Both Prussia and Israel were the
product of a holocaust
Two years ago Uri Avnery, one of the few Zionists who you couldn’t describe
as a racist, died. Avnery was a maverick Israeli who began his political life
in Irgun, the fascist Revisionist Zionist militia and ended it as a fighter for
peace.
Avnery formed Gush
Shalom, an Israeli peace group in 1993. He published for 40 years a
muck raking magazine Haolam Hazeh that Ben Gurion hated so much that he refused
to refer to it by name calling it ‘the
filthy weekly’ or ‘the
certain weekly’. Avnery was also a former member of the Knesset, serving three
terms - 1965-1969, 1969-1973, 1979-1981,
as well as being a prolific writer and columnist.
 |
| Avnery was lucky to survive a knife attack on him |
When the PLO
and Yasser Arafat were subject to a siege by the Israeli army in Beirut in 1982,
Avnery crossed the armistice lines to meet him.
Avnery is not the first person to draw attention to the comparison
between Israel and Prussia.
Both military states were by-words for the worship of the military and aggression.
A good biography of Avnery is here.
Take the test below and see how remarkable are the parallels between Israel
and Prussia!
Tony Greenstein
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| Haolem Hazeh pictures Eichmann in the dock at Jerusalem |
Uri Avnery
12/12/09
A SHORT historical quiz: Which state:
(1) Arose after a holocaust in which a third of its people were
destroyed?
(2) Drew from that holocaust the conclusion that only superior military
forces could ensure its survival?
(3) Accorded the army a central role in its life, making it “an army
that had a state, rather than a state that had an army”?
(4) Began by buying the land it took, and continued to expand by
conquest and annexation?
(5) Endeavored by all possible means to attract new immigrants?
(6) Conducted a systematic policy of settlement in the occupied
territories?
(7) Strove to push out the national minority by creeping ethnic
cleansing?
For anyone who has not yet found the answer: it’s the state of Prussia.
But if some readers were tempted to believe that it all applies to the
State of Israel – well, they are right, too. This description fits our state.
The similarity between the two states is remarkable. True, the countries are
geographically very different, and so are the historical periods, but the
points of similarity can hardly be denied.
THE STATE that was respected and feared for 350 years as Prussia started
with another name: Mark Brandenburg. (Mark: march, border area). This territory
in the North-East of Germany was wrested from its Slavic inhabitants and was
initially outside the boundaries of the German Reich. To this day, many of its
place names (including Berlin neighborhoods, like Pankow) are clearly Slavic.
It can be said: Prussia arose on the ruins of another people (some of whose
descendants are still living there).
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| A typical Haolem Hazeh front cover |
A historical curiosity: the land was first paid for in cash. The house
of Hohenzollern, a noble family from South Germany, bought the territory of
Brandenburg from the German Emperor for 400,000 Hungarian Gulden. I don’t know
how that compares with the money paid by the Jewish National Fund for parts of
Palestine before 1948.
The event that largely determined the entire history of Prussia up to
World War II was a holocaust: the 30-years war. Throughout these years -
1618-1648 - practically all the armies of Europe fought each other on German
soil, destroying everything in the process. The soldiers, many of them
mercenaries, the scum of the earth, murdered and raped, pillaged and robbed,
burnt entire towns and drove the pitiful survivors from their lands. In this
war, a third of the German population was killed and two thirds of their
villages destroyed. (Bertolt Brecht immortalized this holocaust in his play,
“Mother Courage”.)
 |
| reading about the Eichmann trial in Haolem Hazeh |
North Germany is a wide open plain. Its borders are unprotected by any
ocean, mountain range or desert. The Prussian answer to the ravages of the
holocaust was to erect an iron wall: a powerful regular army that would make up
for the lack of seas and mountains and be ready to defend the state against all
possible combinations of potential enemies.
