible to
find until after they surface with an attack. The
same was true with the Holy Roman Empire in its
effort to rein in the Protestant German princes
and their religious zealot advisers during the
Thirty Years' War.
The "war on terrorism"
today is a violent neo-imperialist strategy that
unwittingly enhances the unifying aim of
pan-Arabism, by threatening the sovereignty of the
numerous small Arabic failed states created by the
imperialist powers of the last century to
frustrate pan-Arab nationalism. Just as the
prevention of the unification of Germany played a
key role in the strategy of foreign powers during
the Thirty Years' War, the eventual emergence and
prevention of pan-Arabism will play a key role in
the "war on terrorism" today. It is too early to
discern how the geopolitical implication of the
development will shape up.
The "war on
terrorism" is a unilateral war waged primarily by
the sole superpower that is putting strains on
residual Cold War alliances, forcing Europe to
seek independence from post-Cold War US
unilateralism. It pushes Cold War US nemeses such
as Russia, China and India to converge if not
unite in support of a multipolar world order. The
Holy Roman Emperor was in a similar situation in
its relations with the major powers of Europe at
the time of the Thirty Years' War.
Bourbons, Bonaparte and Bush
The
Peace of Westphalia that began in 1648 after 30
years of destruction and slaughter marked the
triumph of the doctrine of the balance of power.
The doctrine was directed against Hapsburg
supremacy, which was successfully blocked by a
France on its path toward superpower status.
Later, when King Louis XIV of France advanced the
doctrine of "universal monarchy", or still later
when Napoleon Bonaparte expanded the same idea to
a multinational, multi-ethnic Empire of the French
(not a French empire) based on universal
citizenship in the imperial Roman sense, the
balance-of-power doctrine was directed
specifically against France. Today, there is clear
evidence of the balance-of-power doctrine being
directed against a hegemonic United States that
attempts to construct, by violent regime changes
in distant sovereign states, a world order of
compulsive neo-liberalism. Unlike the Roman Empire
or the Empire of the French, US neo-imperialism
has yet to adopt an inclusive citizenship policy.
US-led neo-liberal globalization promotes only the
cross-border free movement of goods and capital,
but not of people.
One and half centuries
after the Peace of Westphalia, Napoleon co-opted
the democratic ideals of the French Revolution and
applied them to the concept of a universal empire
ruled by a Bonaparte dynasty consisting of members
of his family. The people of Spain proved to be
less docile than their aristocratic leaders to the
Pax Napoleon. Even before Joseph,
Napoleon's brother, was proclaimed king of Spain
with alacrity by a Spanish Council of Regency,
spontaneous anti-French insurrection had broken
out in every province of Spain, without central
leadership, systemic organization or preparation.
Spain was by that time a mere shadow of its former
greatness and, in every sense of the term, a
failed state. The popular insurrection was not
explainable by any aversion to a foreigner on the
Spanish throne. The Spanish Bourbons were a
foreign dynasty. Joseph Bonaparte came to Spain
with an impressive record of liberal reforms as
king of Naples and he had the support of a
substantial segment of the Spanish elite, nobles,
prelates, financiers, officials and intellectuals
who looked to France, even Napoleonic France, as a
bearer of the liberal principles of the French
Revolution. Had Joseph been allowed to rule in
peace, such aspirations might not have been wrong.
The Spanish Church had little to fear from
Catholic France, but the monastic orders that
controlled the conscience of the masses had vested
interest in keeping fanaticism alive, forcing
Napoleon to limit the number of priests while
appeasing the church elites. The large landowners
in Spain could afford to toy with liberal reform,
for they also had commercial interests and their
income from rent was not threatened by reform. The
lesser nobles, on the other hand, were ruined by
the abolition of entails and suppression of feudal
dues. To them, the Napoleonic Code, a progressive
instrument of the rule of law, was a direct
threat. They wanted no part of Napoleon's
liberation. President Bush's call to liberate the
world from tyranny will meet with resistance not
from tyrants but from a natural aversion to
imported liberty. Like Napoleon's, Bush's bogus
liberty is a smokescreen for installing puppet
proxies all over the world to support a new
American empire that thrives on structural
disparity of income and wealth. Like Napoleon's
efforts in Spain, Bush's drive for global
democracy will be foiled by popular resistance
unless and until neo-liberalism is purged from the
institution of democracy.
