Peace of Westphalia and Implications on the Modern Nation State System

Thirty years of war across Central Europe over religion and territory finally exhausted every side enough to sit down and negotiate — and what came out of those talks in two German towns in 1648 did something no earlier settlement had managed. It made sovereignty, not religion or empire, the basis for organising political life, and the whole planet still runs on that template.

In two minutes

The Peace of Westphalia, a pair of treaties signed in 1648 that ended the Thirty Years' War, is treated as the founding moment of the modern state system because it fixed sovereignty, not religion or imperial authority, as the basis of political power.

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