Foreign Affairs. January-February 2020

Dreams of Westphalia

January/February 2020 149

and the reason it offers a blueprint for

the Middle East today—was the legal,

continent-spanning mechanism for

dispute resolution that it put in place.

Such a mechanism indeed seems an

appealing solution for a region that is

today wracked by conflict and upheaval.

But the book fails in its attempt to

argue that a similar framework could

see the light of day in the contemporary

Middle East and succeed.

“SAND AND DEATH”

Towards a Westphalia for the Middle East

emanated from a series of workshops

funded by the Körber Foundation, the

German foreign ministry, and the

University of Cambridge that brought

together more than 100 participants from

across Europe and the Middle East.

That kind of format provides a welcome

sounding board for policy prescriptions,

but the resulting analysis in this case

suffers somewhat from the romanticism

that often arises in convenings of

scholars and diplomats in various

European capitals. Milton, Axworthy,

and Simms exult in the bonds of shared

custom, religion, and language that

“quickly emerge when people from the

region come together, especially outside

the region” and thus find it confound-

ing that “the divisions in the region

have often been so bitter.” Yet given the

physical and psychological distance

between conference-goers and combat-

ants, it should not be surprising that

passions rarely manifest themselves as

sharply in European salons as they do

on the battlefields of the Middle East.

Still, drawing on historical precedents

in the search for answers to contempo-

rary crises has tremendous value. Histo-

rians tend to see “presentism as a sin

mass uprisings that swept the Arab world
beginning in late 2010 yielded little lasting
progress. Among some disillusioned
politicians, one even senses a temptation
to take cover in dangerous tropes of
ancient hatreds and perpetual conflict in
order to allow the West to simply wash its
hands of the Middle East.
That Zeitgeist of gloomy resignation
is precisely why a new volume by
Patrick Milton, Michael Axworthy, and
Brendan Simms is such a refreshing
contribution to the literature on conflict
resolution in the Middle East. Milton
and Simms are historians of Europe at
the University of Cambridge, and
Axworthy (who died earlier this year)
wrote or edited five books on Iran after
a career in the British Foreign Office.
Their innovative approach applies the
lessons drawn from the Thirty Years’
War, a devastating series of conflicts
that ravaged central Europe between
1618 and 1648, and the accord that
eventually settled them, the Peace of
Westphalia, to the war in Syria and the
violence that has afflicted the Middle
East since the Arab uprisings of 2010–11.
The Thirty Years’ War was, as the
book’s promotional material empha-
sizes, “the original forever war”: what
began as a Protestant rebellion against
the Catholic Holy Roman Empire over
time drew in major powers such as
Denmark, France, Spain, and Sweden,
resulting in a decades-long conflagra-
tion. Released to coincide with the
400th anniversary of the conflict’s
outbreak, the volume rectifies common
misconceptions about the peace that
ended it, especially the notion that
Westphalia firmly enshrined the prin-
ciples of state sovereignty and noninter-
vention. The treaty’s true innovation—