Towards A Westphalia for the Middle East

Abstract

It was the original forever war, which went on interminably, fueled by religious fanaticism, personal ambition, fear of hegemony, and communal suspicion. It dragged in all the neighboring powers. It was punctuated by repeated failed ceasefires. It inflicted suffering beyond belief and generated waves of refugees. No, this is not Syria today, but the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), which turned Germany and much of central Europe into a disaster zone. The Thirty Years' War is often cited as a parallel in discussions of the Middle East. The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the conflict in 1648, has featured strongly in such discussions, usually with the observation that recent events in some parts of the region have seen the collapse of ideas of state sovereignty--ideas that supposedly originated with the 1648 settlement. Axworthy, Milton and Simms argue that the Westphalian treaties, far from enshrining state sovereignty, in fact reconfigured and strengthened a structure for legal resolution of disputes, and provided for intervention by outside guarantor powers to uphold the peace settlement. This book argues that the history of Westphalia may hold the key to resolving the new long wars in the Middle East today.

Syria’s Sect-coded Conflict: From Hezbollah’s Top-down Instrumentalization of Sectarian Identity to Its Candid Geopolitical Confrontation

“…A group of researchers compared Syria’s conflict with the 30 years’ war that led to the peace of Westphalia in 1648. They stressed that neither the wars in seventeenth-century Europe were between Protestants and Catholics, nor the twenty-first-century chaos in the Middle East can be best explained by the Sunni–Shiʿa schism (Milton et al, 2018, p. 35). The sect-coded and sectarian confrontations were not the primary drivers of the conflict, but the instrumentalization of sectarian identities was a jackpot for the players.…”

In Search of a Middle East and North Africa Peace System

“…States are, on one hand, too small for pan-Arab and pan-Islamists, inadequate vehicles for communities of such global stature. On the other hand, for Kurds, Berbers, and other ethnic minorities who had seen their ambitions for independence thwarted, states were too big, forcing them to be subordinates (Heraclides, 1989;Milton et al, 2019).…”

Попутчики Поневоле: Исламские Партии И Арабское Национальное Государство В Свете Теории Размежеваний

“…В монографии "К Вестфалю для Ближнего Востока" П. Милтон, М. Эксуорси и Б. Симс усматривают структурные аналогии между взаимодействиями враждующих сторон в период Тридцатилетней войны и в текущих арабских конфликтах [Milton, Axworthy, Simms 2019]. Одна из них -это рост политизации религии и межконфессиональной нетерпимости после периодов относительной стабильности соответственно в XV и XX вв.…”