Anti-Climacus

Thinking Through the Thirty Years War:

I've been re-reading C.V. Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War, in part for my own scholarly purposes, but inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates' reading of the same (e.g.). With all respect to Wedgwood and Coates, I'd like to disagree with their assessment of whether the war was 'worth it.' Wedgwood's argument is that the best thing for Germany would have been to have the war end in 1630, at the peak of HRE Ferdinand's military successes, as he was the last person who had a realistic opportunity to unite Germany. At the very least, there would have been peace, and several million lives would've been spared. All Wedgwood can see that would be lost is the "German liberties," whose value she finds dubious for reasons that are probably contextually specific to her (they probably didn't seem worthwhile in the 1930s, not that I can blame her for thinking so), and though she gestures at issues of religion, she doesn't seem to grasp why denominational differences might be important.

From where I sit, though, the longer portion of the war served two important aims: first and foremost, it ensured freedom of conscience and practice for Protestants in Germany and the rest of Europe. Ferdinand was engaged in an active program of persecution and forced conversion in the 1620s, and it was only the intervention of Sweden in 1630 that prevented him from being successful. To Wedgwood, this appears to be trivial or unimportant.* For those of us who are Protestant and, more importantly, value freedom of conscience, it's absolutely a cause worth fighting for.

In the second place, Wedgwood sees the German liberties as one part hand-waving and one part so retrograde as compared to liberal values as to not be worth saving. No one who spends time on the 17th century will be of the opinion that anyone was particularly liberal (Locke and Spinoza as exceptions to the rule), but in the long and complicated history by which concepts develop, one can't have the later form without the earlier imperfect form. Like Wedgwood, I am not going to argue that the moral calculus of the war was positive; like Peter Wilson's account, I am sufficiently uninterested in the glory of war in general, or the specifics of grand personality, to find anything admirable in the War on those terms. But waste though it was, it seems to have been impetus for an important step forward in European politics and political thought.


*N.B. that she appears to believe Ferdinand could've united Germany, but Gustavus Adolphus could not have done so.