The Old Swiss Confederacy a "de facto" independent state throughout the early modern period, although still nominally part of the Holy Roman Empire until 1648 when the Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War. The Swiss Reformation divided the confederates into Reformed and Catholic parties, resulting in internal conflict from the 16th to the 18th centuries; as a result, the federal diet () was often paralysed by hostility between the factions. The Swiss Confederacy fell to invasion by the French Revolutionary Army in 1798, after which it became the short-lived Helvetic Republic. The adjective "old" was introduced after the Napoleonic era with ,
Treaty Establishing the European Stability Mechanism mechanism, which would subsequently be negotiated as an intergovernmental treaty outside of the EU framework, legitimacy under EU law. The two line amendment to Article 136 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which was approved by the European Council on 16 December 2010, reads: Due to the intergovernmental nature of the permanent lending mechanism, which was named the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the simplified treaty revision procedure could be used for the TFEU amendment as the EU's powers were not being increased. However, the amendment would not fulfill the German demand that the removal of