At the beginning, the army was an essential instrument for the defense
of the state’s very existence. In the course of time, it became the center of
national life. What started out as the Prussian defense forces became an
aggressive army of conquest that terrified all its neighbors. For some of the
Prussian kings, the army was the main interest in life. For a time, the
soldiers and their families constituted about a quarter of the Berlin
population. An old Prussian saying goes: “Der Soldate / ist der beste Mann im
Staate” – the soldier is the best man in the state. Adulation of the army
became a cult, almost a religion.
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| A younger Avnery |
PRUSSIA WAS never a “normal” state of a homogenous population living
together throughout the centuries. By a sophisticated combination of military
conquest, diplomacy and judicious marriages, its masters succeeded in annexing
more and more territories to their core domain. These territories were not even
contiguous, and some of them were very far from each other.
One of those was the area that came to give the state its name: Prussia.
The original Prussia was located on the shores of the Baltic Sea, in areas that
now belong to Poland and Russia. At first they were conquered by the Order of
Teutonic Knights, a German religious-military order founded during the Crusades
in Acre - the ruins of its main castle, Montfort (Starkenberg), still stand in
Galilee. The German crusaders decided that instead of fighting the heathens in
a faraway country, it made more sense to fight the neighboring pagans and rob
them of their lands. In the course of time, the princes of Brandenburg
succeeded in acquiring this territory and adopted its name for all their
dominions. They also succeeded in upgrading their status and crowned themselves
as kings.
The lack of homogeneity of the Prussian lands, composed as they were of
diverse and unconnected areas, gave birth to the main Prussian creation: the
“State”. This was the factor that was to unite all the different populations,
each of which stuck to its local patriotism and traditions. The “State” – Der
Staat – became a sacred being, transcending all other loyalties. Prussian
philosophers saw the “State” as the incarnation of all the social virtues, the
final triumph of human reason.
The Prussian state became proverbial. Demonized by its enemies, it was,
however, exemplary in many ways – a well organized, orderly and law-abiding
structure, its bureaucracy untainted by corruption. The Prussian official
received a paltry salary, lived modestly and was intensely proud of his status.
He detested ostentation. A hundred years ago Prussia already had a system of
social insurance – long before other major countries dreamed of it. It was also
exemplary in its religious tolerance. Frederick “the Great” declared that
everyone should “find happiness in his
own way”. Once he said that if Turks were to come and settle in Prussia, he
would build mosques for them. Last week, 250 years later, the Swiss passed a
referendum forbidding the building of minarets in their country.
PRUSSIA WAS a very poor country, lacking natural resources, minerals and
good agricultural soil. It used its army to procure richer territories.
Because of the poverty, the population was thinly spread. The Prussian
kings expended much effort in recruiting new immigrants. In 1731, when tens of
thousands of Protestants in the Salzburg area (now part of Austria) were
persecuted by their Catholic ruler, the King of Prussia invited them to his
land. They came with their families and possessions in a mass foot march to
East Prussia, traversing the full length of Germany. When the French Huguenots
(Protestants) were slaughtered by their Catholic kings, the survivors were
invited to Prussia and settled in Berlin, where they contributed greatly to the
development of the country. Jews, too, were allowed to settle in Prussia in
order to contribute to its prosperity, and the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn
became one of the leading lights of the Prussian intelligentsia.
When Poland was divided in 1771 between Russia, Austria and Prussia, the
Prussian state acquired a national minority problem. In the new territory there
lived a large Polish population that stuck to its national identity and language.
The Prussian response was a massive settlement campaign in these areas. This
was a highly organized effort, planned right down to the minutest detail. The
German settlers got a plot of land and many financial benefits. The Polish
minority was oppressed and discriminated against in every possible way. The
Prussian kings wanted to “Germanize” their acquired areas, much as the Israeli
government wants to “Judaize” their occupied territories.
This Prussian effort had a direct impact on the Jewish colonization of
Palestine. It served as an example for the father of Zionist settlement, Arthur
Ruppin, and not by accident – he was born and grew up in the Polish area of
Prussia.
IT IS impossible to exaggerate the influence of the Prussian model on
the Zionist movement in almost all spheres of life.
