Traditional or Kantian liberalism

By Cornelia Navari

Source: Williams, P. D. (Ed.). (2008). Security studies: an introduction. London: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group.

Immanuel Kant was an enlightenment philosopher (some would say the greatest enlightenment philosopher), often noted for his approach to ethics. (Kant argued that moral behaviour resulted from moral choices and that these were guided by an inner sense of duty – when individuals behave according to duty, they were being moral.) But he was not only an ethicist; he philosophized the ‘good state’ as well as its international relations. According to Kant, the only justifiable form of government was republican government, a condition of constitutional rule where even monarchs ruled according to the law. Moreover, the test of good laws was their ‘universalizability’ – the test of universal applicability. The only laws that deserved the name of ‘law’ were those one could wish everyone (including oneself) obeyed. Such laws become ‘categorical imperatives’; they were directly binding, and monarchs as well as ordinary citizens were subject to them.

 

Kant argued that republican states were ‘peace producers’; that is, they were more inclined to peaceful behaviour than other sorts of states. He attributed this to habits of consultation; a citizenry which had to be consulted before going to war would be unlikely to endorse war easily. He also attributed it to the legal foundations of the republican state: he believed a state built on law was less likely to endorse lawless behaviour in international relations.

But being republican was not sufficient to ensure world peace. According to Kant – and it was the critical argument of Perpetual Peace – the situation of international relations, its lawless condition, unstable power balances and especially the ever-present possibility of war endangered the republican state and made it difficult for liberal political orders to maintain their republican or liberal conditions. Hence, he argued, it was the duty of the republican states to strive towards law-regulated international relations; they could not merely be liberal in themselves.

A critical part of Kant’s argument, which initiated the debate between liberalist and realists, was his critique of the concept of the ‘balance of power’: he refuted the argument, becoming prevalent in his day, that the balance of power was a peacekeeper. The idea of conscious balancing was fallacious, he argued, since ‘It is the desire of every state, or of its ruler, to arrive at a condition of perpetual peace by conquering the whole world, if that were possible’. As to the automatic operations of such a balance, he held Rousseau’s view that such tendencies did indeed exist. Rousseau (1917) argued that states were naturally pushed into watching one another and adjusting their power accordingly, usually through alliances. However, this practice resulted merely in ‘ceaseless agitation’ and not in peace.

Kant’s peace program consisted of two parts. There were the ‘preliminary articles’ – the initial conditions that had to be established before even republican states could make much contribution to a more peaceful international environment. These included the abolition of standing armies, non-interference in the affairs of other states, the outlawing of espionage, incitement to treason and assassination as instruments of diplomacy, and an end to imperial ventures. These had to be abolished by a majority of states, non-liberal as well as liberal, to end the condition philosopher Thomas Hobbes had described as ‘the war of all against all’. There were then the three definitive articles; these went further and provided the actual foundations for peace:

1.      The civil constitution of every state should be republican.

2.      The law of national shall be founded on a federation of free states.

3.      The law of world citizenship shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality.

Spreading republican constitutions meant, in effect, generalizing the striving for peace, since according to Kant, striving for peace was pace of the natural orientation of the republican state. The ‘federation of free states’ would provide for a type of collective security system; and the provision of ‘universal hospitality’ would, in Michael Howard’s formulation, ‘gradually create a sense of cosmopolitan community’. Kant distinguished between the end of war and the establishment of positive peace, and his plan made peace ‘more than a merely pious aspiration’. Accordingly, he can properly be regarded as ‘the inventor of peace’.

During the nineteenth century, liberals tended to emphasize only Kant’s views that liberalism inclined to peace. Through most of the nineteenth century, the liberal approach to peace consisted of critiques of the ancient regimes, and promised that peace would automatically follow the overthrow of autocracy and the establishment of constitutional regimes. This led Raymond Aron (1978), to charge that nineteenth-century liberals had no peace plan. With the outbreak of the First World War, however, the emphasis changed. Then, the dangers that Kant had foreseen for liberalism in a dangerous international were rediscovered; and liberal thinkers turned from internal reform towards emphasizing arbitration, the development of international law and an international court, to protect liberalism from without. When the League of Nations failed, moreover, some would go so far as to recommend either the abolition of, or severe restrictions upon, state sovereignty.