War, the State and International Law in Seventeenth-Century Europe¹

This chapter considers a broad map of Europe before the Thirty Years War. The struggle for pre-eminence among individual powers, however, was not a problem only during the Thirty Years War, but also during the whole of the early modern period. In the wars between the Emperor Charles V and the French kings in sixteenth century it was already a question of the Monarchia universalis or a duel for Europe. An additional problem concerning state formation from below was that of emergent states. The formation of three states, which separated from the Universalist Habsburg Empire and were for the most part of corporate origin and composed of particularist units, kept Europe well provided with war. These states include, Swiss Confederates, Bohemian Uprising, and Dutch. The early modern process of state-formation will come to a close only when no more wars are waged.