collapsedsquid:

Beyond that, how did the misleading story become so popular? The treaties were only properly mythologized in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when European historians turned to the early modern period in order to craft stories that served their own worldview. As scholars such as Richard Devetak and Edward Keene have explained, conservative historians of the period—particularly the Göttingen-based German historical school—were keen to depict the pre-1789 European continent as an orderly system of states, characterized by restraint and mutual respect, that had come to be threatened by Napoleon’s expansionist imperialism. This reinvention of early modern European history was part of a larger and now well-studied trend that sought to make both the rise of the states-system and of global European power seem like a linear, inevitable, and laudable process. Europeans, the story went, were uniquely modern in their political organization, and they would bring this gift to the rest of the world.

As Osiander explains, the Peace of Westphalia came to be given pride of place in this new historical narrative by means of recycled seventeenth-century propaganda. Looking for a story of states fighting for their sovereignty against imperial domination, nineteenth-century historians found exactly what they needed in the anti-Habsburg fabrications that had been disseminated by the French and Swedish crowns during the Thirty Years’ War.

Twentieth-century historians pressed this narrative further still. As is so often the case with foundational myths, one article seems to have been especially influential, particularly in the fields of international relations and international law: Leo Gross’s essay “The Peace of Westphalia: 1648–1948,” published in 1948 in the American Journal of International Law. Canonized as “timeless” and “seminal” at the time, the article gave meaning to the emerging postwar order. By comparing the 1945 UN Charter to the Peace of Westphalia, Gross rehashed a story about treaties for freedom, equality, non-intervention, and all the rest of the alleged virtues for reinventing national sovereignty. He did note that the text of the treaties did not appear to reflect these ideas, but he appealed to general principles that, he assumed, must have underpinned the agreements. Those who went on to cite him took myth-building a step further: in the best case, they cherry-picked clauses about the internal affairs of the Holy Roman Empire and brandished them as foundations for a new pan-European order. More often, they simply sidestepped the gap between the story of Westphalia and the content of the treaties altogether.

You are all eating from the trash can of nation-state ideology