International relations, 1648–1814 and cultural achievement. Historian Frederick Nussbaum says it was: The worst came during the Thirty Years' War, 1618–1648, which had an extremely negative impact on the civilian population of Germany and surrounding areas, with massive loss of life and disruption of the economy and society. Scholars taking a "realist" perspective on wars and diplomacy have emphasized the Peace of Westphalia (1648) as a dividing line. It ended the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), where religion and ideology had been powerful motivating forces for warfare. Westphalia, in the realist view, ushered in a new international system of sovereign states of roughly equal
Treaty establishing the European Defence Community Treaty establishing the European Defence Community The Treaty establishing the European Defence Community, also known as the Treaty of Paris, is an unratified treaty signed on 27 May 1952 by the six 'inner' countries of European integration; West Germany, France, Italy, and the Benelux countries. The treaty would have created a European Defence Community (EDC) with a pan-European defence force. The treaty failed to obtain ratification in the French parliament, and consequently never entered into force. Instead, West Germany was admitted into the Western European Union (WEU), a dormant successor of the 1948 Western Union, as well as NATO. The