Kant's 'perpetual peace': utopia or political guide?

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Kant's 'perpetual peace': utopia or political guide?

By Anonymous
Created 05/26/2004 - 23:00

In the history of political thought Immanuel Kant’s 1795 treatise Perpetual Peace is not unique. It is
part of a long tradition of works attempting to answer the question of how war, the scourge of
humanity, could be ended.

The possibility of achieving this goal through political means – that is, not waiting for a miracle, such
as the creation of a new world, nor the birth of a child-peacemaker as in Virgil – is a concept that can
be traced back at least to the Florentine poet and political theorist Dante Alighieri, in his De
Monarchia (

c. 1313

[1]).

Four centuries later, the European universal genius

Gottfried Leibniz

[1], in Corpus Juris Gentium

(1693) considered this same possibility, as did the Abbé de St. Pierre, who created a detailed plan for
the foundation of perpetual peace. At the end of the 18th century, with the publication of

Kant’s

treatise

[1], a flood of texts addressed the possibility of the creation of a lasting peace in Europe.

Roger Scruton

[1] started it, with his characteristically incisive and provocative essay

“Immanuel

Kant and the Iraq war”

[2] (February 2004); Antje Vollmer continued the discussion with

“Immanuel

Kant and Iraq: a reply”

[3] (April 2004)

The hope of perpetual peace at the end of the 18th century was, then, grounded in generations of

European thinking

[1]. But it arose afresh at the end of a century that had begun belligerently and

culminated brutally with Napoleon’s revolutionary wars. Amid fear and uneasiness in Europe, the
French Revolution promoted the idea among many, including Immanuel Kant, that reason itself could
be realised in politics.

This leads Kant to pose a further question: could such a development also hold true for the
foundation of perpetual peace?

Kant’s essay is not a utopian venture. A utopian work, following its classic elaboration in Thomas
More’s Utopia (

1516

[1]), is a treatise that compares an existing condition with an imaginary

alternative in which the commentator finds himself without being able to explain what path was
necessary to arrive there. Kant’s peace treatise is of a different order: rather than “entering” the
condition of perpetual peace, it considers the steps necessary to reach this goal. Thus, contrary to a
widely-held interpretation, Kant’s work is a political guide rather than the sketch of a utopia, and
should be read as such.

From leader to law

Kant’s prognosis differs from Dante’s requirements for lasting peace in Europe, written almost five
hundred years earlier. Dante put all hope in the effectiveness of a self-asserting political elite, such
as (for example) a Kaiser unlimited by popish opposition in matters of conflict resolution and the
negotiation of peace.

Kant renounces the installation of such a political elite. He believes peace in Europe can only be
achieved and secured by increasing the importance of the rule of law in relations between states.
Moreover, a vital condition has to be met: these states are republics whose citizens – and not an
individual or elite – have the last word regarding decisions of war and peace.

Coming soon on openDemocracy: David Held’s major essay on “Globalisation: the danger and the
answer”, which starts from Immanuel Kant’s reflection that human beings are “unavoidably side by
side”. See also his

“Violence and justice in a global age”

[4] (September 2001)

Kant renounces the political elite as guarantor and enforcer of law and order for more fundamental
reasons than mere political pragmatism. His emphasis on a federation of states able, in cooperation

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Kant's 'perpetual peace': utopia or political guide?

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with individual states and their citizens, to take responsibility for preserving the law, is a crucial
protection against possible despotism.

A leader of the peace, who would embody in his or her own person the responsibility for international
administration and enforcement of justice, would, Kant fears, quickly become a despot.

In a word: if Dante’s plan for peace can be described as imperial, Kant’s design for perpetual peace
can be considered republican.

From empire to federation

As the east-west conflict ended and the search for a new world order began in the early

1990s

[1],

Kant’s design received renewed attention – and its emerging contrast to Dante’s plan shadowed
the evolving differences between European and American visions of what that post-cold war world
order should be.

