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
Dominions of Sweden Norway to the king of Sweden under the Treaty of Kiel, which followed on Second War against Napoleon. However the treaty of Kiel never came into force: instead sovereignty of Western Pomerania passed to Kingdom of Prussia, who already held the eastern parts and merged them into the Province of Pomerania. Norway declared her independence, but was forced after a short war into a personal Union with Sweden. Sweden received the German town of Wismar with the surrounding countryside in the Peace of Westphalia (1648). In 1803 Wismar was pawned, in exchange for a loan, and control was handed over