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| Theodor Herzl |
Theodor Herzl, the founder of the movement, was born in Budapest and
lived most of his life in Vienna. He admired the new German Reich that was
founded in 1871, when he was 11 years old. The King of Prussia – which constituted
about half of the area of the Reich – was crowned as German emperor, and
Prussia formed the new empire in its image. Herzl’s diaries are full of
admiration for the German state. He courted Wilhelm II, King of Prussia and
Emperor of Germany, who obliged by receiving him in a tent before the gate of
Jerusalem. He wanted the Kaiser to become the patron of the Zionist enterprise,
but Wilhelm remarked that, while Zionism itself was an excellent idea, it “could not be realized with Jews”.
Herzl was not the only one to imprint a Prussian-German pattern on the
Zionist enterprise. In this he was overshadowed by Ruppin, who is known today
to Israeli children mainly as a street name. But Ruppin had an immense impact
on the Zionist enterprise, more than any other single person. He was the real
leader of the Zionist immigrants in Palestine in their formative period, the
years of the second and third Aliyah (immigration wave) in the first quarter of
the 20th century. He was the spiritual father of Berl Katznelson, David
Ben-Gurion and their generation, the founders of the Zionist Labor movement
that became dominant in the Jewish society in Palestine, and later in Israel.
It was he who practically invented the Kibbutz and the Moshav (cooperative
settlement).
If so, why has he been almost eradicated from official memory? Because
some sides of Ruppin are best forgotten. Before becoming a Zionist, he was an
extreme Prussian-German nationalist. He was one of the fathers of the
“scientific” racist creed and believed in the superiority of the Aryan race. Up
to the end he occupied himself with measuring skulls and noses in order to
provide support for assorted racist ideas. His partners and friends created the
“science” that inspired Adolf Hitler and his disciples.
The Zionist movement would have been impossible were it not for the work
of Heinrich Graetz, the historian who created the historical image of the Jews
which we all learned at school. Graetz, who was also born in the Polish area of
Prussia, was a pupil of the Prussian-German historians who “invented” the
German nation, much as he “invented” the Jewish nation.
Perhaps the most important thing we inherited from Prussia was the
sacred notion of the “State” (Medina in Hebrew) – an idea that dominates our
entire life. Most countries are officially a “Republic” (France, for example),
a “Kingdom” (Britain) or a “Federation” (Russia). The official name “State of
Israel” is essentially Prussian.
WHEN I first brought up the similarity between Prussia and Israel (in a
chapter dedicated to this theme in the Hebrew and German editions of my 1967
book, “Israel Without Zionists”) it might have looked like a baseless
comparison. Today, the picture is clearer. Not only does the senior officers
corps occupy a central place in all the spheres of our life, and not only is
the huge military budget beyond any discussion, but our daily news is full of
typically “Prussian” items. For example: it transpires that the salary of the
Army Chief of Staff is double that of the Prime Minister. The Minister of
Education has announced that henceforth schools will be assessed by the number
of their pupils who volunteer for army combat units. That sounds familiar – in
German.
After the fall of the Third Reich, the four occupying powers decided to
break up Prussia and divide its territories between several German federal
states, Poland and the USSR. That happened in February 1947 – only 15 months
before the founding of the State of Israel.
Those who believe in the transmigration of souls can draw their own conclusions.
It is certainly food for thought.
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| The 30 year war saw the death of up to 8 million people |
Ending
the new Thirty Years war
New
Statesman January 2016
Why the real history of the Peace of
Westphalia in 17th-century Europe offers a model for bringing stability to the
Middle East.
By Brendan
Simms and Michael Axworthy and Patrick Milton
A man hangs upside down in a fire. Others are
stabbed to death or tortured; their womenfolk offer valuables to save their
lives – or try to flee. Elsewhere, women are assaulted and violated. In another
image the branches of a tree are weighed down with hanging bodies, and a
religious symbol is proffered to a victim as the last thing he will see on
Earth. The caption describes the hanged men as “unhappy fruit”.
