Historians studying international politics and international relations scholars studying the past are finding increasing points of intersection. At these disciplinary crossroads sit the exploration of new sources, new interpretations of key historical narratives, and reassessments of the significance of the international past for contemporary politics. The IR scholar Thomas Peak’s new account of the Treaty of Westphalia is an important addition to this trend. He examines historical revisionism of what he terms “the myth of 1648” and then adds his own reading of the events of a half–millennium ago and why they still matter. At stake, he argues, is the contemporary fate of humanitarian intervention.

The myth of 1648, as Peak relays it, concerns the peace that brought to an end the devastating and highly deadly Thirty Years’ War on the European continent. In the mid-seventeenth century, European political actors gathered in the region known as Westphalia to negotiate an agreement that was duly signed in the cities of Münster and Osnabrück. In the modern era, the “Peace of Westphalia” became shorthand for the history of the origins of a shared European conception of state sovereignty and the modern state-based international order. Peak takes as evidence of the myth’s pervasiveness its use by twentieth-century elites, ranging from the famous (or infamous, depending on one’s interpretation) US secretary of state Henry Kissinger to Australian statesman Gareth Evans, and even the pop star Katy Perry. In these examples, Evans is a vocal exponent of the “Responsibility to Protect” principle, arguing that it is the idea of state sovereignty enshrined at Westphalia in 1648 as a dominant concept of political organization that often confounds the imperative of international humanitarian intervention. Peak’s problem with someone like Evans’s legitimation of humanitarian intervention is that, even if unintentionally, it places too much emphasis on the historical status of national sovereignty invested in the Westphalian moment. Evans’s view, he suggests, is particularly problematic when there is now extensive historical evidence that sovereignty was a limited, historically specific idea tied to the culture of monarchical dynasties and early modern imperial structures. This is the launching point of Peak’s parsing of the myth of Westphalia and his interest in replacing it with a new history written—in the parlance of social historians—“from below.” In Peak’s words, “The broad colour of seventeenth century social mentalities determined the direction and the character of the Westphalian peace and remains the lens through which the meaning should be gauged.… Humanitarian intervention, far from being a radical and dangerous innovation, in fact coheres with the purpose or deep meaning of an ‘original’ European state sovereignty idea” (p. 122).

Peak’s choice not to focus on the politics of peacemaking or the few political peacemakers means that we do not spend much time in the conventional space of historical analysis of Westphalia. (Although his most evocative piece of writing sets the treaty-making scene: “In a pair of muddy little towns in the Westphalian countryside, several centuries ago, order was slowly whittled from the all-engulfing maelstrom of an unprecedented war” [p. 157]). The focus of Westphalia from Below is elsewhere. First it introduces the uninitiated reader to the new historical work that is revising our understanding of both what was actually achieved in the Peace of Westphalia and how it resonated afterward. Building on this foundation, Peak examines the broader context of ideas about the war articulated by thinkers and artists through the long period of fighting with an analysis of textual and visual sources from the time. Peak concludes that the savagery unleashed by the Thirty Years’ War led to “the existential crisis, manifesting itself in dislocation, dehumanization, diminished dignity” (p. 11). The fifth chapter on “imagining order” brings his novel approach to political ideas to bear on this history; Peak shifts the focus from the apparatus and telos of the state to the history of feeling, experience, and mentalities. He brings to bear his own version of the social history of political ideas (“from below”), offering a close reading of published texts and visual representations to get at what he calls the period’s “mentalité.” These texts and images, he claims, prove what he regards as the more compelling point: a half-millennium ago, the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War provoked a new humane way of thinking about dignity, which should be considered the real historical legitimation of humanitarian intervention.

As the subtitle tells us, Peak’s overriding interest is the problem of humanitarian intervention and why it has proven such a politically contested idea. Indeed, Peak begins his study with a long dystopian account of the brutality of contemporary episodes of genocide in Africa, where “humanity” has been at stake and humanitarian intervention has failed. If it is the present we are concerned about, then why should we bother with seventeenth-century Westphalia? For Peak, the dystopia that shifts the world happened in the early seventeenth century, giving birth to new ways of thinking and seeing. Understanding 1648 is about understanding how human dignity informed the wider ordering projects of the 1640s.

There is much to admire here in Peak’s devotion to the significance of Westphalia for our own political moment and for IR scholarship. Then there is his investment in the history of mentalities, drawing on unusual visual and textual evidence. Indeed, I read Westphalia from Below as a modern historian with some knowledge of the revisionism taking place around the ideas emplaced in 1648 but having almost no expertise in the early modern era. I missed reading more about the political moment of 1648—although there are the well-wrought textual evocations that hint at historical possibilities for even further rewriting.

What is still missing from this new history of Westphalia? At the least, there is the still contentious question: When did humans learn to start to care for other humans elsewhere—within and outside territorial sovereign borders—if they could not directly know but could only imagine the lives of these others? Some modern historians have argued that humanitarian feeling emerged in the early nineteenth century. This is Lynn Hunt’s view—that the invention of the novel enabled European men and women to imagine the suffering elsewhere of humans unlike themselves, particularly slaves. What are the implications of Peak’s historical rereading of humanitarianism that traces it back to the seventeenth century? The nineteenth-century origin story does not, of course, discount the possibility of an alternative seventeenth-century account. Instead, taken together with Peak’s investigation, it suggests the need for more historical attention not only to the historical specificity of humanitarian thinking and sentiments in the past but also to just how different from earlier periods contemporary expressions of humanitarian politics and emotions might be. Modern historians are also increasingly questioning the benign presumptions implied in international intervention on humanitarian grounds by investigating the ways in which, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cases of transnational humanitarian intervention entangled imperial and fiscal adventurism or, at the least, evoked partisan and religious rationales. What might Peak say to this body of scholarship?

For Peak, 1648 is not the origin story we thought it was, but there is no ambiguity in the fact that the existence of the myth of 1648 has affected and affects political action. Yet he discusses no other factors that might be as (or more) important—even though we know, for example, that US president Bill Clinton’s inclination not to intervene on humanitarian grounds in the Yugoslav wars was more influenced by representations of Yugoslavs as “Balkan,” and thus naturally inclined to violence, than by the obstacle of state sovereignty. Indeed, historical work has shown the extent to which the legitimacy of state sovereignty in the modern era has often been weighted with stereotypical representations of difference, including race and gender difference. How does Peak’s account relate to these other factors driving humanitarian intervention or its absence?

Ultimately, Peak’s history of the early modern era is a provocation to reflect more urgently on what is at stake in the so-called end of international order so often represented as our present reality. That includes reflecting on the ways in which a long history of human dignity might be a more enduring characteristic of international order than the principle of state sovereignty that we now know to be a relatively recent invention.