Word: westphalia
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...overthrow the Reich, France would be bound to act. The French General Staff foresaw " the necessity for certain military measures to protect the French troops in the Ruhr." The first of these measures would be to straighten out the Ruhr salient by taking strategic positions to the South in Westphalia. It was estimated that France could put 200,000 men in motion: 55,000 already in the Ruhr basin, 95,000 in the Rhineland, 50,000 massed near the frontier, including large garrisons at Metz and Strasbourg, with reserves at Belford Epinal and Verdun...
Herr Oswald Sprengler, the German historian whose book, Downfall of the Occident, was one of the sensations of the past few years, accuses France of carrying on Napoleon's ambitions: "When Napoleon founded the Grand Duchy of Berg in the Ruhr Basin and the Kingdom of Westphalia he observed to his brother-in-law that the Ruhr was the strategic road to the North Sea. This thought of Napoleon's . . . is gradually taking shape in Premier Poincaré's policy . . . it is only a short distance from the Ruhr to the North Sea. . . . France could seize...
There has never been a treaty more radical in its remodelling of international society. The Peace of Westphalia gave the coup de grace to the idea of a united Europe in the Holy Roman Empire and inaugurated an age of sovereign territorial states. The Peace of Utrecht inaugurated an age of commercial and colonial rivalry by express recognition of the principle of the balance of power. The Treaty of Vienna sought to establish a concert of Europe, but with recognition of dynastic interests, it ignored the rising tide of nationalism and democracy. It remained for the present treaty to recognize...
With its 80,000 words, presented in less than six months from the armistice the peace treaty is the longest and will probably be concluded in the shortest time of any comparable treaty in modern times. Treaties with which comparison is suggested are those of Westphalia, signed in 1648 after seven years deliberation, those of Utrecht signed in 1713, eighteen months after the preliminaries, and that of Vienna signed June 9, 1815, fourteen months after the first capitulation of Napoleon but while the opposing forces were gathering for the final struggle at Waterloo...
...above, the present treaty is the first to include, extra-European powers. It is also the first general treaty in which English is an official language, a position it shares with French, which was the sole official version of the treaty of Vienna, while the treaties of Westphalia and Utrecht were in Latin...