As the decade developed, European visions of world order increasingly seemed more oriented to
Kant’s guidelines, while the basis of world order in American politics seemed rooted more in the
Dantian than in the Kantian model. It is significant that recent polemics of journalists close to official
United States policies are highly critical towards the treatise of Perpetual Peace. An example is
Robert Kagan’s

On paradise and power

[1], which repeats the familiar claim that Kant’s treatise is

nothing more than a utopia – and whose

author sees

[1] Europe “entering a [Kantian] post-historical

paradise of peace and relative prosperity”, while the United States remains “mired in history”.

For two representative views in openDemocracy of international relations from American and
European perspectives during the approach to war in Iraq, see John Hulsman,

“The violations of

Gerhard Schröder”

[5] (December 2002) and Mary Kaldor,

“In place of war, open up Iraq”

[6]

(February 2003)

This, to repeat, was not the case when the essay was written. In the hands of a Kantian, of course, it
could have acquired that interpretation in the intervening period. Europe’s political history in the
decades after the second world war – from the slow expansion of the European Union to the end of
east-west confrontation – could be understood as a step-by-step realisation of

Kant’s venture

[1].

Yet it would still be misleading to view Kant’s federation of states as a model for the organisation
either of European or of global relations.

It is true that the contemporary European balance of power stands in the background of Kant’s
considerations. He frequently mentions it in his work on international law. In Kant’s conception, the
reciprocity of a peace that ensures security, law and order relies on the tendency towards a balance
of power between European states; no balance means no reciprocity. In this sense, Kant’s federation
of states does not account for a superpower like the United States; unquestionably a political realist,
Kant would have realised that such an overwhelmingly superior power could not be fitted into his
projected structure.

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (

OSCE

[1]), the European Union and

possibly the European part of Nato can justifiably be considered, to a certain extent, as
embodiments of a federation of states as Immanuel Kant might have envisioned them. But to apply
this concept on a global scale to the United Nations, or to project other developments in this
direction, would be a daring step. Both the quasi-imperial position of the United States in the world
community, and the phenomenon of “collapsed” or “failed” states on its forsaken fringes, indicates
otherwise.

In this situation, Kant would be too much of a realist to follow his own guideline. His plan for peace
applies to a European federation of states; he views the large empires on their periphery with
distrust. At any rate he does not consider them in his peace project.

From war-cost to peace-benefit

Kant’s Perpetual Peace has generated an immense body of literature, but much of this has almost

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completely overlooked one of the central features of Kant’s argument: the elementary importance
of the rule of law as embodied in the state. Kant consistently remarks that legal interactions take
place between states.

For him, this is not a historical limitation, but a point of systematic importance. Only when states
have the exclusive ability to wage war does Kant’s observation, the foundation of his entire venture,
take effect: that war invariably means more cost then return, even for the victor.

Kant reaches this conclusion via a calculation that measures the costs of war for the entire state
territory affected, including those. Only this, believes Kant, permits the conclusion that war is not
worthwhile under any circumstances. The cold-blooded calculation of this cost-benefit analysis
would, Kant was convinced, increasingly prevail against fictional notions of honour and glory.

Each week in openDemocracy, Paul Rogers tracks the most modern and least classical of wars, the
“war on terror”. It is read from the Pentagon to Tora Bora, so why should you miss out? Click

here

[1]

All these developments, unforeseen in Kant’s venture for perpetual peace, are hardly recognised in
the Europe of today. Europeans still focus on civil and transnational wars, from sub-Saharan Africa to
Central Asia to south-east Asia. The modern world of warfare still eludes them, and so therefore does
a vision for peace that speaks to the world of warfare as it has

become

[1], as Kant’s did in his own

time.

209 years after the publication of Kant’s peace treatise it is possible to conclude that he has been
proven correct and yet also mistaken: correct in his expectation that interstate war would disappear
with the expansion of commercialism and the democratisation of political systems;

mistaken

[7] that

this disappearance would be identical to the foundation of eternal peace.

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iraq: philosophy in war
Herfried Münkler
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