At the last session of a college seminar on nuclear weapons and strategic defense, my seminar leader, astronomer Mike Lecar (RIP), raised the question of how to ensure world peace without expensive and ineffective defense systems. Mike introduced those of us who didn’t know him to Immanuel Kant, a polymath who, inter alia, had been a fellow astronomer - Kant was one of the first people to speculate that nebulae were actually “island universes,” or galaxies. The Sage of Konigsburg acquired greater fame as a philosopher, in which capacity he wrote several essays on political philosophy, chief among them “Perpetual Peace” (1795) In his essay Kant argued that republicanism was a necessary precondition for world peace: citizens of republics were far less likely to start wars when their own blood and treasure were at stake, and more accustomed to relationships structured by contract than by dominion. Necessary, Kant wrote, but not sufficient: one could not fully guarantee an end to war unless those republics were bound together in a constitutional federation, akin to the social contract between individual citizens.
Eirene, by Ludwig Knaus
Kant’s speculations, recast as “democratic peace theory,” became popular with interventionist American policy-makers in the twentieth century. Woodrow Wilson justified American intervention in World War One as “making the world safe for democracy,” which in turn would prevent another global conflict. Bill Clinton argued that the promotion of democracy would make permanent the peace created by the Fall o’ Communism™. George Bush II justified the invasion of Iraq by claiming that the United States had a responsibility to establish democracies in Southwest Asia, and to support democratic “color revolutions” in nations like Georgia and Ukraine. All three of these presidents agreed with Kant that representative government was not the sole guarantor of international peace, that some form of trans-national institution had to harmonize those republics’ interests. For Wilson, the League of Nations would serve this purpose; Clinton and Bush, both skeptical about world government, assumed that free international trade under the World Trade Organization would do the job. Or that God would intervene.
In practice, the concentration of coercive power in the hands of a few sovereign states prevented either of these international systems from functioning equitably. The League of Nations became the bagman for the British and French Empires, dividing the spoils of Ottoman and German defeat among the Great War’s victors. The WTO and the International Monetary Fund became the servants of multi-national corporations, helping them strip-mine the public assets of the old Communist bloc and the global South. Both of these would-be world governments destroyed their own legitimacy within half a generation.
Their fatal flaw was a misconception that dated back to Kant himself: individuals in a republic are not analogous to nation-states in an international system. States are defined by Max Weber as entities enjoying “a monopoly on the legitimate use of force” within a given geographical era. Individuals within a social contract, on the other hand, cannot legitimately use force except in self-defense, and then only if the state is unable immediately to defend them. Nations one may define as political communities with shared sets of historical grievances. Citizens aren’t supposed to go around with chips on their shoulder, even if many do; nations, on the other hand, almost always have someone or something they want to fight. What is anti-social in an individual is acceptable, even laudable, in a nation-state. National leaders we are accustomed to regard as responsible if they are willing, often eager, to break, burn, and kill on their country’s behalf. One cannot fashion any sort of international order out of such antisocial beings, unless the order be a giant global prison run by the strongest inmates.
Nor can one assume that such a world-prison is a suitable place for the kind of intelligent beings capable of deducing the nature of galaxies. If we want to imagine a peaceful future conducive to science, culture, and human flourishing, however, we must imagine one that rejects the poison of nationalism and the concept of “legitimate violence.”
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One question, though: Do republics actually tend not to fight one another? Political scientists have not come up with a satisfactory answer to that question, because one can easily undermine any historical examples raised to support or undermine democratic peace theory with the No True Scotsman tactic. One need not adopt the absolutist posture of many political scientists, however. If we define a republic as a government featuring 1st Separation of government powers, 2nd Competitive multi-party elections, and 3rd An electorate including at least 20 percent of the population, then the number of republics - representative democracies, if you prefer - would seem to have increased worldwide since 1795. Concurrently, the number of inter-republican conflicts decreased. The United States made war on the Mexican Republic and the Confederacy, the First French Republic conquered Venice and the Netherlands, the Second French Republic destroyed the Roman Republic of 1848, Britain and Finland fought one another (somewhat half-heartedly) during the Second World War, and Iceland and Britain fought a bloodless war over cod fishing in the mid-twentieth century. There are other examples one might adduce, but they tend to conflate constitutional monarchies in which the non-elected sovereign has actual power (e.g., Wilhelmine Germany) with representative democracies. I suspect that elected officials are more adept at compromise and at gracefully chickening out of conflicts than kings and dictators, since the former skill helped them get elected and the latter helped them get along with other officials. From the skills and foibles of crooked politicians may yet come a more peaceful world order.
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