"}Beyond that, how did the misleading story become so popular? The \ntreaties were only properly mythologized in the late eighteenth and \nearly nineteenth centuries, when European historians turned to the early\n modern period in order to craft stories that served their own \nworldview. As scholars such as Richard Devetak and Edward Keene\n have explained, conservative historians of the period\u2014particularly the \nG\u00f6ttingen-based German historical school\u2014were keen to depict the \npre-1789 European continent as an orderly system of states, \ncharacterized by restraint and mutual respect, that had come to be \nthreatened by Napoleon\u2019s expansionist imperialism. This reinvention of \nearly modern European history was part of a larger and now well-studied\n trend that sought to make both the rise of the states-system and of \nglobal European power seem like a linear, inevitable, and laudable \nprocess. Europeans, the story went, were uniquely modern in their \npolitical organization, and they would bring this gift to the rest of \nthe world.
As Osiander explains, the Peace of Westphalia came to be given pride \nof place in this new historical narrative by means of recycled \nseventeenth-century propaganda. Looking for a story of states fighting \nfor their sovereignty against imperial domination, nineteenth-century \nhistorians found exactly what they needed in the anti-Habsburg \nfabrications that had been disseminated by the French and Swedish crowns\n during the Thirty Years\u2019 War.
Twentieth-century historians pressed this narrative further still. As\n is so often the case with foundational myths, one article seems to have\n been especially influential, particularly in the fields of \ninternational relations and international law: Leo Gross\u2019s essay \u201cThe Peace of Westphalia: 1648\u20131948,\u201d published in 1948 in the American Journal of International Law. Canonized\n as \u201ctimeless\u201d and \u201cseminal\u201d at the time, the article gave meaning to \nthe emerging postwar order. By comparing the 1945 UN Charter to the \nPeace of Westphalia, Gross rehashed a story about treaties for freedom, \nequality, non-intervention, and all the rest of the alleged virtues for \nreinventing national sovereignty. He did note that the text of the \ntreaties did not appear to reflect these ideas, but he appealed to \ngeneral principles that, he assumed, must have underpinned the \nagreements. Those who went on to cite him took myth-building a step \nfurther: in the best case, they cherry-picked clauses about the internal\n affairs of the Holy Roman Empire and brandished them as foundations for\n a new pan-European order. More often, they simply sidestepped the gap \nbetween the story of Westphalia and the content of the treaties \naltogether.
You are all eating from the trash can of nation-state ideology