Gerard ter Borch. "Disputes during the ratification of the treaty in Münster"
In the post-Soviet space, the war is not between nations, but between religious parties: Eurasian "Catholics" and "Protestants" - as in the 16th-18th centuries in Europe
New and old Europe
National states united in the European Union, freedom of religion, separation of religion from the state - this is how we know modern Europe. The immediate preconditions for its current state, born in modern times, are also known: bourgeois revolutions, the establishment of republics, the declaration of nations as sovereigns in the person of their "third estate".
Map of Europe of the 15th century.
However, one must understand that all this also did not appear from scratch. There was a time when Western Europe was a single space: with one religion, one church and one empire. Therefore, before modern nation-states could emerge from the centralized states of the late Middle Ages as a result of bourgeois revolutions, sovereign countries had to emerge from the homogeneous imperial space, and the Catholic Church had to lose the monopoly on Christianity that it possessed in the empire.
These processes took place in Western Europe in the XVI-XVII centuries.
What was old Europe really like before all these events?
First of all, it was an empire with one church - the Catholic one. First, the Frankish Empire, which existed from the 5th to the 9th century and disintegrated in 843 into three kingdoms. Further, from the Frankish space in the West, as a result of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), which was preceded by the defeat of the French King Philip the Beautiful of the transnational Order of the Templars (1307-1314), independent England and France stand out. In the east of this space, in 962, a new empire appeared - the Holy Roman Empire, which formally existed right up to 1806.
The Holy Roman Empire is also known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, as it has been called since 1512. The then "Germanic nation" is far from being synonymous with the present German, either geographically or in terms of ethnic composition. In general, one must understand that in addition to the peoples of Central Europe, not only the Anglo-Saxons, but also the founders of France, the Franks, and the founders of Spain, the Visigoths, belonged to the German language family. However, later, when all these countries began to separate politically, the core of the empire, the Holy Roman, became the territorial array of the German-speaking lands of modern Holland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Bohemia. The latter was a country split between the German-speaking nobility and the Slavic-speaking population, as, incidentally, was the case in many countries with aristocracy of German origin.
Francois Dubois. "St. Bartholomew's Night"
Against the background of France, England and Spain, isolated into territorial states, from which colonial empires were born after some time, the Holy Roman Empire remained the conservative pole of Europe. As in the Frankish Empire, one emperor and one church stood over many territorial and class formations in it. Therefore, a new Europe, as we know it in the foreseeable period of its history, cannot be imagined without the transformation of this very imperial Catholic space.
Reformation and the Peace of Augsburg
The first step in this direction was the religious reformation (hereinafter referred to as the Reformation). Let's leave out the dogmatic aspects of this process - in this case, we are not interested in pure theology, but in political theology, that is, the relationship between religion and power and its role in society.
From this point of view, in the Reformation that began in Western Europe in the 16th century (we previously wrote that at about the same time an attempt to do so also took place in Russia), two directions can be distinguished. One of them is the Reformation from above, which started in England (1534) and subsequently won in all overseas northern European countries. Its essence consisted in the withdrawal of the ecclesiastical dioceses of these countries from subordination to Rome, their subordination to the kings of these countries, and thus the creation of national state churches. This process was the most important part of the separation of these countries from a single imperial space into independent nation states. So, the same England, starting with the Hundred Years War, was at the forefront of these processes, it is not surprising that in religious terms they took place with it decisively and with lightning speed.
But in continental Europe, the Reformation took place differently. It was driven not by the rulers of centralized states, which in most cases did not exist, but by charismatic religious leaders relying on the communities of their fellow believers. In the German lands, the pioneer of these processes was, of course, Martin Luther, who publicly nailed his "95 Theses" to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517 and thus laid the foundation for his and his supporters' confrontation with Rome.
Francois Joseph Heim. "Battle of Rocroix". One of the episodes of the Thirty Years War
About twenty years later, young John Calvin will follow in his footsteps. It is very interesting that, being a Frenchman, he began his activity in Paris, but neither he nor his supporters managed to gain a foothold there. In general, let us remember this circumstance - the religious reformation in France was not crowned with success, a clear confirmation of which was St. Bartholomew's Night - the massacre of French Protestants on August 24, 1572. The Protestants in France did not become either a ruling force, as in England, not one of the recognized ones, as later in the German lands, but the consequence of this was that when the Reformation in France nevertheless won in the 18th century, it was no longer religious, but anti-religious. character. In the 16th century, however, French Protestants eventually had to settle in Switzerland, a country with a Germanic language core and with the inclusion of French and Italian-speaking communities.
