On Westphalian Myth, and Its Mythmakers
A follow-up to the Global Humanist Shoptalk: "Petronationalism" miniseries
I had a sinking feeling when scripting the first episode in Global Humanist Shoptalk’s first miniseries, “Petronationalism”. I knew what I wanted to say, and what I wanted to explore over the course of the series. But what would I do about the loaded implications that could all too easily come out of part of my historical overview?
In the first episode, “The Making of Nations”, I take us through a familiar story about the start of World War I, as a rupture in a balance of power that had supposedly shaped how sovereign nations lived together for centuries. This prior arrangement was the Westphalian system: the use of multinational mutual aggression treaties that bound states together in the event of any one going to war. Who would want to rock the boat and risk war not just against one country, but many? Surely this system, with its secular approach to adjudicating between religious and non-religious interests, would allow us to protect sovereignty over a country’s internal affairs at long last.
In the episode, though, I don’t just deconstruct the myth of a grand transformation in international law that then abided for centuries. I also discuss when and how the myth first took off—and that’s where things get tricky with the script. Because the idea of the Westphalian system, and WWI as a rupture of that balance of power, was most notably advanced after the end of World War II, when so much of Western political and socioeconomic theory gained new stories, for better and for worse.
It was the era right after the Bretton-Woods conference, which had yielded decisions about global finance we’re still struggling with today. (Some of which, I discuss in the second miniseries of Season 2, “Global Finance”.)
It was the era of the founding of the United Nations, with all its grand ambitions and human uplift projects, through international promises of collaborative aid.
And it was the era in which the modern state of Israel emerged, as a country backed by Western states for reasons all their own.
Earlier this year, in a four-part series for OnlySky, I wrote about the West’s selfish use of Jewish trauma and Zionism: to further its own regional concerns, to tend to its own ego/conscience, and to provide political shelter for ongoing antisemitism. The point of that series wasn’t to talk about specific Israeli policies today, or the human rights nightmare for Palestinians. There’s a time and a place for those, but there’s also a lack of maturity we need to address first. This is because Western states have never been honest brokers in the region, and very rarely treat Israel like the politically complex entity that it is. Western countries’ self-serving uses and abuses of trauma in the region continue to make it very difficult for us to discuss and take action to improve human welfare responsibly. We have a lot of growing up and taking stock to do.
This analytical approach was tricky, though, because some people don’t want to sit with broader notions of complicity, or wrestle with the deeper givens in all our state politics. Any article that isn’t expressly railing against X or Y is a waste of time, by this logic. And yet, that “waste of time” is the crux of my aim with the podcast. I want us to “think slow” more often: to imagine a landscape of critical ideas held in tension; to see what new vocabularies for action might emerge if estranged from the old.
So you can imagine, then, how delicately I also needed to come at one part of my story about the myth of nations: a story in which academics after World War II normalized thinking about more recent European history as guided by Westphalian ideology until disrupted by World War I.
Here’s what I wrote in my script:
This was real sovereignty. Every king, every kingdom, every nation sharing in such a regional dominion, with the right to its own, local rule. And in the next century, eventually? This would also come to be interpreted as the right of the people to choose their own rulers, as in the American Revolution against British governance, and the French Revolution against a disconnected monarchy.
At least, that’s the story two historians in particular, Leo Gross and Hans Morgenthau, created out of the fragile stuff of all our messy histories. On the 300th anniversary of the Peace of Westphalia, in the fragile post-war world of 1948, these two Jewish émigrés from Austria and Germany would advance this story of the modern nation-state in prominent political science journals, and with it shape the mythology of international relations for at least the next fifty years without significant resistance to the main idea: namely, that the Peace of Westphalia marked a deep and sustained transformation to our political systems.
I debated whether or not to include the fact that these two political historians—not the only voices, but among the most prominent in this discourse—were Jewish. This facet of their identity was named often enough in discussions of their work, but was it important to my discussion? Or more to the point, was it more important than the concern I also faced as a storyteller, when essentially advancing a narrative in which two Jewish thinkers helped to shape the modern Western world?
Again, they didn’t do so alone. Their work was published by solid Western academic journals and presses, and plenty of others decided that their ideas were worth discussing and signal-boosting into greater cultural prominence.
But we all know—or should know—that there is a nasty antisemitic myth about Jewish people secretly running the world. And the fact that this particular approach to history arose the same year that the modern state of Israel was declared? Even if there was an actual 300th anniversary to which the authors were centrally attending, and a whole whack of excitement around the UN Charter also on everyone’s minds?
…Yeah, this was a tough concept to articulate properly.
It’s bad enough that my episode focused on WWI—do you have any idea how many different rabbit holes people are always itching to go down when it comes to figuring out the “why” of that war?—while the crux of my argument focuses on Westphalia’s historical legacy: as a political system that I and many scholars argue was never as stable as our myth-making around the lead-up to WWI suggests.
I didn’t want to get side-tracked or bogged down by anything else.
Ultimately, though, I also didn’t want to omit something out of fear, so I did decide to mention that Gross and Morgenthau were Jewish émigrés—because why should I hide this important subject position, for authors writing about recent European history from a truly haunted set of European subject-positions? I knew full well that there was no grand conspiracy afoot—just garden variety contextual biases informing one research paradigm, until the next one came around.
Besides, there would always be room for further elaboration elsewhere.
Here, for instance.
So let’s dive in.
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