With the benefit of hindsight, Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace is an argument that boasts little historical support, but nonetheless remains a solid theory with modern applications.
When he wrote Perpetual Peace in 1795, the institutional principles upon which Kant based his pacifist argument were still radical new ideas that had yet to be widely implemented. First, the concept of a republican constitution was still fresh in the minds of European thinkers. Scarcely six years earlier had the Declaration of the Rights of Man been approved by France's National Assembly, and universal suffrage for men would not be seen in England for almost forty years, in America not until 1863 during their Civil War, and for the German states not until Unification in 1871. Second, the concept of international commerce had yet to be applied on a massive scale. With mercantilist ideas still in recent memory, the full brunt of the Industrial Revolution yet to be borne, and trade between nations but a mere hint of what it would become, there existed no powerful international economic forces such as Kant's theory required. The principles upon which Kant pinned his argument were still largely theoretical.
It may come as less of a surprise to the modern reader, then, that a writer with such immense authority could reach such radical conclusions, which have little or no empirical verification in today's world more than two hundred years later. States that modelled themselves after the republican institutions Kant had in mind have most certainly gone to war. The First World War had democratic actors, as did the Second, as did the Vietnam War, to name three prominent examples. International commerce has boomed in times of war: a first year economics course will teach that it took the Second World War to pull the America out of the Great Depression. Even Coca Cola managed to operate on both sides during this war, with the German subsidiary named Fanta. America and the Soviet Union each supplied arms to both sides during the Iran-Iraq conflict 1980-1988. In fact, the Twentieth Century is infamous for having more war in it than any other in known history.
However, though Kant's institutional version of pacifism has certainly not come to pass, the question still looms as to whether it is possible. To this end, Kant's premises must be assessed, both in terms of their logical sensibility and their applicability to humankind. Kant's opening axiom in Perpetual Peace is that a “state of peace among men living together” is not the same as the “state of nature,” which he defines as a “state of war.” It is no great leap to posit that, in this appeal to Hobbes's Leviathan, Kant clearly believed war to be a natural condition of men. However, a mere two paragraphs later, Kant writes that it is “very natural” that men would “have great hesitation in embarking on so dangerous an enterprise [as war].” Such apparently contradictory assumptions - that war is the natural state of men, and yet that men would be acting naturally to oppose it - seem to indicate a fundamental confusion of premises. The simple logical rule Not "P and Not P" might lead the rational reader to conclude that Kant must be wrong in one of his assumptions: either war is the natural condition of men, or men would naturally oppose it, but surely both could not be the case. Upon further scrutiny, however, it may be argued that, though contradictory, these two axioms are not mutually exclusive. Instead of writing himself into a fatal logical conundrum, Kant may have instead picked up upon one of the fundamental dilemmas of human nature: throughout history, humans have often been ready and willing to pick up the sword, and yet at the same time have shown great hatred for war.
Perhaps this terrible confusion of human nature is why Kant rested his pacifist argument not upon “motives of morality,” but instead upon artificially imposed institutions such as republicanism and international commerce. In Kant's theory, states are “compelled” to promote peace, and the possibility of pacifism is considered outside of the moral argument. Today, it would seem that pragmatic, amoral motives for peace are still relevant to the pacifist's debate. Thomas Friedman pointed out in 2000 that no two nations that had a McDonalds Restaurant had ever gone directly to war with one another. In doing so, he dangles in front of us a contemporary version of Kant's institutional pacifism, suggesting that once a certain degree of economic development is reached, war becomes an unattractive option. Similarly, Kant's republican argument against war has also held in recent times; Canada's popularly backed choice not to participate in the 2003 invasion of Iraq is one example.
Thus, though Kant's institutional argument for peace has found little universal acceptance in the past two centuries, its purely logical form remains valid to this day, and it seems to still be applicable in certain modern scenarios. Perhaps, then, those who argue for peace in the Twenty-first Century might still learn from their counterparts in the Eighteenth.