This is not surprising - unlike Northern Europe, where the Reformation passed relatively calmly from above, or the Romanesque countries, where it failed, a variety of Christian religious movements flourished in the German world at that moment. In addition to moderate Lutherans, these were the Anabaptists, supporters of the socially radical Thomas Münzer, and numerous supporters of the Czech reformer Jan Hus. The last two movements became the leading forces of the Peasant War of 1524-1526, which, as its name implies, was of a class character. But the general political requirement for all Protestantism was, as banal as it may sound, freedom of religion. The new religious communities, denying the authority of Rome, demanded, first, their recognition and non-persecution, and secondly, the freedom to spread their ideas, that is, the freedom of Christians to choose their own community and church.
From this point of view, the Augsburg Peace Treaty (1555), concluded as a result of the Schmalkalden War between the Catholic Emperor Charles V and the German Protestants, became a partial compromise, since it provided for the principle of limited religious tolerance cujus regio, ejus religio - "whose power, that is the religion."In other words, now they could choose their faith, but only princes, while subjects were obliged to follow the religion of their overlord, at least in public.
Thirty Years' War and the Netherlands Revolution
In historiography, as a rule, the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) and the Netherlands Revolution (1572-1648) are considered separately, but, in my opinion, they are part of a single process. By and large, the Great Civil War in the Holy Roman Empire can be counted from the Schmalkalden War, which began in 1546. The Augsburg peace was only a tactical truce, which did not prevent the same war from continuing in neighboring Holland as early as 1572, and in 1618 it resumed again in the lands of the Holy Roman Empire, ending with the Dutch in 1648 with the signing of the Peace of Westphalia.
Bartholomeus van der Gelst. "Celebrating Peace in Münster"
What makes it possible to assert this? First of all, the fact that both the Thirty Years and the Netherlands War had one and the same participant on one side - the Habsburg dynasty. Today, many people associate the Habsburgs with Austria, but in reality this identification was the result of the Great Civil War. At the time of the end of the 16th - beginning of the 17th centuries, the Habsburgs were a transnational Catholic dynasty, ruling not only in the Holy Roman Empire, the heir of which was later proclaimed by the Austrian Empire, but also in Spain, Portugal, Holland and southern Italy. In fact, it was the Habsburgs at that time who inherited and embodied the traditional principle of imperial Catholic unity across insignificant political boundaries.
What was the problem and what was the main reason for antagonism in Europe? Fanatical commitment of the Habsburgs to the Catholic Church and the desire to establish its monopoly everywhere. It was the anti-Protestant repression that became one of the main factors that provoked the Dutch uprising against the rule of Habsburg Spain. They also gained momentum in the root Germanic lands, despite the formally acting Augburg peace. The result of this policy was the creation, first, of a coalition of Protestant princes - the Evangelical Union (1608), and then, in response to it, the Catholic League (1609).
The trigger for the start of the Thirty Years' War itself, as was the case earlier with the demarcation of England and France, was the formal question of succession to the throne. In 1617, the Catholics managed to push the Jesuit pupil Ferdinand of Styria as the future king of Protestant Bohemia, which blew up this part of the Holy Roman Empire. It became a kind of detonator, and the dormant conflict between Catholics and Protestants everywhere escalated into war - one of the bloodiest and most devastating in European history.
Again, it is unlikely that all of its participants were so well versed in theological nuances that they gave their lives for them. We are talking about political theology, it was a struggle between various models of the relationship of religion with power and society. Catholics fought for the empire of one church across ephemeral state borders, and Protestants … this is already a little more complicated.
The fact is that, unlike Catholics, who were monolithic both religiously (Rome) and politically (Habsburgs), Protestants were not something the same whole. They did not have a single political center, they consisted of a multitude of confessions and communities, sometimes in very difficult relations with each other. What they had in common was that they opposed the old order, protested against it, hence this conventional name for this conglomerate of different groups.
Both Catholics and Protestants supported each other across territorial and national borders. And not just ethnic (Germans - Slavs), but national (Austrian Protestants along with Czechs against Austrian Catholics). Moreover, it can be argued that the nations just arose out of this war as a result of the disengagement of the parties. An important factor was the impact of external parties on the conflict: France, Sweden, Russia, England, Denmark. Despite their differences, all of them, as a rule, helped the Protestants in one way or another, being interested in the elimination of the continental Catholic empire.
