In 1648, the peace of Münster and Osnabrück, ending the Thirty Years’ War that had raged across vast swathes of Europe, established sovereignty and territorial integrity as the basic organizing principles for the modern state. As Kalevi Holsti reminds us, the Treaties of Westphalia were unique: “Europe had not previously witnessed a multilateral diplomatic gathering that was designed both to terminate a pan-European war and to build some sort of order out of the chaos into which Europe had increasingly fallen since the late fifteenth century” (1991: 25).