Although
guerrilla tactics have been used since time
immemorial, the term "guerrilla" gained currency
only during the Napoleonic wars, particularly in
Spain, where it had been highly effective in the
six years between 1808 and 1814. France had
320,000 troops in Spain at the height of its
presence in 1810 and a low of 200,000 troops in
1813. During the six-year campaign, French forces
lost 240,000 men: 45,000 were killed in action
against conventional forces, 50,000 died of
illness and accident, and 145,000 were killed in
action against guerrilla forces. French losses in
Iberia approached 1% of the entire French
population. Indeed, Napoleon lost more French
troops in Spain than in Russia. These were large
numbers that France could not afford, numbers that
had they not been lost might have turned the
strategic tide at Leipzig or at Waterloo to
prevent French defeat. A similar fate is falling
on US forces in Iraq and whatever other
regime-change plans the neo-cons in the US
government are planning.
Military analysts
have calculated membership in Spanish guerrilla
bands to have been about 50,000. Even if these are
added to the Duke of Wellington's regular force in
Spain of 40,000 and 25,000 attached Portuguese
forces, the French still enjoyed a favorable force
ratio of almost 3:1. In spite of their numerical
force advantage, however, the French were defeated
badly. Some historians see the fall of Napoleon as
having begun in Spain, where 320,000 French troops
were tied down and demoralized by guerilla
warfare. But the real damage suffered by Napoleon
in his disaster in Spain was the challenge to his
image of invincibility.
Similarly, Iraq
will tie down more than 150,000 US troops and
Afghanistan 50,000 for the foreseeable future. It
the US were foolhardy enough to invade Iran, a
country four times the size of Iraq and much less
secular, it had better be prepared to send a
million troops to deliver its gift of exported
liberty. But the real damage is to US prestige of
invincibility, following a pattern that began in
Korea, then Vietnam, and now Iraq.
Napoleon told the Spaniards: "I have
abolished those privileges which the grandees
usurped, during the times of civil war, when kings
but too frequently are necessitated to surrender
their rights, to purchase their tranquility, and
that of their people. I have abolished the feudal
rights, and henceforth everyone may set up inns,
ovens, mills, employ himself in fishing and rabbit
hunting, and give free scope to his industry,
provided he respects the laws and regulations of
the police. The selfishness, wealth, and
prosperity of a small number of individuals, were
more injurious to your agriculture than the heat
of the dog-days. As there is but one God, so
should there be in a state but one judicial power.
All peculiar jurisdictions were usurpations, and
at variance with the rights of the nation; I have
abolished them. I have also made known to everyone
what he may have to fear, and what he may have to
hope."
Yet the Spanish people, long
oppressed under the foreign Spanish Bourbons,
decisively turned down Napoleon's offer of
liberation. It should be an object lesson to the
United States' offer of liberty to Afghanistan and
Iraq and elsewhere around the globe. President
Bush's second Inaugural Address defined the unity
of US national interest with the spread of liberty
around the world as a "calling of our time". While
no one can argue against liberty, one can question
whether liberty can be spread by force, or imposed
by occupation and economic domination. It is a
well-known fact that liberty can only be taken by
the oppressed themselves, never delivered by a
liberator from outside.
Incongruent
issues, overlapping battlefields
The Thirty
Years' War was a protracted, complex,
multidimensional conflict in a splintered Germany,
with much similarity to today's Middle East. It
was a German civil war fought over
Protestant-Catholic religious issues. It was also
a violent civil conflict over constitutional
issues regarding the central authority of the Holy
Roman Emperor and centrifugal forces of state
sovereignty. The two separate issues were not
congruent, yielding overlapping battlefields and
shifting alliances and adversaries. The religious
wars among Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists
were fought by secular monarchs who saw religious
schisms as political opportunities. Ferdinand II
and his primary ally Maximilian I represented the
re-Catholicizing zeal of the Jesuit
Counter-reformation, while Frederick V of the
Palatinate represented the equally militant forces
of Calvinism. Unspoken is the socio-economic
struggle behind the religious dispute, with the
Counter-reformation trying to preserve
agricultural feudalism while Calvinism agitated
for the emergence of capitalism.