This could be Syria today: but it is Europe, in the
mid-17th century, at the height of the Thirty Years War. The artist who
recorded these horrors was Jacques Callot, who saw the French army invade and
occupy Lorraine in 1633. He was perhaps the closest thing his time had to a
photojournalist.
The Thirty Years War, within which the occupation of
Lorraine was just a short episode, has been cited as a parallel in new
discussions of the Middle East by a range of foreign policy practitioners,
including Henry Kissinger and the president of the US Council on Foreign
Relations, Richard Haass, academics such as Martin van Creveld and journalists
such as Andreas Whittam Smith. Like the original Thirty Years War, which was in
fact a series of separate but interconnected struggles, recent conflict in the
Middle East has included fighting in Israel, the occupied territories and
Lebanon, the long and bloody Iran-Iraq War, the two Gulf wars, and now
civil wars in Iraq and Syria. As with the Thirty Years War, events in Iraq and
Syria have been marked by sectarian conflict and intervention by peripheral
states (and still more distant countries) fighting proxy wars. Both the Thirty
Years War and the present Middle Eastern conflicts have been hugely costly in
human life. The Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War in 1648 has
also featured in comment of late, usually along with the observation that
recent events have brought about the collapse, at least in parts of the Middle
East, of ideas of state sovereignty that supposedly originated with Westphalia.
Yet that is a myth, a serious and perhaps fatal
misunderstanding of the Westphalian treaties. The provisions of the treaties in
fact set up a structure for the legal settlement of disputes both within and
beyond the German statelets that had been the focus of the conflict, and for
the intervention of guarantor powers outside Germany to uphold the peace
settlement. And, as we shall see, the real history of Westphalia has much to
tell us in the present about the resolution and prevention of complex
conflicts.
***
Germany is the prosperous heart of the continent
today, but in the early 17th century the “Holy Roman Empire of the German
Nation” was the disaster zone of Europe. It was politically fragmented, with
the various princes, bishops, towns and the emperor himself all vying for
influence, greatly complicated by religious differences between Roman Catholics
and followers of various forms of Protestantism. The empire lay at the centre
of Europe and was thus the point at which the great-power interests of nearly
all the main protagonists in the international system intersected: the French,
the Habsburgs, the Swedes, the Ottomans and even the English regarded the area
as vital to their security. So Germany both invited intervention by its
neighbours and spewed out instability into Europe when the empire erupted in a
religious war in 1618 that lasted three decades.
Domestically, the root of the Thirty Years War, just
as with many Middle Eastern conflicts today, lay in religious intolerance. The
security of subjects governed by rulers of the opposing religious camp was
often at risk of their governments’ attempts to enforce doctrinal uniformity.
With the creation of cross-border confessional communities, as well as
antagonisms both within and between the territorial states, rulers became
increasingly willing to intervene on behalf of co-religionist subjects of other
princes – another parallel with the contemporary Middle East.
Initial attempts to solve these problems failed. After
a series of wars following the Reformation, a religious peace was concluded
at the imperial Diet of Augsburg in 1555. This was a milestone in the development
of confessional cohabitation, because it embodied, for the first time, a
recognition of the importance of creating a legal-political framework to manage
religious coexistence. Although the treaty helped foster peace for many years,
it was nevertheless deficient. First, the princes granted each other toleration
only between themselves, not among subjects within their territories. The
“Right of Reformation”, or ius reformandi, gave princes the
power to impose their confession on their subjects: a form of religious
compulsion later encapsulated in the phrase cuius regio, eius religio
(“the religion of the prince is the religion of the territory”).
Rulers
became increasingly willing to intervene on behalf of co-religionist subjects
of other princes
This was a state-centred solution; it ignored the
concerns of the princes’ subjects apart from guaranteeing their right to
emigrate. Partly designed to undercut interventionist impulses by consigning
confessional affairs to an inviolable domestic sphere, the treaty text stated:
“No Estate [territory] should protect and shield another Estate or its subjects
against their government in any way.” Second, the state-centred settlement was
increasingly unsatisfactory for most Protestant states, as it had inbuilt
structural advantages for the Catholic side. Calvinism was not recognised and
remained officially a heresy. Furthermore, the Catholic princes began to rely
on majority voting to sideline Protestants at decision-making assemblies such
as the Reichstag or Diet, which in effect was the German parliament. And the
Catholic Church embarked on a major evangelising effort to reverse the effects
of the Protestant Reformation through popular preaching – the
Counter-Reformation, a prime mover for which was the Jesuit order. Taken
together, these factors left Protestants feeling increasingly under pressure,
and more radical Protestants were constantly trying to revise the settlement.
