Nearest historic settlement
Handle with care. Textbooks often say Westphalia invented the sovereign state and the modern international system. Andreas Osiander and others have shown this is largely a nineteenth- and twentieth-century retrojection: the treaties never use the word sovereignty in that sense, they explicitly preserved the Empire rather than dissolving it, and they left the emperor real authority. What 1648 did establish was a durable multilateral settlement in which religion was no longer a legitimate reason to redraw borders — important enough without the myth.