The Conditions of the Realisation of the Kantian Ideal.
These means are of two kinds. In the first place, what evils must we set about removing? What are the negative conditions? And, secondly, what are the general positive conditions which will make the realisation of this idea possible and guarantee the permanence of an international peace once attained? These negative and positive conditions Kant calls Preliminary and Definitive Articles respectively, the whole essay being carefully thrown into the form of a treaty. The Preliminary Articles of a treaty for perpetual peace are based on the principle that anything that hinders or threatens the peaceful co-existence of nations must be abolished. These conditions have been classified by Kuno Fischer. Kant, he points out,[62] examines the principles of right governing the different sets of circumstances in which nations find themselves—namely, (a) while they are actually at war; (b) when the time comes to conclude a treaty of peace; (c) when they are living in a state of peace. The six Preliminary Articles fall naturally into these groups. War must not be conducted in such a manner as to increase national hatred and embitter a future peace. (Art. 6.)[63] The treaty which brings hostilities to an end must be concluded in an honest desire for peace. (Art. 1.)[64] Again a nation, when in a state of peace, must do nothing to threaten the political independence of another nation or endanger its existence, thereby giving the strongest of all motives for a fresh war. A nation may commit this injury in two ways: (1) indirectly, by causing danger to others through the growth of its standing army (Art. 3)[65]—always a menace to the state of peace—or by any unusual war preparations: and (2) through too great a supremacy of another kind, by amassing money, the most powerful of all weapons in warfare. The National Debt (Art. 4)[66] is another standing danger to the peaceful co-existence of nations. But, besides, we have the danger of actual attack. There is no right of intervention between nations. (Art. 5.)[67] Nor can states be inherited or conquered (Art. 2),[68] or in any way treated in a manner subversive of their independence and sovereignty as individuals. For a similar reason, armed troops cannot be hired and sold as things.
These then are the negative conditions of peace.[69] There are, besides, three positive conditions:
(a) The intercourse of nations is to be confined to a right of hospitality. (Art. 3.)[70] There is nothing new to us in this assertion of a right of way. The right to free means of international communication has in the last hundred years become a commonplace of law. And the change has been brought about, as Kant anticipated, not through an abstract respect for the idea of right, but through the pressure of purely commercial interests. Since Kant’s time the nations of Europe have all been more or less transformed from agricultural to commercial states whose interests run mainly in the same direction, whose existence and development depend necessarily upon “conditions of universal hospitality.” Commerce depends upon this freedom of international intercourse, and on commerce mainly depends our hope of peace.
(b) The first Definitive Article[71] requires that the constitution of every state should be republican. What Kant understands by this term is that, in the state, law should rule above force and that its constitution should be a representative one, guaranteeing public justice and based on the freedom and equality of its members and their mutual dependence on a common legislature. Kant’s demand is independent of the form of the government. A constitutional monarchy like that of Prussia in the time of Frederick the Great, who regarded himself as the first servant of the state and ruled with the wisdom and forethought which the nation would have had the right to demand from such an one—such a monarchy is not in contradiction to the idea of a true republic. That the state should have a constitution in accordance with the principles of right is the essential point.[72] To make this possible, the law-giving power must lie with the representatives of the people: there must be a complete separation, such as Locke and Rousseau demand, between the legislature and executive. Otherwise we have despotism. Hence, while Kant admitted absolutism under certain conditions, he rejected democracy where, in his opinion, the mass of the people was despot.
An internal constitution, firmly established on the principles of right, would not only serve to kill the seeds of national hatred and diminish the likelihood of foreign war. It would do more: it would destroy sources of revolution and discontent within the state. Kant, like many writers on this subject, does not directly allude to civil war[73] and the means by which it may be prevented or abolished. Actually to achieve this would be impossible: it is beyond the power of either arbitration or disarmament. But in a representative government and the liberty of a people lie the greatest safeguards against internal discontent. Civil peace and international peace must to a certain extent go hand in hand.
We come now to the central idea of the treatise: (c) the law of nations must be based upon a federation of free states. (Art. 2.)[74] This must be regarded as the end to which mankind is advancing. The problem here is not out of many nations to make one. This would be perhaps the surest way to attain peace, but it is scarcely practicable, and, in certain forms, it is undesirable. Kant is inclined to approve of the separation of nations by language and religion, by historical and social tradition and physical boundaries: nature seems to condemn the idea of a universal monarchy.[75] The only footing on which a thorough-going, indubitable system of international law is in practice possible is that of the society of nations: not the world-republic[76] the Greeks dreamt of, but a federation of states. Such a union in the interests of perpetual peace between nations would be the “highest political good.” The relation of the federated states to one another and to the whole would be fixed by cosmopolitan law: the link of self-interest which would bind them would again be the spirit of commerce.
This scheme of a perpetual peace had not escaped ridicule in the eighteenth century: the name of Kant protected it henceforth. The facts of history, even more conclusively than the voices of philosophers, soldiers and princes, show how great has been the progress of this idea in recent years. But it has not gained its present hold upon the popular mind without great and lasting opposition. Indeed we have here what must still be regarded as a controversial question. There have been, and are still, men who regard perpetual peace as a state of things as undesirable as it is unattainable. For such persons, war is a necessity of our civilisation: it is impossible that it should ever cease to exist. All that we can do, and there is no harm, nor any contradiction in the attempt, is to make wars shorter, fewer and more humane: the whole question, beyond this, is without practical significance. Others, on the other hand,—and these perhaps more thoughtful—regard war as hostile to culture, an evil of the worst kind, although a necessary evil. In peace, for them, lies the true ideal of humanity, although in any perfect form this cannot be realised in the near future. The extreme forms of these views are to be sought in what has been called in Germany “the philosophy of the barracks” which comes forward with a glorification of war for its own sake, and in the attitude of modern Peace Societies which denounce all war wholesale, without respect of causes or conditions.
Hegel, Schiller and Moltke.
Hegel, the greatest of the champions of war, would have nothing to do with Kant’s federation of nations formed in the interests of peace. The welfare of a state, he held, is its own highest law; and he refused to admit that this welfare was to be sought in an international peace. Hegel lived in an age when all power and order seemed to lie with the sword. Something of the charm of Napoleonism seems to hang over him. He does not go the length of writers like Joseph de Maistre, who see in war the finger of God or an arrangement for the survival of the fittest—a theory, as far as regards individuals, quite in contradiction with the real facts, which show that it is precisely the physically unfit whom war, as a method of extermination, cannot reach. But, like Schiller and Moltke, Hegel sees in war an educative instrument, developing virtues in a nation which could not be fully developed otherwise, (much as pain and suffering bring patience and resignation and other such qualities into play in the individual), and drawing the nation together, making each citizen conscious of his citizenship, as no other influence can. War, he holds, leaves a nation always stronger than it was before; it buries causes of inner dissension, and consolidates the internal power of the state.[77] No other trial can, in the same way, show what is the real strength and weakness of a nation, what it is, not merely materially, but physically, intellectually and morally.