The treaty of Westphalia had the notion of sovereign rulers within the so called Holy Roman Empire (later known as German Reich). A German nation state was no concept in this treaty, nor any other nation State.
The concept of a nation state emerged in France, the first step was in the so-called hundred-years war, which resulted in a victory of France over England, and a strong king of France. The full emergence of nation state came with the French revolution, the nationalism was used first by the Jacobin radicals, then by Napoleon, and this produced a nationalistic reaction in Germany and other countries.
Much of the emotions created in religious wars (especially between protestants and Catholics) was transformed into nationalism, you can see this link up to now, e.g. in Northern Ireland, or former Yugoslavia.
I didn't say that the Peace of Westphalia created Germany. Or at least I didn't intend to, what I meant was that the Peace of Westphalia was the first document that enshrined State sovereignty over it's land and it's people. This basically created the modern concept of "the State" and the states were linked to national identity because it created the idea that "the State" was the protector of people based on nationality.
I don't disagree with the notion that nationalism began to rise at this time as a sentiment. I don't think that contradicts what I said previously. At least not as I understood my own statement.
I would certainly agree that France and England both were the first unified Nation States, but I don't think that this limits the concept of the Nation state to them.
An example of the difference involved in thought on this can be seen in the titles of the French Kings. Prior to the French Revolution the title was "King of France", because Kingship was understood to be tied to the land. The King was the ruler of that land. After the Revolution when the Monarchy is restored the title "King of France" was replaced with "King of the French". The concept of the King as the Sovereign over the land was changed to the King as the acclaimed ruler of the people (ie the nation).
This marks a key transition that was going on, and I would say was probably only finished at that point, it certainly didn't begin there. The transition was from the idea of an organic relationship between people and land. The people were linked to the land where they lived. This was their "country". This defined their identity. The ruler was nominally the owner of the land, and he/she had direct ties to the people through the land. They had mutual duties and obligations to each other. The "rights and privileges" of each were based on ancestral practice. I have a right to this land because my ancestors lived here for generations. I have a right to gather resources from that forest because my ancestors have always gathered resources from that forest.
With the French Revolution it is a transition to abstract ideas rather than organic relationships. The Nation supplants The Country. My rights and privileges are no longer established by long tradition and ancestral practice, in other words, defined by my family. My rights become individual and abstract they are now "the rights of man". Instead of being concrete, they are determined by legal documents and as such can be changed by legal documents etc.
Most people today would undoubtedly think the later is much superior, and the former archaic and undesirable. I don't think either one is perfect, nothing involving humans ever is. However, I think that there is much that was lost when the old way was replaced and that the new way actually does much less for people than they think it does.
One of the ironies of Nationalism is that today Conservatives are mostly Nationalist and view Nationalism as good etc. In the heyday of Nationalism in the 19th century, nationalism had a great deal of crossover with socialism, and was a radical revolutionary ideology that was frequently at odds with Conservative Christian culture.
This is an example of how what was liberal and progressive in the past, becomes adopted by conservatives today. Thus conservatism of tomorrow will not resemble conservatism of today, it will be more like the liberalism of today.
You forget the superstition that was largely overcome by the enlightenment. As anything, enlightenment had good and bad aspects. You flung from seeing only the good ones to seeing only the bad ones.
Again, I don't doubt that you are correct. I am, perhaps, too used to the need to speak polemically to get anyone's attention. Reality is always nuanced and people almost always present it in an overly simplistic manner, because most people don't have the patience for nuance. They are conditioned to want simple messages that produce strong feeling.
However, I do believe and am trying to make the point that while the Enlightenment has been viewed even by Conservative Christians as almost like a Golden Era that produced our democracy and our society, it was in many was disasterous and it produced a society that had the seeds of its own destruction already sown in it.
It was better than today, certainly, in the same way that a cancerous tumor is better at it's beginning when it is small, than when it is full-grown.
But of course, science is a great example here. Science has done many great things for us. It would be foolish to say that science should simply be done away with. But scientism has also done massive harm to our culture and our society.
You underestimate the number of revolutions in pre-modern times. There are revolution that are not well-known - it was a revolution that opened the way to Babylon for Cyrus, another revolution in Egypt opened the way into Africa for the Arabs, and yet another revolution in 750 AD turned the so-called »early Islam« into Islam as we know it. Just some haphazard examples. And there are certainly revolutions we (and all historians) have heard nothing about. We know more about modern times than about pre-modern times, for obvious reasons.
This may be true. I may be incorrect.
I would offer this caveat though. I am tending to think of revolution in the sense where a people rise up and over throw their rulers in order to form a new social regime.
I would generally not consider this to be the same thing as a civil war between rival claimants to the throne, nor would I consider it to be the same thing as a conquered people trying to restore their country etc.
For example, the Roman revolution where the Roman King was overthrown and the Roman Republic was created, I would consider to be a revolution in the sense that I am thinking of.
I would not consider the Civil wars of Rome between Sulla and the Grachii or between Antony and Octavian, to be revolutions in the sense that I am thinking of.
I always think it is an error to call a movement or state revolutionary when the last revolution linked to it is more than a generation ago.
What I meant by this was more to try and bring about a realization of how the political landscape has changed in the last 200 years.
Obviously there were lots of changed before that as well.
But if we go back to the American Revolution and the French Revolution we basically have three main ideologies in western politics. We can call them Right, Center, and Left.
Back then the Right were varying degrees of Monarchist. The wanted to maintain the traditional culture and society, though many maybe even supported reforms and limitations on monarchy etc.
The Center were revolutionaries who wanted to abolish monarchy and establish republics, OR some of them may have been satisfied with establishing a Republic with a very limited monarch as head of state and a government largely separate from the Monarch (basically what England is today). These people wanted extensive reforms to change the old social order, but they were leery about going too far, and were willing to compromise.