The "war
on terrorism" today will also be a protracted,
complex, multidimensional conflict in a splintered
Islamic Middle East and Central Asia. It will be a
struggle between Christian fundamentalism and
Islamic fundamentalism, and a struggle between
unipolar US imperium and a multipolar world order
of sovereign states. It will also be a struggle
between neo-liberal market fundamentalism and
humanist socialism. The fall of Soviet socialist
imperialism should not be mistaken as the death of
socialism or the end of history. The triumph of
anti-imperialist socialist and populist forces
through democratic processes in Central and South
America will spread to other regions. The day will
come when the US will regret its disingenuous push
for democracy all over the world. True democracy
will emerge as an effective vaccine against
neo-liberal market fundamentalism.
One of
Germany's main problems in the 16th century was
that the northern states were still divided over
religion, though, ironically, it was division
among the Protestant states. After the Religious
Peace of Augsburg (1555), Protestant states had
split along two different lines. There were those
states that wanted a flexible approach to
Protestantism. These states, known as the
Phillipists, saw value in some of the ideas of
John Calvin and Huldreich Zwingli and saw no harm
in adopting a combination of Protestant beliefs.
Opposed to these states were the hardline Lutheran
states. In 1577, these states produced the
"Formula of Accord", which clearly stated their
position, and the Phillipist states responded to
this by switching openly to Calvinism. Therefore,
there was a visible split among the Protestant
world in Germany and there was a failure to create
a common front against the Roman Catholic Church.
Similar splits in Islam, perhaps even more
complex, also cause a failure to create a common
front in modern times against the Judeo-Christian
evangelicals. In modern politics, the split in the
socialism camp between communists and social
democrats has similarity to the split among the
Protestants.
This Protestant split allowed
the Roman Catholic Church some gains in Germany.
The socialist split has also allowed market
capitalism some gains in many parts of the world
in recent decades. In the 1580s, the archbishop of
Cologne wanted to secularize his land. This would
have been very lucrative for him but it also broke
the terms of the Imperial Reservation in the 1555
Augsburg Settlement, which forbade such a move. He
was removed from his position by the Holy Roman
Emperor, who sent Spanish troops to enforce his
authority. This was a perfectly legal move by the
emperor. A more orthodox Catholic replacement was
installed.
But Spanish troops so near to
the western French border were not well received
in Paris any more than Soviet nuclear missiles in
Cuban were welcomed by Washington. The Protestant
Evangelical Union was founded in response to this
foreign intrusion. It was a defensive alliance of
nine princes and 17 Imperial Cities. It was led by
the Elector Palatine and its general was Christian
of Anhalt. This union was predominantly Calvinist,
and many Lutheran leaders stayed away from it as
they felt that its existence could lead to
anarchy.
In response to this union,
Maximilian of Bavaria founded the Catholic League
in 1609. Ironically, he did not ask the Catholic
Austrian Hapsburgs to join it - a symbol of just
how far the status of the Hapsburgs had fallen, to
a level similar to US Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld's disparaging reference to uncooperative
Western European allies and the "old Europe".
Phillip III of Spain sent financial aid to
maintain some Hapsburg influence but his
involvement in a central European issue was bound
to provoke the French. The "war on terrorism"
today also brings forth an opposing coalition
against US hegemony and unilateralism, such as a
new European relationship with China and, more
significantly, the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO) process.
The
Shanghai Cooperation
Organization
Unilateralism in US foreign
policy, highlighted by US rejection of the Kyoto
Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the
hardline approach toward North Korea and China,
and until September 11, 2001, support for
anti-socialist terrorism in the name of human
rights and democracy, has solicited efforts by
targeted countries to form their own sets of
cooperative multilateral mechanisms that exclude
the US. The SCO process, the most significant of
such mechanisms, has quietly but steadily built up
its economic, military and diplomatic relations,
seeking to present itself as more viable
counterweight to emerging US hegemony in Central
Asia.