The formation of hostile princely religious alliances – the Protestant Union in
1608 and the Catholic League in 1609 – was symptomatic of the general “war in
sight” atmosphere characterising central Europe at the turn of the 17th
century.
The resulting war was, just like the current Middle
Eastern conflict, a set of interlocking political-religious struggles at local
and regional levels. These provoked and enabled extensive external
interference, which in turn exacerbated and prolonged the conflict. Non-state
and sub-state actors played important roles in that epoch as they do now:
corporate groupings of noble subjects (estates) and private military
entrepreneurs; terrorist groups and aid organisations. The war began as an
insurrection of the Bohemian nobility against their Habsburg rulers, and soon
escalated into a much broader confessional conflict within the empire. But it
also became a struggle between competing visions of the future political order
in central Europe – a centralised imperial monarchy against a more federally
organised, princely and estates-based constitution – which in turn folded into
the long-standing Habsburg-Bourbon struggle for European supremacy.
The war was immensely destructive: arguably the
greatest trauma in German history. It resulted in an overall loss of about
40 per cent of the population, which dropped from roughly 20 million to 12
million. The war was not merely quantitatively, but qualitatively, extreme. Such
atrocities as the massacre and burning of Magdeburg in 1631, which killed
over 20,000 people, resonate in the German popular imagination to this day. The
war also caused its own refugee crisis. Cities such as Ulm hosted huge numbers
relative to their pre-war population – 8,000 refugees taken in by 15,000
inhabitants in 1634, a situation comparable to the one faced by Lebanon today,
where one in four people is a Syrian refugee. The resulting shifts in the
religious balance often sparked unrest in previously quiet areas, a phenomenon
we are beginning to see in the Middle East as well. In those days no one had
come up with the concept of toxic stress – but the trauma was no less for that.
***
Eventually, the war between the Holy Roman emperor,
the princes, Sweden, France and their respective allies was brought to an end
by the now-famous Treaties of Münster and Osnabrück (collectively known as the
Peace of Westphalia). In roughly the past century and a half, however, their
nature and implications have been completely misunderstood. The misconception –
still frequently repeated in many textbooks, in the media, by politicians, and
in standard works on international relations – maintains that the Peace,
by granting the princes sovereignty, inaugurated a modern “Westphalian system”
based on states’ sovereign equality, the balance of power and non-intervention
in domestic affairs. This fallacious notion of Westphalia was later picked up
uncritically by political scientists, scholars of international law and historians,
leading to the remarkably persistent and widespread Westphalian myth.
The real Westphalia was something quite different.
Although the Right of Reformation was officially confirmed, it was in effect
nullified by the imposition of the “normative year”. This fixed control of the
churches, the right of public worship, and the confessional status of each
territory to the state it had been in, on 1 January 1624. This was an
innovative compromise arrangement that set a mutually acceptable official
benchmark for faith at a point in time at which neither side had gained
supremacy. By establishing a standard applicable to all, it also represented a
convenient means of avoiding the conflicts of honour inherent in early-modern
negotiations in which princes were asked to make concessions.
The practical outcome was that a princely conversion
could no longer determine the religious affiliation of the subject population
in question. The imperial judicial tribunals retained extensive authority to
enforce the confessional and property rights of princes’ subjects (many of
which were stipulated at Westphalia). The external guarantors, France and
Sweden, were granted a right to intervene against either the emperor or the
princes, in order to uphold Westphalian rights and terms. So, this “true
Westphalia” is better characterised as an order of conditional sovereignty.
