Structures

Abstract

Münster and Osnabrück were strange places to call an international peace conference.¹ Larger cities, some of them accustomed to hosting major gatherings (such as the Imperial Diet)—Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Cologne, and Lübeck—were passed over in favor of two provincial towns of no special importance. Contemporaries viewed it something like we might if the president announced a major forthcoming conference in the Iowa cities of Cedar Rapids and Davenport. To be sure, treaties have been negotiated in small towns, even in recent times: the treaty of Portsmouth, ending the Russo-Japanese War, was signed in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and the “General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina” was signed in 1995 in Dayton, Ohio. Negotiators had their reasons for choosing smaller or less cosmopolitan cities in those cases, chiefly security and, in the case of Dayton, relative isolation from the international press.

The Baron was one of the most powerful lords in Westphalia, for his castle had not only a gate, but windows.

—Voltaire, Candide, 8