The SCO consists of China,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and,
most recently, Uzbekistan. Until that sixth member
joined, the group was known as the Shanghai Five.
The group emerged from a series of talks on border
demarcation and demilitarization which the four
former Soviet republics held with China. Since
1996, when the group held its first presidential
summit meeting in Shanghai, the five-country group
has held annual summits. The statement from the
July 2000 Dushanbe summit notes the establishment
of a "Council of National Coordinators" that would
further foster regularized cooperation among the
member states. In addition, the joint statement
expressed the group's view of the international
security situation both within and beyond their
borders. The Dushanbe statement pledge the member
states to crack down jointly on secession
movements, terrorism, and religious extremism
within their borders and to oppose intervention in
another country's internal affairs on the pretexts
of humanitarianism and protecting human rights;
and support the efforts of one another in
safeguarding the member states' national
independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity,
and social stability. China has called for
strengthening mutual support in safeguarding the
national unity and sovereignty of the SCO member
nations and jointly resisting all kinds of threat
to the security of the region, particularly from
outside the region.
With these aims in
mind, the SCO defense ministers meet annually
along with their foreign ministers, and their
militaries conduct joint exercises and training,
exchange information about peacekeeping
operations, and hold conferences and other
exchanges on security issues. The Dushanbe
statement also noted the group's opposition to the
use of force or threat of force in international
relations without United Nations Security Council
approval, a direct reference to recent US
undertakings in Iraq. The group also opposes any
attempt by countries or groups of countries to
monopolize global and regional affairs out of
selfish interests. In similar terms, the Dushanbe
statement also expressed its opposition to US
missile-defense strategy by stating its strong
support for the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM)
Treaty of 1972 and its opposition to "bloc-based"
(ie, US alliance-based) deployment of theater
missile defense systems in the Asia-Pacific
region, particularly in Taiwan and Japan.
The SCO maintains that it is not an
alliance, and is not aimed at any third parties.
Indeed, the group has a number of internal
differences that will likely prevent it from
becoming like a North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO). The two biggest countries in the group,
China and Russia, have enjoyed much-improved
relations over the past decade, but still harbor
mutual long-term strategic distrusts. In addition,
individual members of the group differ over other
important issues, such as relations with various
neighbors such as India, Pakistan and Afghanistan,
and over how best to exploit the rich reserves of
energy and other natural resources in Central Asia
for common use. Russian President Vladimir Putin
appears to welcome additional members to the group
(such as Uzbekistan; Pakistan, Iran and India have
expressed an interest), which, if admitted, would
certainly complicate the achievement of consensus
within the group. China and India are engaged with
serious efforts to improve relations.
The
SCO process has resulted in impressive
achievements, such as settling border disputes,
introducing confidence-building measures, and
moving in cooperative ways to combat illicit
activities in their region such as terrorism and
drug smuggling. It has also issued increasingly
pointed statements in opposition to US hegemony.
The SCO is indicative of efforts around the world
seeking security-related mechanisms independent of
US participation.
End of the Thirty
Years' War
The Thirty Years' War was also
an international war between France and Spain and
a dynastic war between the Bourbons and the
Hapsburgs. Foreign powers opposed to the Hapsburgs
could not look with equanimity on developments in
Germany. The French, English and Dutch formed a
league to oppose the Hapsburgs. They found their
champion in Christian IV of Denmark, who also had
extensive possessions in northern Germany.
Christian IV invaded Germany in 1626, but was
crushingly defeated in 1627 by the army of the
Catholic League and a new Imperial force under the
enigmatic Bohemian condottiere Albrecht
Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein. Emboldened by
victory, Ferdinand, Holy Roman Emperor and king of
Bohemia, issued the Edict of Restitution,
requiring the return of all lands expropriated
from the Roman Church since the 1550s. Fearing
Wallenstein's rising power, the territorial rulers
forced the emperor to remove him from power and
reduce the size of the Imperial army. Concerned by
growing Hapsburg power along the Baltic, Gustavus
Adolphus of Sweden, the Lion of the North, invaded
northern Germany in 1630. Cardinal Richelieu of
Catholic France wanted an alliance with the
Protestant Gustavus to form a counterweight to
Hapsburg power in Europe. If Gustavus could also
enlist the help of Maximilian of Bavaria and the
Catholic League, then so much the better. Both
Gustavus and Richelieu were pragmatists. Though
they held opposite views on religion, they both
realized that they needed each other if they were
to form a realistic opposition to Ferdinand, Holy
Roman Emperor and king of Bohemia. Gustavus was
not welcomed by his fellow Lutherans in Germany.