Princes were entitled to rule for life, but crucially
were required to respect their subjects’ basic rights, such as religious
freedom (including that of Calvinists), enjoyment of property and access to
judicial recourse, while also respecting the rights of fellow rulers. If they
failed in their duties towards their subjects or the empire they could in
theory and practice become targets for intervention, which in some cases
entailed deposition from power.
That central Europe avoided another religious war
after 1648 shows the success of Westphalia’s conflict regulation mechanisms. At
a time of renewed religious dispute in the early 18th century, a statement issued
by the Protestant party at the imperial Diet commented on the improvements that
Westphalia had brought to the imperial constitution, stating: “The refusal of
Territorial rulers to accept that other fellow states protect foreign
inhabitants and subjects was one of the greatest causes which led to the
wretched Thirty Years War. It is precisely this wound which has been healed by
the Peace of Westphalia.”
Westphalia was thus seen as a corrective measure,
opening up domestic affairs to mutual and reciprocal scrutiny, on the basis of
clear principles agreed by all. It provided an effective system for the
“juridification” of conflict, whereby confessional strife (which certainly
continued) was channelled into a legal-diplomatic framework and defused through
litigation and negotiation, if necessary with the threat of external
intervention by a guarantor power, rather than being settled by warfare.
***
Where in 17th-century Europe Protestants were alarmed
by the revanchism of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, through which the
emperor (with the support of his Spanish Habsburg cousins) sought to restitute
property and lands confiscated from the Catholic prince-bishoprics by
Protestant princes during the previous century, so in the Middle East today Shia
communities feel under pressure from the new wave of aggressive Wahhabi/Salafi
jihadism which similarly regards their faith as heresy and abomination. Or, if
you choose to accept the Saudi or Wahhabi version, you could regard Iran and
the Shias as the threatening hegemon. One way or the other, both Iran and Saudi
Arabia feel insecure in the region, menaced by enemies, to a degree paranoid
and liable to miscalculate the true nature of the threat to them and their
faiths.
Moreover, the position can change. After the Swedish
intervention in Germany in 1630, the Catholics, previously triumphant, were
thrown on the defensive and their worst nightmares began to come true. For an
eventual settlement to become possible, it was necessary for disillusionment
with religious aggrandisement to set in. That might still seem to be some way
off in Syria and Iraq now; yet perhaps not so far off. At an earlier stage some
Sunnis at least, in Iraq and elsewhere, became disillusioned with al-Qaeda when
it was seen to be able to offer no more than continuing violence, with no
prospect of any kind of victory. It will be necessary first to defeat Da’esh,
or Islamic State, but disillusionment with it could set in quite quickly when
its millenarian project is seen to suffer severe setbacks. It will nonetheless
be necessary to deal with the Wahhabi origins of the jihadi problem, in Saudi
Arabia, as Michael Axworthy argued in his New Statesman
article of 27 November 2015.
It would be highly desirable as part of a wider
Westphalia-style settlement also to make progress towards a solution of the
conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Yet such a settlement should not
be seen as necessarily dependent on that. The Israel/Palestinian question is
not an important factor in the present situation in Syria or Iraq, nor has it
been among the prime concerns of al-Qaeda or Islamic State, which have both
been much more focused on toppling Arab states in the Middle East.
Another aspect of the conflict in the Middle East is
that both Iran and Saudi Arabia see themselves as the legitimate leader of the
community of Islam as a whole. Just as Christendom was pulled apart by
religious conflict in the 17th century, yet Catholicism and Protestantism were
still horribly bound together, like cats in a sack, by a shared history
and shared faith, so too with contemporary Islam. The traditional territory of
Islam is still, in some sense, a coherent whole in the minds of Muslims. In a
way reminiscent of that in which the Holy Roman emperor’s authority was still recognised
by the Protestant states of the empire, albeit reluctantly and with bitter
resentment, so Shia Muslims have to accept Saudi Arabia’s de facto guardianship
of the holy places of Medina and Mecca. A settlement in the Middle East could
take strength from the lingering sense of a common heritage in the region.
