【Article/Observer Network Columnist Article 1】
The European Renaissance after the Crusades led to court corruption, moral degeneration, warlord scuffles throughout Europe, and the bottomless pursuit of monetary and commercial interests by the popes and European royal families, which eventually led to the awakening of the "national consciousness" of European countries and the rise of national power. One of the catalysts for the rise of this "national consciousness" was the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which broke out in the first half of the 17th century.
Once the "national consciousness" rises, a series of new chaos driven by "national interests" will inevitably break out among European countries. Thus later historians and politicians dismissed the series of wars that erupted after the Thirty Years' War by falsely claiming how the Peace of Westphalia promoted respect for national sovereignty in modern European history.
The series of 17th-century scuffles that broke out only after the signing of the Peace of Westphalia reflected the fierce competition before the rise of the "industrialized war machine" in Europe, laying the groundwork for the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War in the 18th century, the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century, and the two world wars in the early 20th century.
Thus, this Thirty Years' War at the beginning of the 17th century could not have been the last epic war in Europe, but rather a rehearsal and rehearsal of the second half of the 17th century and the entire 18th-19th century and the 20th century. It was also a European war second only to the First and Second World Wars in terms of intensity, scale and brutality. In other words, the Thirty Years' War ended the Renaissance movement, and the miniature "system of state competition" between the Italian city-states that developed during this period was sublimated to a new level—finally reaching the level of the Spring and Autumn Warring States era in ancient China, and opening up the nation-state rise movement in Europe in the next two or three hundred years after Portugal and Spain.
In this national struggle, the Portuguese and Spanish empires will decline, and France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Britain, Austria, Prussia, and the German Empire towards unification will rise on the blood and corpses of habsburgs and land empires such as Prussia, Austria, and Bohemia.
The Thirty Years' War has been described as one of the worst humanitarian disasters in European history. 8 million people, mostly Germans, died from swords, artillery, famine, disease and retaliatory massacres. Back-and-forth tug-of-war and re-alliances between nations have led to the repeated fall of many European cities, with mercenaries from all over the world flocking to the battlefields of the European hinterland, where they are strewn by corpses, trampling crops, burning towns, raping and murdering civilians, looting and destroying property.
This devastating war, which lasted for three decades, fully reproduced the "de-moralization" aftermath of the Crusades, but the blade and blade of the massacre were directed at the white European Christians themselves— only in the name of the religious conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism. Moreover, the war was fought over an even longer eighty-year War between the Netherlands-Spanish War and the France-Spain War, both of which had nothing to do with religious conflicts but with political and commercial interests.
Pictured: A large-scale grave discovered by archaeologists in Leipzig, Germany, in 2006, with the dead of 15-50 years old soldiers, identified as the site of the Battle of Lützen during the Thirty Years' War. Most of the soldiers died from head shots, and some from knife wounds. The battle was one of the turning points of the Thirty Years' War.
The German thinker and great writer Schiller of the 18th century, in his historical monograph "History of the Thirty Years' War", described the Thirty Years' War that took place in Europe after entering the 17th century as follows: "As a result of the war, the population of these regions was drastically reduced, crops were destroyed, cities and villages were reduced to ruins, and thousands of soldiers sacrificed their lives. The faint cultural flame that had just been emitted in Germany had been extinguished for half a century, and the social morality that had not yet been fully revitalized had once again given way to ancient barbaric customs. ”
"Deutsche Land [referring to the entire German-speaking region before reunification— author's note] has indeed reached the point of extinction. The place where the joyous and industrious crowds of people used to gather, the place where nature once poured out its most wonderful blessings, and the place that was once the most prosperous and prosperous, is now a wasteland. The land has left the industrious hands of the plow-tillers, abandoned, and overgrown with weeds; Where the new seed is about to bear fruit or a good harvest is in sight, a single march can wipe out all the years' toil and take away the last hope of the haggard peasants; Burned palaces, wilderness lands, burned villages, shocking sights, a scene of family destruction. ”
"Thousands of mouths pray for peace thousands of times, and even the most pernicious peace is regarded as a good deed of Heaven." Schiller argues that on the surface it is "religion that causes all this, that everything that happens is caused by religion, but that all the military actions taken are not all about religion." Had it not been for the rapid agreement of personal and national interests, the voices of theologians and peoples would not have been echoed by so many zealous princes, nor would there have been so many brave and fearless warriors fighting for new doctrines. ”
In his book, Schiller attempts to tear off the sacred religious cloak of both sides of the war, exposing that these wars are motivated by the "selfishness" and "unspeakable desire for power" of emperors, princes, and monarchs of various countries, and is a great scuffle for hegemony, land, and wealth.