The war was fought with varying success, consisted of several stages, was accompanied by the conclusion of a number of world agreements, which each time ended with its renewal. Until the Westphalian Treaty was finally concluded in Osnabrück, which was later supplemented by an agreement to end the Spanish-Dutch War.
How did it end? Its parties had their own territorial losses and gains, but today very few people remember about them, while the concept of the "Westphalian system" entered into a stable circulation to determine the new realities that were established in Europe.
The Holy Roman Empire, and before that was not distinguished by special centralism, now turned into a purely nominal union of dozens of independent German states. They were already either Protestant or recognizing the Protestant minority, but the Austrian Empire, whose rulers the Habsburgs, not without reason, considered themselves to be the successors of the former Holy Roman Empire, became the stronghold of Catholicism in the German lands. Spain fell into decay, Holland finally became independent, and with the direct support of France, which thus preferred its pragmatic interests to Catholic solidarity.
Thus, it can be argued that the religious war in Europe ended with the delimitation into territorial states dominated by Protestants and Catholics, followed by the political (but not yet religious) secularization of the latter, as was the case in France. Having got rid of its Protestants, France helps Protestant Holland and recognizes the Protestant German states, as well as Switzerland.
The imperial unity of Western Europe, which arose during the Frankish Empire, partially preserved in the Holy Roman Empire, supported by emperors and popes, is finally becoming a thing of the past. It is being replaced by completely independent states, either with their own churches, or with a purely formal domination of Catholicism, which no longer determines the policy of the state and its relations with its neighbors. This was the culmination of the process of creating a Europe of nations, which began with the defeat of the Knights Templar and the Hundred Years War and finally completed the formation of the post-war Wilsonian system, the collapse of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.
Russia and Westphal: a view from outside and from within
What relation can all the described events have to Russia and the post-Soviet space? In the author's opinion, today we are seeing exactly their analogue on the territory of Central Eurasia.
Alexey Kivshenko. "The annexation of Veliky Novgorod - the expulsion of noble and eminent Novgorodians to Moscow"
Whether Russia is culturally part of Europe is a question beyond the scope of this study. Politically, Russia, at least until 1917, was part of the European Westphalian system. Moreover, as already indicated, Russia, along with a number of other powers external to the participants in the Thirty Years War, actually stood at its origins.
But not everything is so simple. Participation in the same Westphalian system did not prevent the collapse of the colonial empires of Spain, France, Holland, Britain. Of all the powers of the Old World, only Russia not only retained the imperial territorial structure, but also clearly seeks to restore it to the same extent within the framework of the projects of the "Eurasian Union" and "Russian World".
Can this be understood in such a way that Russia is a European empire that does not want to come to terms with the loss of its colonies, and after deducting this, it is a completely organic part of the European Westphalian system?
The problem is that, unlike Western Europe, Russia was not formed in the area of the first Frankish and then the Holy Roman empires. The source of its statehood is Muscovy, and it, in turn, developed in the space formed after the collapse of Kievan Rus, with the participation of the Horde, Russian principalities, Lithuania and Crimea. Subsequently, as the Horde disintegrated, independent khanates emerged from it: Kazan, Astrakhan, Kasimov, Siberian.
That is, we are talking about a special historical and political space, which correlates with the Frankish and Holy Roman empires only in an external way, while inside it represents a different reality. If we look at this reality in historical retrospect, we will see that this space is geopolitically taking shape at about the same time as the Western European one, but … along a directly opposite development path.
In Western Europe, at this time, the formation of independent states on the basis of various communities was taking place. On the eastern flank of Eastern Europe or Northern Eurasia, at the time of the decline of the Horde, the same happens at first. Here we see Catholic-pagan Lithuania, we see Orthodox Muscovy raking up North-Eastern Russia into a fist, we see the Novgorod and Pskov republics pregnant with the Reformation, we see a conglomerate of Turkic-Muslim khanates, with which all these states were associated with vassal relations. The collapse of the Horde for this space could be the same as the collapse of the old Holy Roman Empire for Central-Western Europe - the birth of a new order of many nation states. But instead, something else happens - their inclusion in the new empire, and even more centralized than the Horde.
Vasily Surikov. "The conquest of Siberia by Yermak"
1471-1570 - the destruction of the Novgorod and Pskov republics, 1552 - the destruction of the Kazan Khanate, 1582-1607 - the conquest of the Siberian Khanate, 1681 - the liquidation of the Kasimov Khanate. The Crimean Khanate was liquidated after a long interval in 1783, almost at the same time the Zaporozhye Sich was finally abolished (1775). Then they happen: in 1802 - the liquidation of the Georgian (Kartli-Kakhetian) kingdom, 1832 - the liquidation of the autonomy of the Kingdom of Poland, 1899 - the de facto governorate of Finland.