***
The creation of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon as sovereign
states after the First World War owes something to the European state model
that is linked in the minds of many to the mythical Westphalia. Some would
say that the model was artificial and unsuited to the complex political reality
of those countries; that the continuing collapse of Iraq and Syria (with
Lebanon looking fragile) is at least in part a consequence of the bad match. But
it may be less the borders of those states that have been the problem than the
internal political nature of the states as they were established.
The new nations’ borders for the most part followed
the boundaries of previous Ottoman administrative districts, including those
abolished with much fanfare by Islamic State 18 months ago. Such is the ethnic,
religious and tribal complexity of the peoples they contain that they are
likely to be difficult to divide up in any less artificial or more satisfactory
way. Any attempt to redraw borders extensively is likely to deepen and
exacerbate the chaos. In the Westphalia settlement, with only a few exceptions,
the pre-war borders of the German statelets were retained; it was the way the
states related to each other and the confessional diversity of their subjects
that changed. There is a lesson here.
Sectarianism, the interference of neighbouring states,
the breakdown of earlier state arrangements, the exodus of refugees –all of
these are features of a region that has become, as a recent New
Statesman leader put it (quoting Karl Kraus), a “laboratory for
world destruction”. Some in the contemporary Middle East are aware of past
religious extremism and conflict in Europe and ask how we overcame it
historically. Therefore, it is in no way patronising to offer the lessons of
those past traumas: it is part of our shared human experience, our collective
memory. That is what history is – or can be. The Westphalia myth, in supporting
a notional model of the modern state which has failed in both Iraq and Syria,
may have contributed to the terrible conflicts we have seen unfolding in recent
years in those countries. The real Westphalia, by contrast, could contribute to
a solution.
It showed
ways to turn interference in wars into guarantees of peace
Its application to the Middle East requires an
inclusive conference with representatives from all recognised states in the
region, plus potential “guarantor” powers. The negotiations would have to start
from the assumption that the “truth content” of the various positions has to be
set aside for now, and would have to end with a recognition that sovereignty
would be conditional and involve the transfer of some prerogatives to common
institutions modelled on the old German imperial supreme judicial institutions
and/or the Reichstag. Populations would not necessarily be guaranteed
democratic participation in the first instance, but governments would be
obliged to respect certain vital rights, including the free exercise of
religion and, in certain circumstances, that of judicial appeal outside their
local jurisdictions. Toleration would thus be “graded”, Westphalian-style, with
the recognition of a dominant religion or system in each territory, but with
safeguards for minorities. As with Westphalia, rulers would be constrained by
duties towards their own subjects (for that is what they are, at present), but
also towards respecting each other’s integrity as well as that of the whole
system. The whole arrangement would then have to be placed under external
guarantee of agreed regional and global powers.
All this requires political will and engagement,
obviously, but it must begin with some intellectual legwork. To this end, the
Forum on Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge has established a
“Laboratory for World Construction”, drawing on expertise in both cases, to
begin to design a Westphalia for the Middle East.
***
There will be no a “quick fix”; the Westphalia
negotiations took five years and ultimately failed to end the related war
between Spain and France (which lasted until 1659). By 1648 the various warring
parties in central Europe had reached a state of general exhaustion, and
disillusionment with religious extremism.
But the lessons of the real treaties of Westphalia,
which provided means for the legal resolution of disputes and showed ways to
turn external interference in conflict into external guarantees for peace,
could be a significant contribution to eventual settlement of the Middle East’s
problems.
Bringing peace to the Middle East will not be
easy, and many have failed before. Yet if it could be done in
mid-17th-century Germany, a problem no less intractable, then anything is
possible.
Brendan Simms is the director of the Forum on
Geopolitics at Cambridge Michael Axworthy is the director of the Centre for Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Exeter
Patrick Milton is a postdoctoral fellow at the Free University of Berlin (POINT programme) and co-ordinator of the Westphalia for the Middle East “Laboratory for World Construction” at the Forum on Geopolitics
