The Origins of the Modern State System

By: James G. Apple, Editor-in-Chief, International Judicial Monitor and President, International Judicial Academy

A part of the birth process of the modern state system was singularly bizarre – two men were thrown out of window.

But the real origins of the state system, from an earlier time, revolve around an equally pedestrian architectural feature, a door. What happened on that door literally shook the foundations of western civilization.

The door in question was attached to a church in a small town in northern Germany. It was, of course, the door of the All Saints’ Church (university church) in Wittenburg where the monk and professor Martin Luther tacked his famous 95 theses challenging certain practices of the Roman Catholic Church. The surprising part about that action was not necessarily that it happened – it was common practice in that academic city for professors to post writings of one kind or another on the door as an impetus for discussion and debate – but the speed at which the challenges traveled, first to the immediate countryside (two weeks), then throughout Germany (one month), and then throughout all of Europe (six months). The speed of this dispersal of theological ideas was remarkable, a demonstration of widespread dissatisfaction with religious practices and perhaps even with the Christian theology as announced and enforced from Rome. Luther sent a letter with his 95 theses enclosed to the local archbishop, making his challenges a public issue. The archbishop duly forwarded the epistle to the Pope in Rome, while copies of the theses were printed and circulated throughout Germany. These actions precipitated a “pamphlet war” and eventually a real one.

Luther’s singular action took place on October 31, 1517. By the end of the century all of Europe was in a political turmoil that is now known as the Reformation.

In the ensuing years, Protestant theology became a dominant force in many parts of the Holy Roman Empire. One of the centers of that theology was Prague, the capital of what is now the Czech Republic, but was then the major city in the German region known as Bohemia.

In 1617, one hundred years after Luther’s posting of his dissatisfactions on the church door in Wittenburg, Ferdinand of Styria, a “rabid Catholic,” a Habsburg, and heir apparent to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, was crowned king of Bohemia. His coronation marked the end of the religious toleration for Protestants in the area that had been brought about earlier in 1609 by one of Ferdinand’s predecessors. Regents (representatives) of Ferdinand quickly began to harass Protestants in Bohemia, censoring their publications and preventing them from holding public offices. The Protestant nobility of Bohemia rebelled.

The rebellion of nobles in Prague that proved to be such a momentous event took the form of an “act of defenestration.” On May 23, 1618 one hundred armed nobleman pressed into the council rooms of Prague Castle, grabbed two of Ferdinand’s regents (and possibly a secretary) who were present to negotiate with the nobles, and threw them out one of the council room windows, which was 50 feet above the Castle grounds. Although the two regents survived, having landed in a dung heap, the event caused such outrage among Ferdinand’s Catholic followers that armed hostilities soon followed, the beginnings of what history now calls the Thirty Years War. The armies of Spain, France, Sweden and Denmark eventually marched into German lands and decimated both the countryside and the population. It has been estimated that 40% of the population of the Germanic lands of the Holy Roman Empire were killed in that conflict, one that involved “religion, religious zeal, and religious hatred.”

Thirty years later, in 1648, the fighting finally stopped. On October 24 of that year representatives of the warring Catholics and Protestants and of the Holy Roman Empire gathered in two cities in the German area of Westphalia (Munster and Osnabruck) to negotiate treaties officially terminating the hostilities. The Peace of Westphalia not only ended the Thirty Years War, but it also ended the Eighty Years War between Spain and the Netherlands, and for all practical purposes it marked the end of the Holy Roman Empire.

Under the terms of the treaty, Switzerland and the Netherlands became independent states, France and Sweden gained territory, and the boundaries of the small states of German territory were stabilized. These results laid the foundation for the modern state system of Europe, which in turn provided a fertile soil for the growth and development of a “law of nations.”

But the Peace of Westphalia did not only provide the origins of the modern state system from which a law of nations could grow and mature, it was also the birthplace of a new idea in political science, one that has both nourished and impeded the cause of international law, the doctrine of state sovereignty.