His sole significant ally was the French, who
subsidized his army.
After the
Swedish-allied city of Magdeburg was destroyed by
an Imperial army, the Protestants grew concerned
and began to arm. When the Imperial forces moved
against Saxony, the elector of Saxony threw in his
lot with the Swedes. The Swedish army met the
Imperials at Breitenfeld near Leipzig and
annihilated them. The Swedes promptly took over
most of southwestern Germany. Ferdinand, Holy
Roman Emperor and king of Bohemia, had no choice
but to recall Wallenstein. The Swedes and
Wallenstein's new army met near Leipzig at Luetzen
on November 16, 1632. The battle was a draw, but
Gustavus was killed. Fearing Wallenstein's rising
power, and concerned by his intrigues with hostile
powers, the emperor had him killed. With some
imagination, one can see Saddam Hussein as a
modern-day Wallenstein who was first used by the
US against an Islamist Iran and then destroyed to
punish his intrigues with hostile powers.
The Imperial and Spanish armies joined and
inflicted a crushing defeat on the Swedes at
Noerdlingen. All the Swedish gains in southern
Germany were lost. After Noerdlingen, most of the
German territorial rulers made their peace with
the emperor. Under the resultant Peace of Prague,
most of the church lands in Protestant hands in
1627 were allowed to remain so.
After the
invasion of Iraq, most of the Arab states also
made their peace with the US, most notably Libya's
Muammar Gaddafi. The Financial Times reported on
March 26, 2003, that Libya brought to an end
decades of international isolation as a pariah
state with a promise to join forces with the
United States and the United Kingdom to fight the
"global war against terrorism". It promised to
provide intelligence to help root out al-Qaeda and
secured a gas-exploration deal with Shell that
could be worth billions of dollars. Tony Blair, UK
prime minister, held two hours of talks with
Gaddafi in a bedroom tent a few kilometers outside
of Tripoli, the first time a British leader had
set foot in the country since 1943. He emerged to
declare the Libyan leader an important ally of the
neo-imperialists and urged other Arab countries to
follow Tripoli's example.
In May 1635, 17
years after the beginning of the Thirty Years'
War, France declared war on Spain and increased
the scope of its interventions in the Empire, and
gradually weakened the Imperial forces. Earlier,
in October 1634, the Holy Roman Emperor, the king
of Spain and the Roman Catholic princes of Germany
had agreed to a joint attack on France. Louis XIII
was simply preempting the inevitable: attack
before France itself was attacked.
The
military prospects of France were not good. Its
troops were undisciplined and lacked experience in
the newer forms of fighting. France, therefore,
needed alliances. In July 1635, France signed a
treaty with Savoy, Parma and Mantua for a joint
campaign in northern Italy. The French Huguenot
general, the Duc de Rohan, was sent to help the
Swiss Protestants in a campaign to overthrow the
Valtellina. In October 1635, Bernhard of
Saxe-Weimar and his army were taken into French
service.
To sustain the above alliances,
Richelieu needed improved finances by taking
loans, selling government offices to the highest
bidder (though not necessarily the most talented)
and to place government tax inspectors
(intendants) on permanent location in the
provinces to ensure tax collection. French
military involvement in the Thirty Years' War got
off to a poor start. The Spanish made timely and
generous concessions to the Swiss Protestants in
the Valtellina and therefore stability was brought
back to the area. Rohan was abandoned by the Swiss
rebels and had to withdraw to France.
