ABSTRACT
The dominant discourse on international relations and the dominant discourse on the nature of diplomacy were conditioned by the situation of Europe in the war-torn 17th and 18th centuries. In the centuries before the Westphalian Peace, this old discourse on the religious foundations of political power prevailed. It did so even as the basis for this discourse had become precarious in the real world as the Reformation and the wider spread literacy and the new prominence of science had splintered the common religious base. The transition to this new Westphalian discourse therefore took time and was troubled. Already at the beginning of the 16th century, the discoveries and the expansion of world trade had resulted in the first wave of globalization, with German banks financing silver mines in Latin America and Portuguese vessels fishing cod from the banks off the coast of North America.
