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ABSTRACT
Did Kant believe we need a world government? It has been a matter of controversy in Kant scholarship whether Kant endorsed the creation of a world state or merely a voluntary federation of states with no coercive power. I argue that Kant's main concern was with a global juridical condition, which he regarded as a rational requirement given the equal freedom and equality of individuals. However, he recognized that implementing this rational ideal requires sensitivity to contingent aspects of world politics. I will argue that Kant offers an ideal theory not disentangled from realist considerations and that he adopts what I will call methodological realism: the attempt to realize the requirements of Right (Recht) in a world governed by its own laws and mechanisms. I will illustrate this interpretation with Kant's discussion of the right of nations (Völkerrecht). The confusion in regard to Kant's actual position on the matter, I will argue, is a direct consequence of Kant's methodological realism. The article concludes by showing how Kant’'s ideas and methods can inspire us to rethink global institutions for our current global challenges.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 See for instance, Horn (Citation2014, Chap. II).
2 Subjective right are the concrete rights individual persons can derive from a given general norm (an objective right), thereby binding another person or others directly.
3 Lacking a better alternative, I translate the German ‘Recht’ as ‘right’, a usage also adopted by Mary Gregor in her translation of the Doctrine of Right.
4 Kant's works are cited according to the Academy edition of Kant's works. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are from the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, translated by Mary Gregor, Cambridge University Press, 1996. I use the following abbreviations: MS: The Metaphysics of Morals; ZeF: Towards Perpetual Peace.
5 See for instance, Kersting (Citation2004, 79).
6 Eberl (Citation2004, 213) and Geissmann (Citation2012, 233–238) argue that Kant was by no means naïve in political matters, although they would not identify Kant as a Realpolitiker. This last reading, which is unusual in the literature, has indeed been proposed by Kenneth N. Waltz, who argues that ‘while Kant may be seen as a backsliding liberal, he may also be considered a theorist of power politics who hid his Machiavellian ideas by hanging ‘round them the fashionable garments of liberalism’ (Waltz Citation1962, 331). The interpretation I will defend in this article is indebted to scholars who have pointed out the realist aspects of Kant's political theory but goes beyond them in proposing a middle ground between the acknowledgment of realist elements in Kant's theory and Waltz's realist interpretation of Kant. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer of the Journal of Global Ethics for urging me to differentiate my position in relation to these other realist readings of Kant.
7 It is important to differentiate between non-ideal theory and realism. While non-ideal theories take into account context sensitive considerations for the implementation of ideals, political realism relies on a politics immanent conception of political legitimacy and on the concept of legitimate rule as opposed to mere violence or coercion. In political realism, the actual consent of the people plays an important role.
8 Despite the analytic relation between the concept of a right and coercion, it does not follow that whoever has a right also has the authority to enforce that right (like Locke's idea of rights enforcement in the state of nature). The enforcement must have a binding character (equally valid for everyone). Only a public institution can have such an authority.
9 By ‘devoid of justice’ Kant meant ‘with no public authority to decide and enforce disputes of rights’. Justice is thus a matter of the formal authority to rule and not some substantive criterion of legitimacy.
10 ‘Moral’ means laws of practical reason as opposed to laws of nature. Following Kant in his late works, I will not conflate morality (Sittlichkeit) with ethics or virtue (Tugend) and will use the first as the broader category which encompasses both virtue and right. See Introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals, VI: 218-221.
11 See also Ingeborg Maus’ (Citation2010, 155) discussion. Maus understands ‘in hypothesis’ as concerning a hypothetical judgment about the means for attaining global peace. I will offer an alternative interpretation in the course of this section (156).
12 Democratic peace theory is one such interpretation that ascribes the dogma of state sovereignty to Kant at the cost of the duty to develop international law. This interpretation, based on the third definitive article for perpetual peace, assumes that the democratization of states at internal level is what promotes perpetual peace. Because democracies do not tend to attack each other, peace comes from within these republican democratic states, and not from international law. Völkerrecht is only required because there are non-democratic states against which democracies must unite in the international arena; the relations between democratic states themselves, however, do not require international regulation. For a criticism of democratic peace theory, see Cavallar (Citation2001).
13 This picture is of course exaggerated in our times, since we already have international institutions such as the UN. There is no longer an absolute state of nature between states as was the case in the eighteenth century and before.
14 Kant explicitly mentions Hugo Grotius, Pufendorf and Vattel, the ‘sad comforters’ of natural law theory of rights (lauter leidige Tröster, ZeF VIII: 355).
15 See for instance his discussion of the duty to leave the state of nature in §§42 and 44, MS VI: 307–308 and 312–313. The Hobbesian colour of his arguments has led several Kant scholars to assume Kant's exeundum was motivated by Hobbesian considerations such as the problem of assurance. There is enough textual evidence to refute this interpretation (see my ‘Human Nature and the Right to Coerce in Kant's Doctrine of Right’. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, Vol. 96, Issue 1, April 2014). Nevertheless, the shift between idealism and realism is confusing enough. I hope that the present article will help solve this confusion.
16 I would like to thank audiences at the workshop World Government or Else? at Collegium Helveticum, Zurich, Switzerland, and Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, June 2017, and at the panel Realism and Idealism in Kant's Political Thought, Kantian Standing Group, ECPR annual conference, University of Oslo, August 2017, for their comments on earlier versions of this paper, especially Raffaele Marchetti, Torbjörn Tännsjö, Henning Hahn, Marco Cellini, Attila Tanyi, Howard Williams, Helga Varden and Ewa Wyrębska-Đermanović. I would also like to thank an anonymous referee for their very helpful comments.