In
1636 came the expected attack on France by the
major Catholic powers of Europe. The high taxes in
France had made Richelieu a very unpopular man and
the invading Catholic forces hoped to capitalize
on this and be seen as a liberating force with
religious righteousness. France had to endure a
three-pronged attack. The Cardinal-Infante
Ferdinand attacked through Picardy. An Imperial
army led by Graf von Gallas attacked through the
Vosges and Phillip IV of Spain led an attack from
the south.
The Cardinal-Infante was
especially successful and many Parisians feared
that their city would be occupied. It was commonly
thought that Richelieu would be dismissed as a
concession to the Cardinal-Infante but Louis XIII
stood by him and asked Parisians to be patriotic
and supply money to the government in the defense
of Paris. Bernhard of Weimar pushed back Gallas
and the attack by Phillip IV failed to
materialize. The Cardinal failed to maintain his
push and he too was pushed back from Paris.
Though the attack on France failed, the
prestige of France as a nation had suffered. It
had proclaimed itself as the savior against the
domination of Europe by the Holy Roman Emperor,
but a nation that had been invaded could hardly
claim the status of protector of European
liberties.
The German electors had no
faith in France. In the autumn of 1636 they were
summoned to Regensburg by Ferdinand, Holy Roman
Emperor and king of Bohemia. Here, they duly
elected his son, Ferdinand, king of the Romans. In
February 1637, the elder Ferdinand died and his
son succeeded him as Ferdinand III. Like any new
emperor or king, Ferdinand had to prove himself,
but his start was less than auspicious. France
took control of Alsace and much of the Rhineland
while the Swedes took over or neutralized northern
Germany and carried the war into Bohemia. Over the
final four years of the war, the parties were
actively negotiating at Osnabrueck and Muenster in
Westphalia. On October 24, 1648, the Peace of
Westphalia was signed, ending the Thirty Years'
War.
Reorganization and
compromise
No true Diet or Reichstag had
been assembled since 1613. The emperors, Ferdinand
II and III both, had ruled by fiat and the consent
of the electors. While they had hoped to resolve
matters themselves, the electors, at the
Kurfeurstentag opened in Nuremberg on February 3,
1640, agreed that a Diet should be called. It was
to debate a broader amnesty than that granted by
the Peace of Prague in the hopes of at last
bringing peace to the Empire. The Diet actually
opened at Regensburg on September 13, 1640. At
first all went according to the Imperial plan. A
safe-conduct was issued to emissaries from
Hesse-Cassel and Brunswick-Lueneberg and even to
the Winter King's relict, Elizabeth Stuart. The
Diet agreed to a general amnesty. And to put some
force behind these pacific plans, the current size
of, and subsidies to, the Imperial army were
agreed.
In 1640 a short pamphlet,
Dissertatio de ratione Status in Imperio nostro
Romano-Germanico, was published under the
pseudonym Hippolithus a Lapide, but generally
attributed to the Swedish court historiographer
Bogislav von Chemnitz. This widely read work
demonstrated the limits of the authority of the
emperors under the Imperial constitution and the
manner in which the Hapsburgs had exceeded their
legitimate authority in pursuit of power.
In December 1640, Georg-Wilhelm, elector
of Brandenburg, died and was succeeded by his son,
Frederich-Wilhelm, as the Great Elector who in
January 1641 removed his late father's adviser,
the pro-Imperial Schwartzenberg. During the summer
of 1641, the Swedes and French had shown that,
regardless of the emperor's wishes, they were not
going to disappear from the Empire, nor were they
going to permit any solution to be reached of
which they were not a part.
On June 30,
1641, they entered into the Treaty of Hamburg,
which renewed their 1638 treaty of alliance, which
was set to expire. Unlike prior treaties, which
had run for a specified term, this was to last
until the war was over. In July 1641,
Frederich-Wilhelm concluded a two-year truce with
Sweden. He then announced to the shocked Diet that
he did not consider the Imperial proposals,
grounded on an extension of the Peace of Prague
and seeking a purely domestic solution to the wars
of the Empire, worthy of his support. The lesser
Protestant princes immediately began to distance
themselves from the emperor and rally to the
Brandenburger.
The Swedes and French
issued an invitation to the emperor, Spain and the
Estates of the Empire to peace conferences to be
held in Westphalia. On December 4, 1642,
Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, died.
