My latest article for DIPLOMAT magazine is out (not currently available online, alas).

It is all about HOBGOBLINS AND OMELETTES: WHERE DIPLOMACY MEETS ETHNICITY

It starts thus:

A vital date in the history of the modern world is 1648. That was when the Treaties of Osnabrück and Münster were signed. All readers of DIPLOMAT know these treaties off by heart. They together are more usually known as the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War within the Holy Roman Empire and the even more geriatric Eighty Years’ War between Spain and the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands.

The negotiation of those two treaties invented modern grand scale diplomatic junketing. Haggling meandered on for six years. Over 100 different delegations of states, ‘imperial states’ from the Holy Roman Empire and interest groups (today known as NGOs) jostled for good outcomes, all on generous expenses.

The Two Treaties were mainly about settling Europe’s violent religious differences. But in doing so they set up new principles of sovereignty, under which the rulers of ‘nation states’ agreed to manage their relationships in a peaceful or at least civilised way. As democracy slowly came to qualify the power of those rulers, such sovereignty was seen as lying not with the national leader but rather in the ‘nation’. Which opened the way for ‘nation states’ to emerge as independent actors on the international stage.

Hence two tricky questions, still alive and well today:

  • how does a defined territory join this grand process (ie what is a ‘state’)
  • which people join this grand process (ie what is a ‘nation’)?

After a grand tour of world trouble-spots and my own role therein, it concludes:

Diplomacy. Building on what exists (ie racial, ethnic, religious tensions going back centuries) and accept that Good Fences make Good Neighbours? As we (HMG/West) did in accepting the break-up of what remained of Yugoslavia into Serbia + Kosovo + Montenegro?

Or building towards what we insist has to exist, hoping to compel people to cooperate nicely within single state frameworks which they dislike and distrust, as we (HMG/West) have done in Bosnia?

Two utterly different philosophies and policies, applied to places a few miles apart, which for eighty years were in one country.

Foolish Consistency? Or Foolish Inconsistency?

From Westphalia to West failure?

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