Civilians can be the main battlefield
Contributions made villages into magazines.
The Empire survived, weaker. France and Sweden gained. The Dutch Republic's independence was recognised.
The later "Westphalian system" idea shaped how twentieth-century diplomats talked -- a legacy of reading, not only of 1648.
Lessons
Patrons change the war they join
Sweden and France did not fight Bohemia's original war.
Exhaustion can settle more than victory
1648 is a peace of cannot-continue.
Beware theory labels
"Westphalian" is a later tool.
Local records beat slogans
Parish books are the honest monument.
Unresolved
Territory-by-territory demography
Still being refined.
Wallenstein's last politics
Conspiracy files remain argued.
Art restitution
Some church loot trails never closed.
The IR myth in teaching
A pedagogical habit that historians keep correcting.
Shifts
Sweden's great-power season
A seventeenth-century Baltic order.
French anti-Habsburg edge
A step toward later Louis XIV wars.
Imperial constitutional lock-in
Fragmentation confirmed.
A language of statehood
Later lawyers' Westphalia -- a shift in books, then in diplomacy.
Outlook
Local history boom
German regional studies still move the death map.
IR courses may adjust
Some already teach "Westphalia myth" as the unit.
A closed war, an open metaphor
The fighting ended; the sovereignty slogan did not.
Risk
closed, mis-taught
The war is historically closed. The live risk is pedagogical: using "Westphalia" as a cartoon of 1648, or forgetting the German dead in a theory lecture.
German unification much later had to overcome the political map Westphalia confirmed.
Religious coexistence in the Empire was legalised exhaustion, not liberal tolerance in a modern sense.