His health had long been weak and he had persisted
in his labors only by dint of his preternatural
will. He was succeeded as Louis XIII's chief
minister by the Sicilian Giulio Mazarini, more
commonly known as Cardinal Mazarin.
Even
though the convening of peace conferences, both
domestic and foreign, had been set, peace did not
come swiftly to the Empire. After the close of the
Reichstag of Regensburg and the signing of the
Treaty of Hamburg, a structure for negotiation was
in place. In theory, the purely domestic quarrels
of the Empire were to be settled at Frankfurt in a
meeting of the Princes of the Empire, the
Deputationstag. The international dimension of the
war was to be settled by negotiations at Muenster
and Osnabrueck.
According to the
Preliminary Treaty of Hamburg, the Congress of
Westphalia was to open on March 25, 1642. However,
this was rendered impossible by delays in
ratification of the treaty: the emperor delayed
his approval until July 26, 1642. As a result, the
official opening date was revised to July 11,
1643. Even then, only the Imperial representatives
were there on time. As they had no one with whom
to negotiate, no progress was made.
On May
14, 1643, Louis XIII died. His widow queen, Anne
of Austria, a Hapsburg and sister to Philip IV,
was appointed regent to the infant Louis XIV.
Hopes of a softening of policy toward the
Hapsburgs were misplaced. Anne was far more
zealous in the protection of her son's interests
than her brother's. She confided the running of
France to Mazarin, who continued Richelieu's
anti-Hapsburg policies unabated. While the
diplomatic front remained static, the war did not.
The Peace of Westphalia represented a
compromise rather than an unconditional surrender.
Each of the combatants had experienced abrupt
reversals of fortune during the course of the war:
thus neither was willing to proceed on the
assumption that the emperor's dire military
straits would continue. Further, the interests of
the Swedes and the French were sufficiently
divergent that the emperor was able to play one
off against the other. For example, the Swedish
desire for a guarantee of Protestant rights in the
Hapsburg domains was scotched by the French at
Imperial insistence. The peace thus concluded had
something for everyone and everything for no one,
the classic outcome of a balance of power. The
primary component of the peace from the
international perspective was a complex series of
land transfers within the Empire. This was
particularly true of the Swedish acquisition of
eastern Pomerania, which led to a complex chain
reaction of land transfers, mostly representing
re-secularization of bishoprics returned to the
Catholic Church under the Edict of Restitution.
After these transfers, all dreams of the
Roman Church of its re-establishment in northern
Germany were ended. The constitution of the Empire
was so adjusted as to render its already loose
structure utterly incoherent, with a particular
laxity imposed in matters of religion. The Princes
of the Empire were granted an expanded version of
their German liberties, the Landeshoheit. They
could make military alliances among themselves and
with foreigners, could wage war and make peace,
only provided the alliances and wars were not
directed against the emperor. As the future was to
display, this was an empty proviso. To protect
against the emperor and Catholic electors using
the machinery of the Imperial state to advance the
old religion, Protestants were to be admitted as
judges in the Imperial courts in numbers equal to
the Catholics, and in any matter before the Diet
that had religious implications, unanimity of
decision was required. The followers of John
Calvin were at last to be considered followers of
the Augsburg Confession, and thus receive the same
rights under the Imperial constitution as the
Catholics and Lutherans.
Within the
Empire, a broad amnesty was granted to all.
The Edict of Restitution was finally laid
in its grave. The Peace set the normaljahre
to January 1, 1624, with all lands in Protestant
hands at that date to remain so for at least 40
years. Since this date was before the Imperial
advances in northern Germany attendant upon the
Danish war, the north German Protestant lands were
to remain secularized.
The pope protested
the loss of lands, but purely pro forma, in
order to preserve the Church's rights should the
war rekindle. Even these mild protests were met
with a provision in the final treaty in which the
parties agreed to ignore any formal protest the
Church might lodge. The papacy itself was
unwilling to endanger the fragile peace through
excessive vigor in preservation of its rights: the
bull formally protesting the settlement, Zelo
Domus Domine, was not issued until August 20,
1650, although it was backdated to November 26,
1648.