When talking about why King Adolf of Sweden would lead a large army to invade Germany, Schiller pointed out to the point that the purpose of King Gustav Adolf of Sweden to invade Germany was to maintain the political fragmentation of the German state and combat the formation of the central imperial power in Germany; The second was to plunder the rich mineral deposits, wealth, and land of the German state in large quantities. "Monarchs fought for themselves and for expansion, while religious zeal recruited armies for them and opened up the wealth of the people for them. The large number of participants did not come into battle with the hope of obtaining hunting under the war flag, they thought they were shedding blood for the truth, but in fact they were fighting for the interests of the princes. ”
"The division of the Church led to a long period of political division in Germany, which experienced more than 100 years of chaos... some of the great powers in the north, such as Denmark and Sweden, were the first to be incorporated into the European state system, mostly due to the Reformation. Just as the Reformation gave rise to another relationship between the citizens, between rulers and subjects, so the position of the nations as a result of the new changes in the position of the nations vis-à-vis each other, because the division of the Church must be achieved by means of the special process of things, which leads to the convergence of the nations into a close union. But one effect is terrible and harmful, because this universal political sympathy has declared a 30-year-long war of destruction."
In Schiller's view, the reason why this war of hegemony between European monarchies is unfolding on the land of the German nation is because of the political fragmentation of Germany and the struggle for power without moral bottom line between the European powers, which is the root cause of this deep disaster in Germany.
Schiller believed that the religious wars between the princes within Germany, the invasion of european external countries and the rampant hegemony in the German lands, and the difficulties in the growth of the new German nation were all rooted in the political disintegration of Germany.
Thus, like Dante, the great poet of the early Renaissance, and Machiavelli, the great thinker of the mid-Renaissance, in the face of the fragmentation of Italy and the barbaric invasion of France, Schiller believed that anything that would benefit german unity, even the strengthening of imperial power or the introduction of an absolute monarchy, would be more beneficial to the fundamental interests of the German nation than the fragmentation. This is actually the situation that China faced in the last years of the Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China era – hence the background of the founding of the People's Republic of China.
The picture is part of the "Great Tragedy of War" group of pictures. The Great Tragedy of War is a series of 18 etchings produced by the French artist Jacques Callot (1592–1635). Published in 1633, the series is Carlotte's most famous work and has been called the first "anti-war statement" in European art.
After the Thirty Years' War had completely exhausted and exhausted all of Europe' financial and material resources, the European countries had to return to the negotiating table and sign the historic Peace of Westphalia.
The Thirty Years' War caused the population of the Holy Roman Empire to fall from about twenty million in 1600 to just over ten million in 1650, a decline of nearly half, so that it did not return to the pre-war population level until 1750, a hundred years after the end of the war. In many parts of Germany, the number of inhabitants fell by as much as 60 percent. From 1620 to 1650, augsburg's population fell from 48,000 to 21,000 and Munich's from 22,000 to 17,000. In the rest of Germany, the rural population also plummeted by 40 percent and the urban population by a third.
The Peace of Westphalia is the collective name for two peace treaties signed in October 1648 in the Westphalian cities of Osnabrück and Münster. The negotiation process was long and complex, with the negotiations taking place in two cities, as both sides of the war wanted to meet in territory under their control. A total of 109 delegations represented the belligerents, but not all were present at the same time. The Negotiating Conference signed two treaties to end each overlapping war: the Münster Peace Treaty and the Osnabrück Peace Treaty.
These treaties ended the Thirty Years' War of the Holy Roman Empire, with the Habsburgs (the rulers of Austria and Spain) and their Catholic allies on one side, the Protestant powers (Sweden, Denmark, and part of the Holy Roman Empire) and Catholic France on the other. Later scholars of international relations often identified the Peace of Westphalia as the origin of the principles that were essential to modern international relations, including freedom of religion, the inviolability of borders, and non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign States.
But this was really just a good wish for the later Anglo-American dominated view of ideological history. What determined the course of European history was not a few fake peace treaties, nor the so-called Spirit of the Western Pact, but the new type of European great power relations that stood out after the Thirty Years' War and the national interests and national will they embodied.
This new type of nation-state interest relationship and national will, inspired by the Nationalist Enlightenment, will promote a new round of colonialism in Europe since the great geographical discovery, and the redistribution of the global interests occupied by Portugal and Spain through the last colonialist movement, and in this new round of interest division movement, through the intense arms race and commercial competition, a "scientific revolution" and "industrial revolution" that will last forever in history. And using the enormous energy and destructive power accumulated by these two revolutions, at the beginning of the twentieth century, two world wars dwarfed by the "Thirty Years' War" in both scale and intensity. The German nation, which had suffered so much in the Thirty Years' War, would avenge all the Europeans who had oppressed them in both world wars.
Thus the actual situation at the time of the signing and post-signing of the Peace of Westphalia differed greatly from that of Anglo-American historians and international relations scholars. The treaty merely confirmed mutual recognition between Catholicism and Protestantism, and that monarchs could choose their own religion and not persecute each other's adherents on religious grounds. The so-called mutual recognition of national sovereignty and borders was not written into the treaty at all, and it was entirely the interpretation of posterity, especially the interpretation given by the dominant Anglo-Americans in order to maintain the equilibrium system of the European continent.
