Norms of Peace and Security Policy: Basic Problems of Early Modern Peacemaking Using the Example of the Peace of Westphalia

The Early Modern period was critically important to the development of techniques for peacekeeping and peacemaking that are still in use today. All the more remarkable, then, that for a long time historians did not pay any special attention to the history of peace during that era. It is only recently that the concrete techniques and instruments of peacemaking, as well as the reasons for the extremely high incidence of war during that era, have shifted onto center stage for scholars. Characteristic for the Early Modern period was the fact that a state of war constituted a virtual 'normality' in the Europe of the day, despite the fact that Christian rulers were 'normatively' committed to preserving peace among one another. One of the core causes for this was the emergence of a new plurality in both the religious and political spheres, which, however, did not come to be generally accepted until the 18th century. The answer to this problem of a 'plurality without pluralism' was the specifically Early Modern approach to security policy. The author uses the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 to demonstrate the concrete forms these policies could take.