Does not the reality of war prove that the Kantian idea of perpetual peace is a chimera, the dream of an idle moralist, asked Thomas Mertens in Hegel's Homage to Kant's Perpetual Peace (Review of Politics, Vol. 57, 1995). According to Mertens, Hegel's answer to this question is: "Yes, perpetual peace is a chimera, because war is a permanent feature of human history. And war is a necessary part of the dialectic of human progress and development.
But this is a simple answer to one of the most difficult and important questions of our time.
In his article, Mertens reminds us of the Hegelian critique of the Kantian moral approach, but we must also remember that Kant wrote against the political moralist as a threat to peace. In fact, in his Perpetual Peace, Kant explained that the good policy is the honest policy, and the wise policy is the policy that sees rationalism and pragmatism in moral action. Kant supports the politics that understands the value of moral actions as a better option than the immoral political behavior. Thus, perpetual peace may seem like a chimera, but it is not an impossible condition, as many politicians and political thinkers tend to argue.
Who is today's political moralist? Most autocrats are political moralists. The leaders of Al Qaeda, Iranian President Ahmadinejad, the dictators and autocrats of all times - they are political moralists. Moral rhetoric is often a prerogative of authoritarian leaders and regimes. But not an exclusive prerogative. The United States and Britain attacked Iraq in 2003 on the basis of political moralism. It is moral to depose a dictator, the American and British governments argued before the invasion. And war is a duty and a responsibility when that dictator has nuclear weapons. Al Qaeda explains its terror with religious moralism. Almost every belligerent nation, group, or person needs a moral excuse to explain its right to aggression.
Meanwhile, the pragmatic politician does not need to think about morality to understand that military confrontation is an option only in case of self-defense. If we follow this logic, opposition to the nuclear threat posed by Iran today must not be expressed in open acts of war. Yet the stakes are high, with or without such actions.
Kant begins his philosophical sketch of Perpetual Peace by arguing that the political theorist is more honest than the politician, because the motives of both in explaining and thinking politics are different. Of course, the politician always has something to hide. Kant revealed his vision of perpetual peace as a political theorist, and as such he is an optimist in contrast to the traditional politician. In his short philosophical article, he clearly enumerated the conditions under which peace can or cannot exist:
No treaty of peace that tacitly keeps open the possibility for future war shall be held valid, is the first postulate in the Perpetual Peace. Such a treaty is not a peace treaty, but a temporary cessation of war. The Treaty of Versailles was a temporary suspension of war, and the Second World War exposed its hypocrisy and futility. The modern European Union, on the other hand, is based on treaties that truly create peace. European integration, which began in the 1950s, is not based on moral appeals and rhetoric, but on conscious, pragmatic interests and actions that reject the idea of war a priori.
No independent nation, large or small, can be taken over by another nation. This is the second postulate of Kantian perpetual peace. Empires are built on subjugated nations. But it is a historical fact that there is no such thing as a permanent empire. And the most durable empires have been those that gave enough freedom to the natives. The Romans tried to stay out of the internal politics of the subjugated peoples. The Ottoman Empire was a loose entity that preserved local customs. Soviet Russia tried to maintain tight control over its Soviet republics and Eastern Europe, but the communist empire dissolved after only 40 years of existence.
Standing armies shall be gradually abolished. This is the third postulate. Why? Because they are a source of constant threat. They also create an environment of armament competition, which leads to a situation where war is a better choice than peace. This argument has been proven many times, especially with the First World War. That war was a pure result of accumulated tensions, a psychological explosion that reflected decades of armament, mistrust, and competition among the European powers. We were lucky that the Cold War did not produce a real military conflict between the superpowers.
"Of the three kinds of power: the power of an army, the power of an alliance, and the power of money, the third is the most reliable instrument of war," writes Kant. True. The Germans lost World War I because of exhaustion. The United States won three monumental wars in the 20th century because of money (among other factors). And we know that Soviet Russia collapsed with a large army and stable alliances.
Increase of national debt for foreign affairs shows the country's preparation for war. This is another postulate of Perpetual Peace. America has been stagnating in recent years, shaken by an internal economic crisis and unacknowledged exhaustion from the conflict in Iraq. Citizens must be cautious in their expectations of a government that increases war spending and armaments.
No nation shall interfere with the constitution and government of another. In recent years, the American government has made a number of mistakes, especially in the Middle East. The wars in the Middle East have not brought real peace, perhaps because of the violation of this postulate. The West must have good intentions (such as exporting democracy and preventive military action), but it has no right to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, according to the Kantian postulate. Here we return to the idea of political moralism and its difference from moral politics. Last year in Iran there was an uprising against the ruling regime. Many suggested that the West had a moral obligation to support the Iranian opposition. The Obama administration was wise to stay away because, as Kant would say, active Western involvement in Iran's internal affairs would "violate the rights of an independent people struggling with its internal ills," it would be against Iranian autonomy.