Moreover, the treaty did not completely put an end to the conflicts caused by the Thirty Years' War. For example, the war between France and Spain lasted until the Treaty of Pyrenees in 1659. And the war between Spain and Portugal did not end, it was a conflict contained in the 80 years' war; The Spanish-Portuguese War did not end until 1663. And the Thirty Years' War was followed by a series of wars by Louis XIV, the "Sun King", and the "Four Anglo-Dutch" Wars between England and the Netherlands, which were also Protestant countries. These wars are wars that challenge the national sovereignty and borders of European countries, so how can there be mutual respect and recognition of sovereignty and borders?
The practical effect of the Thirty Years' War, however, was that the monarchs of the European countries realized that they represented the commercial interests of the entire country and the geopolitical interests associated with it, not just the royal family's own interests. In other words, a new "national consciousness" that emerged from the Thirty Years' War was that the crown should run the country as it managed a corporation, and seek the greatest commercial benefits for that "corporation."
Nations may cooperate for commercial interests, or they may wage war for commercial interests, but the goal of war is not to impose their own religious beliefs on the other, but only for commercial interests and the geopolitical interests that are closely related to them.
Such a commercial national interest should be the highest goal that a monarch should pursue. Thus, after the Thirty Years' War, the European nations accepted the creed that "there are no eternal allies, only eternal interests", and the way of getting along with the state, because the Thirty Years' War itself proved this truth, and there was no longer a need to throw a knife at the stake for religious feelings. The only thing europe needs to uphold is not a unified religious value, but a balance of power; There is peace in Europe only if there is balance.
Thus, while the Peace of Westphalia did not openly acknowledge in black and white that The European system of state relations and state competition was a system based on "national sovereignty," "national interests," and "national reasons," it reinforced, through religious reconciliation, a subconscious that sought to base state relations on a universal Darwinian rule of "jungle competition."
Such a subconscious is to transform past historical acts of war and conquest on religious grounds into corporate acts based on "national commercial interests", or similar competitive relations between companies, but more bloody.
In this way, the Peace of Westphalia formally commercialized the materialization of the "state" and the "violence of the state" five hundred years after the Crusades and three hundred years after the Renaissance. This is also a true reflection of the essence of Renaissance and Machiavelli thought—that the state should no longer be so militaristic as to waste a great deal of tax resources because of differences in religious beliefs or political systems, but can wage wars over conflicts of commercial and geopolitical interests, as confirmed by the series of wars that followed since the Peace of Westphalia.
In fact, shortly after the end of the Thirty Years' War, the Netherlands and Britain, who belonged to the same religious (Protestant) camp, embarked on a series of maritime wars – but the goal of the war was very clear, that is, to compete for control of global trade and overseas colonial resources, and the means of war were military mercantilism, that is, to force each other into submission by destroying each other's trade routes and commercial interests, rather than to massacre the other's population.
After thirty years of war, European countries realized that they could coexist in a system of national competition in which they competed with each other and exchanged and cooperated with each other, and that inter-state affairs were dominated by commercial affairs, but military strength and means of war were the bargaining chips at the negotiating table. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy and 26th President Theodore Roosevelt put it: "Readiness for war is the surest guarantee of peace, and those who wish to see one country live in peace with other nations are wise if they rely on a first-class fleet of first-class warships, rather than on any arbitration treaty devised by smart people." ”
Thus, the spirit of the Peace of Westphalia embodies the view of the state of Richelieu, the preeminent Statesman of France, the cardinal of King Louis XIII, and the first assistant minister: the state is an abstract and eternal entity with its own existential value; The needs of the state are determined not by the personal preferences of the rulers, by the interests of the family, or by the pursuit of the goal of spreading religious ideology to the whole world, but by the geopolitical interests of the state based on commercial principles, the so-called "national reasons."
This also explains why, in the Thirty Years' War, France did not side with the Catholic Spanish and Habsburg dynasties, but resolutely sided with the Protestant Nordic countries, because France's national interests, rather than the religious preferences of King Louis XIII, determined France's enemies and its position on the war.
Richelieu saw the division of the Habsburgs (Central Europe) as a necessity for French national interests, and a strong and unified Catholic central European region (i.e., the Habsburgs) would monopolize the resources of the continent, so it would be in France's national interest to prevent the unification of Central Europe (including Spain, Bohemia, Austria, Prussia, and the Spanish Netherlands).
In a memorandum of 1632, Richelieu articulated what he saw france's direct participation in the war means for the war: enabling it to "completely destroy the Austrian Dynasty,...... Profit from the endgame and make the King of France the head of all the Catholic princes of Christendom, the most powerful figure in Europe. This goal will be achieved together with Sweden, but thereafter the King of Sweden will not be able to match the King of France, especially since he "does not have as many resources as France".
After the commercial boom brought about by the Crusades, the Renaissance and the Great Geographical Discoveries, France has long considered itself an enemy on both sides, the Habsburgs of Spain to the south and the Holy Roman Empire headed by the Habsburgs to the east.
Thus, Catholic France resolutely sided with the Nordic Protestant bloc in the Thirty Years' War precisely because of its national interest. As Kissinger said, "If the Protestant side is completely defeated, the austrian crown will point its sword directly at France." ”
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