The Left were radical revolutionaries who wanted to wipe away the old social order completely and create something new from the ground up.
The old Right, progressively lost more and more and essentially died out almost complete after WW1, although it is experiencing something of a small revival currently.
The Center back then, is what would become the Right wing today.
The Left back then would become the Center/Liberals today
And a new Left would emerge following the advent of Karl Marx.
The point I am getting at with all this is the understanding of how our world has shifted, and how few people really understand how or why it did.
The landscape modern Christianity and modern politics are linked hand in hand, and as the cracks in the foundations of both begin to show, people need to understand how and why we got to where we are.
It is precisely this situation that produced the brutal conflicts following WW1 and leading up to WW2. The collapse of old Christian culture left a vacuum that was filled by the insanity of the Left, and to counter act that, people went to the insanity of the modern right (Fascism and extreme nationalism etc).
People think our political climate is normal because they haven't known anything else. In reality we are living in a bubble that is abnormal by historical standards.
Wrong alternative. The far most important factor is a system of divided power (or »check and balance« in US terminology). The oldest concept of that was the division between King, Parliament, and independent Judges …
Control is still the question. Divided power is just one option to try and limit control. The United States is an example of the fact that divided power doesn't work long term, because it doesn't prevent the centralization of control as it was supposed to.
The government of the US today has far more power and control over its citizens than King George had over his when the US revolted.
Any good government can turn bad if there is no control.
Yes, and ultimately every government will turn bad given human nature. Ultimately what the determining factor is the character of the people. Any system can work in the short term. The question is, which ones provide the best means of preserving the character of the people. The measure of a good society is ultimately human flourishing. This doesn't just include wealth and prosperity, but character, and civilization. This is also what determines if a society will stand or fall.
In other words, a common ideology.
Generally yes, but an ideology like western classical liberalism is basically self-defeating because it has no means or mechanism of preserving itself from attack. It will always fall apart.
You can say "anything will always fall apart" an that is true to a degree... but Christendom, for example, lasted for what 1500 years? Rome lasted for more (if you count Byzantium). Western liberalism has destroyed itself in 200.
I grant that I am to a certain degree switching categories, but ultimately I'm not talking about individual governments per say, but rather cultures or civilizations. Maybe societies would be a better word?
We have no promise that everyone will become a Christian, and history shows that countries that tried to install Christianity as a state religion produced bad Christians, or even baptized non-Christians that only had the names of being Christian.
I'm glad that you don't reject this Baptist idea (it was condemned by the Popes until mid-20th-century!). According to what you wrote above, you should oppose to religious freedom (fully practiced first in Rhode Island colony, made an amendment because of baptist and Quaker activists).
As you have pointed out, though I generally disdain modernism, and I fundamentally disagree with its philosophy and worldview, not everything that has come out of modernism is bad.
One thing I think moderns don't understand about the middle ages is that it was the unity of religion and the Church that made medieval society possible. In the best part of the middle ages, they were very fragmented in local culture, language, legal codes, political power, and the like. Yet their broader culture held together and could produce a world that in some way surpasses anything modernity has done. This was only possible because the Church was the unified backing of the whole culture.
I think you can make the case that almost everything that has happened in Europe since has been the result of trying to replace that foundation of religious unity with a foundation of political and legal unity.
Freedom is ultimately necessary because the two great and central virtues of Christianity are Truth and Love. Neither of them can be achieved without freedom. Neither can be compelled. You can't compel someone to believe the Truth, even if you can compel them to confess it outwardly. Neither can you compel someone to love. Both can only be freely chosen.
However, this does not mean that there should be no limits. This is probably the single biggest reason why western liberal democracy is failing and was doomed from the start. This is undoubtedly one of the greatest gateways to hell in history. The idea that any idea must be tolerated.
One of the things I don't think most people realize about the "Woke Left" of today is that they have started to adopt ideas and attitudes that actually mirror some of those from the old culture of Europe.
For example, "Cancel Culture". Cancel culture is an old idea whereby people were shunned from polite society for bad behavior. The difference is that today it is politically determined by a group of essentially "party members" where as in the past it was an organic determination of the culture based on the culture's moral values.
Another is the notion that speech can constitute violence. Leftists use this today to shut down opposing speakers, and justify their own use of violence against those they oppose.
However, there is also the truth that speaking lies that deceive people into believing false doctrines and lead them astray from God, IS doing more real and more dangerous harm to them than if you took out a knife and stabbed them.
The problem is: Where is the limit, when does support turn into coercion?
Yes, that is always the problem. That is a problem with almost everything. Lines and limits must be drawn but where?
From the Catholic point of view on this, previous Catholic views on this topic were not always morally wrong. Sometimes they were only prudentially wrong.
For example, there is nothing morally wrong with forbidding the faithful from reading harmful books. But we know now that it is unwise, both because it doesn't work and also because it often backfires.
Forbidding it isn't wrong, but simply teaching people and answering the errors involved is better and more effective.
Likewise, in scripture God makes a variety of religious observances mandatory under law, so that can't be morally wrong to do. However, it isn't prudent in our circumstances.
I would draw the line of coercion based on things like this.
If a person is punished for engaging in the worship and observances of their religion, by placing negative consequences on them, that is coercive. Negative consequences could be anything from denying public services, or extra taxation, or fines to jail, or violence.
If a person is punished for NOT engaging in Christian observances and worship, that is also coercive.
However, I don't think that having prayer in schools is coercive. I don't think that having religious symbols and elements publicly present is coercive.
Using religious language or prayers at public events or in political venues, I don't think is coercive.