The Catholics received confirmation
that there would be no more creeping
secularizations accomplished by changes in the
religion of holders of bishoprics. The Protestants
were to recognize the reservatio
ecclesiasticorum, and any prelate converting
to the reformed faith would henceforward lose his
benefices. Various of the parties received
monetary settlements, either to compensate them
for losses of lands, or to assist in payment of
the long-suffering soldiery.
The results
of the war and the two peace treaties were highly
significant. France replaced Spain as the greatest
power in Europe. With Sweden, France had blocked
the Hapsburg efforts to strengthen their authority
in the Empire. At Westphalia, the right of the
individual states within the Empire to make war
and conclude alliances was recognized. In theory
as well as in fact, the most important of these
states became virtually autonomous, and German
unity was postponed for more than two centuries.
The Empire was further dismembered by the
recognition of the independence of Switzerland and
the seven northern provinces of the Netherlands.
Two new powers emerged in northern Germany. Sweden
received part of Pomerania and the bishoprics of
Bremen and Verden; Brandenburg-Prussia added the
rest of Pomerania and several secularized
bishoprics to its possessions. In southern
Germany, the Bavarian rulers were permitted to
keep the upper Palatinate and the title of
elector, but the Lower Palatinate was restored to
Frederick's son and an eighth electorate was
created for him. France received most of Alsace by
the Treaty of Westphalia, and by the Treaty of
Pyrenees parts of Flanders and Artois in the
Spanish Netherlands and lands in the Pyrenees.
The religious settlement at Westphalia
confirmed the predominance of Catholicism in
southern Germany and of Protestantism in northern
Germany. The principle accepted by the Peace of
Augsburg of 1555 that Catholic and Lutheran
princes could determine the religion practiced in
their territory was maintained, and this privilege
was extended to include the Calvinists as well.
The Austrian Hapsburgs had failed in their
efforts to increase their authority in the Empire
and to eradicate Protestantism, but they emerged
from the war stronger than before. In Bohemia,
they had stamped out Protestantism, broken the
power of the old nobility, and declared the crown
hereditary in the male line of their family. With
Bohemia now firmly in their grasp and with their
large group of adjoining territories, they were
ready to expand to the east in the Balkans, to the
south in Italy, or to interfere once more in the
Empire.
Losers
The above
detailed summary of the complexity of the Thirty
Years' War presents a glimpse of how unpredictably
the "war on terrorism" will affect the shape of
world order over its anticipated protracted course
of decades. Rising powers such as China, India and
Brazil, as well as a revitalized Russia, will
eventually become major players, as will a
European Union and Japan increasingly independent
of US domination. There is also the unstoppable
spread of socialist movements in Central and Latin
America as a major factor in the evolution of new
balance-of-power configurations. If the US
persists with its faith-based foreign policy for
an extended period, it may fall into the danger of
repeating the fate of Catholic Spain.
The
real losers in the Thirty Years' War were the
German people. More than 300,000 had been killed
in battle. Millions of civilians had died of
malnutrition and disease, and wandering,
undisciplined troops had robbed, burned and looted
almost at will. The population of the Empire
dropped from about 21 million to 13.5 million
between 1618 and 1648. Today, the real losers so
far in the "war on terrorism" are the Iraqi people
and their Islamic brothers. The Thirty Years' War
remains one of the most terrible in history. The
long-range result of the war, which was to endure
for about two centuries, was the enshrinement of a
Germany divided among many territories, all of
which, despite their continuing membership in the
Holy Roman Empire up to its formal dissolution in
1806, had de facto sovereignty. After the fall of
imperialism, the Westphalia principle of sovereign
states has been deviously used by Western
neo-imperialists to rule the region through a
proxy of puppet sovereign states to oppose
pan-Arabism. As unnatural fragmentation of the
German nation has been identified by analysts as a
long-term underlying cause of later German
militarism, the unnatural fragmentation of the
Arabic nation is also an underlying cause of
Islamic terrorism.
Next:
Militarism and failed states
Henry C K
Liu is chairman of the New York-based Liu
Investment Group.
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