Both geopolitically and geoculturally, the Central Eurasian space is developing in the opposite direction to Western Europe: instead of manifesting diversity and creating different states on this basis, it is unification and homogenization of space. Thus, being one of Westphal's guarantors for Europe, in relation to its space, Russia emerges and develops on completely anti-Westphalian principles.
How organic was it for this special, huge space? In my article on "Russian Planet" I wrote that the reassembly of the territories of the former Russian Empire by the Bolsheviks on the principles of the union of national republics was not the result of some of their insidious Russophobia, as is commonly believed in our days, but an acute and objective national question. In fact, the Bolsheviks took the first step towards the Eurasian Westphal. True, it quickly became clear that this was a purely symbolic step - the self-determination of peoples in the USSR existed only on paper, like other democratic rights guaranteed by the Soviet constitutions. The empire was recreated in an even more monolithic form - thanks to the fact that millions of foreigners were introduced to it not purely formally, as in tsarist Russia, but through a powerful supranational religion - communism.
In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, just as the Orthodox Russian Empire collapsed before it. They were replaced by new national states that possessed not only legal sovereignty and the attributes of statehood, but also their own understanding of the history of the two previous empires - Russian and Soviet. In the nineties, it seemed that Russians were also trying to critically rethink their imperial history. However, twenty years have passed, and not from the marginal "red-brown" politicians, but from the top officials of the state, they say that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, that Novorossia was never Ukraine, the phrase "historical Russia " etc.
Is this a manifestation of national revanchism? But which one? On the example of the same Ukraine, it can be seen that people with Ukrainian surnames can fight on the side of the pro-Russian forces, just like Russians and Russian-speaking people are fighting for a united Ukraine. Someone may think that labels like "quilted jackets" and "Colorada" on the one hand and "Banderlog" on the other are euphemisms for denoting warring nationalities: Russian and Ukrainian, respectively. But what to do with the fact that their own "colorado" is not only among the non-Russian peoples of Russia, but also in considerable numbers among the Kazakhs, Moldovans, Georgians and even the Balts? Or with Russian "banderlogs" - young people who in Russia go to rallies with the slogans "Glory to Ukraine - glory to the heroes!", And then go to Ukraine to seek political asylum and fight as part of volunteer battalions?
Westphal for Eurasia
It seems that in Ukraine today there are the first flashes of the "Thirty Years War" for Central Eurasia, which has repeatedly been pregnant with its Westphal, but each time it ended with either an abortion or a miscarriage.
Russia was not a nation-state - according to its logic, Muscovy, perhaps, took shape, while it was the business of Russian princes expanding their destiny in the shadow of the decrepit Horde. At that moment, it was one of many countries in the row of Lithuania, Novgorod, nations, because they will take shape only by its results, and between religious parties - Eurasian "Catholics" and "Protestants".
"Catholics" are supporters of sacred imperial unity across national borders, united by common symbols (St. George's ribbon), shrines (May 9) and their own Rome - Moscow. Undoubtedly, it is the Russians in the ethnic or linguistic sense that are the basis of this community, but being religious in nature, it is fundamentally supranational. In the case of central-western Europe, it was Roman-Germanic - Roman in its idea and religion, Germanic in its pivotal element. Moreover, as the territories peel off from this empire, it already officially becomes the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. In central Eurasia, this community is Soviet-Russian - Soviet in its idea, attracting people of numerous nationalities, Russian - in terms of the prevailing language and culture.
Nevertheless, just as not all Germans were Catholics, so not all Russians are their counterparts today. As already indicated, Protestants in Europe were a conglomerate of different communities, churches, and future nations. But, despite all these differences, they were also characterized by solidarity across national borders - for example, the Austrian Protestants actively supported the Czechs, were their "fifth column" inside Catholic Austria. Likewise, the "Protestant" political confessions and emerging nations like the "Bandera" or the Baltic states have their brothers among the Russian "Protestants" - their "fifth column" within the "Soviet empire of the Russian nation."
Celebration of the Day of Russia in Crimea, June 12, 2014. Photo: Alexey Pavlishak / ITAR-TASS
Of course, such comparisons may, at first glance, seem like a stretch: which Catholics, which Protestants in central Eurasia, where they never existed? However, turning to such a methodology of thinking as political theology will allow us to look at this problem more seriously and not dismiss the obvious parallels.
