ABSTRACT
Most textbooks on international law state the founding event of modern international law to be the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 that followed the Thirty Years War. This is the event in which a European society of sovereign states is said to have been established and, so, the law of nations. The peace was set out in two treaties between the Roman Empire and various European powers at Osnabrück on 15 May 1648 and at Münster on 24 October. The treaties recognized the existence of nascent, territorial states comprising their own legal and religious jurisdictions. Prior to the peace, these territories had been subject to the jurisdiction of the Holy Roman Empire, which had been ruled by the Catholic Church over a number of centuries. European peoples were not the only peoples over whom the Catholic Church had claimed jurisdiction by virtue of its divine duty to save all souls. However, the Peace of Westphalia remained silent about the territorial rights of the peoples of the ‘New World’ and their territories. In that respect, the peace was founded on older claims of legitimate rule that had sanctioned the objectification of a New World. That same objectification enabled European legal theorists to incorporate the violence of colonization into new theories supporting the law of nations that arose out of the Peace of Westphalia. This division between the Old World of Europe and the New World, understood as an effect of pre-modern violence, remains a part of international relations today. In consequence, I suggest that the Peace of Westpahlia should be considered as much a culminating event of violence as a foundational event of modern, international law.
