Why is the signifance of the Peace of Westphalia? Why is it said to be the birth of the nation-state? What was different after it than before it? What is the mainstram outlook on it and what the libertarian outlook?
It was the first European treaty that recognised nation states and was between nation states instead of being between royaly and settling royal claims to end war.
I am not sure how to look upon it from a libertarian perspective other than the fact that the menace of government and its wars changed from dynastic monarchy to territorial states. Seems to me to be a case of out of the frying pan and into another frying pan.
Don’t know much about Westphalia, but here is Hoppe on war.
Last but not least, democracy is described as resulting in a radical change in the conduct of war. Because they can externalize the costs of their own aggression onto others (via taxes), both kings and presidents will be more than ‘normally’ aggressive and warlike. However, a king’s motive for war is typically an ownership-inheritance dispute. The objective of his war is tangible and territorial: to gain control over some piece of real estate and its inhabitants. And to reach this objective it is in his interest to distinguish between combatants (his enemies and targets of attack) and non-combatants and their property (to be left out of the war and undamaged). Democracy has transformed the limited wars of kings into total wars. The motive for war has become ideological – democracy, liberty, civilization, humanity. The objectives are intangible and elusive: the ideological “conversion” of the losers preceded by their “unconditional” surrender (which, because one can never be certain about the sincerity of conversion, may require such means as the mass murder of civilians). And the distinction between combatants and non-combatants becomes fuzzy and ultimately disappears under democracy, and mass war involvement – the draft and popular war rallies – as well as “collateral damage” become part of war strategy.
Sorry but the treaty was between princes and emperors and was indeed a settlement of royal claims. The following two Wiki articles may shed some light: Peace of Westphalia, Westphalian Sovereignty.
I think this may be overly simplistic. Kings also prefered the offensive over defensive because it meant their armies would live off the land of the enemy rather than his own. They also allowed looting with loot being considered a part of pay for the soldiers and they sacked cities they did not intend to hold, for example the 1204 sack of Byzantium. Also if all else failed they were not loathe to burn the fields and put peasants to the sword, before the 1683 sige of Vienna the Sultans had already for 200 years had cavalry raiding parties breaking into present day Hungary and Croatia and murder everyone in sight in order to trigger population shifts (which indeed did occur) to try and weaken weaken their Habsburg opponents.
A king avoiding collateral damage in the area he intends to annex and views as his own is not remarkable. Nazis too were loathe to cause collateral damage in Alsace because they saw Alsatians as Germans. And wars between kings too could be very brutal and take a very high toll on the peasants. Precisely the Thirty Years War is a great case in point for this, it has been alleged that once it was over the population of Germany had been more than halved due to disease and hunger brought on by every army that strolled by helping itself to peasant`s provisions.