After all, the fact that communism possessed all the features of a secular religion, a political religion is not something that is obvious, but has long been banal. In this case, it becomes clear that not only Sovietism, but also anti-Sovietism are nowadays two political religions of central Eurasia. It is no less obvious that communism is not a dogmatic abstraction: of course, Marxism was its “spiritual” (ideological) source, but it was formed and it became a reality in a specific historical and cultural environment. In fact, it became a modernized, that is, adapted to the needs of a mass society, a variant of the Russian imperial messianism, thanks to which it continued its existence and entered a new stage of its development.
In 1918, the Russian Empire collapsed in the same way as two other similar empires of the Old World: Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman. They took it for granted, and in their place many nation states arose, some of which were the metropolises themselves - Austria and Turkey. In Russia, the collapse of the empire was also accompanied by war and colossal sacrifices, but the result was completely different - the restoration of the empire on the basis of a modernized secular religion.
It is amazing that today there is an attempt to resurrect the "flesh" of this religion (symbols, rituals, loyalty), from which its "soul" - Marxism-Leninism - has long since flown away. If we proceed from the fact that the very teachings of the latter were ultimately put at the service of the modernized empire, we will have to admit that it is she who is the source of all these bizarre teleportations.
But, if Russia is in essence not a national and not a multinational state, but a space organized into a sacralized empire, it is quite logical to assume that it cannot avoid its Westphalian reformation, which its western neighbor passed through long ago. What could be its trajectory? Based on European analogies, the following main stages can be distinguished:
- From the Reformation to the Augsburg Peace - we have already passed this period and the events from Perestroika to the collapse of the USSR and the formation of the CIS correspond to it, as well as the signing of the Federal Treaty within Russia.
- Expansionism of the Habsburgs, the Dutch Revolution and the Thirty Years' War - the formal Peace of Augsburg fixed the principle of “cujus regio, ejus religio” on paper, but it turned out that the Habsburgs, with their imperial ambitions, were not going to take it seriously. A war begins, which is waged, on the one hand, for the preservation and restoration of the empire of one religion (ideology, in our case, a political religion), on the other hand, for separation from it and its expulsion from the separated territories. This is the period that we have entered now.
Festive demonstration in Moscow, November 7, 1958. Photo: TASS photo chronicle
- Peace of Westphalia - the complete de facto emancipation of the Protestant states that survived the war from the old empire, the recognition of Protestant minorities in the regional German Catholic states, the transformation of the Holy Roman Empire into a purely nominal one - a confederation of Protestant and regional Catholic states. At the same time, the formation of a new Catholic empire on the basis of the Austrian Empire, which considers itself the successor of the previous one, but no longer claims to subjugate Protestant and semi-Protestant states. With regard to our situation, we can talk about a territorial regrouping of the empire with a shift to the east with the final emancipation from it of the "Protestant" and semi-Protestant spaces lying to the West. That is, we are talking about the final disintegration of the Soviet imperial space, despite the fact that some state can inherit the Soviet idea as its own, no longer claiming the states freed from it.
- Secularization of Catholic countries - the subordination of religion to pragmatic state interests in large Catholic countries, republican revolutions, secularization. This stage is most likely for post-Soviet countries like Belarus and Kazakhstan, which will formally remain “Catholic”, that is, will retain their adherence to the Soviet religion, but in reality will increasingly distance themselves from Moscow and pursue their pragmatic policies.
- The collapse of the Austrian Empire and the unification of Germany - ultimately, and the Austrian Empire, which existed on the principles of German-Catholic domination, had to disintegrate into secularized nation states. At the same time, however, the German Protestant and regional Catholic states are being united into a single national state. A united Germany is trying to include Austria and create an empire on a secular-nationalist basis, however, after the failure of this attempt, it shrinks within its borders. As a result, the German-speaking space in Europe retains three assemblage points: Germany, Austria and the German-speaking part of Switzerland. If we talk about our analogies, we cannot exclude attempts to unite Russian (East Slavic) territories into a single state on a purely nationalist basis around a new center. But it is highly probable that the diverse Russian (Rus) space will retain several assemblage points and independent centers.
Of course, we cannot talk about full correspondence and reproduction in Eurasia of the corresponding stages of European history. And times are different today - what used to take centuries, now can happen in decades. However, the main meaning of the Westphalian Revolution - the transition from a hegemonic imperial system to a system of balance of national states - is clearly becoming relevant for central Eurasia.
