See no evil: democratic peace theory, Kant, and democratic backsliding

Some DPT luminaries commented on rising authoritarianism in the United States. Bruce Russett obliquely implicated the theory when warning against the threat posed by Trump’s stance toward international institutions and authoritarian powers such as China and Russia.Footnote ²⁷ Doyle identified various domestic factors that erode democracy, such as ‘a combination of increasing domestic inequalities in some places (such as the United States) with seeming loss of control of borders and economy in others (as in Europe),’ but offered little insight into ‘how many Orbáns or Trumps are likely to prevail.’Footnote ²⁸ Indeed, even though the world’s most important and powerful democracy is experiencing a democratic ‘recession,’ Doyle believes we should not worry too much because he thinks things are not as bad as they were just prior to World War II.Footnote ²⁹ As for empirical DPT research done since the shocks of 2016, it has continued largely in the standard vein of large-N statistical tests, where the focus on datasets allows scholars to elide recent developments.Footnote ³⁰

Most of this research rests comfortably within the confines of the theorization widely acknowledged to have inaugurated the research program: Doyle’s two-part essay on ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs.’Footnote ³¹ As Fred Chernoff contends, so ‘extensive and careful’ was Doyle’s presentation of the phenomenon that ‘many scholars regarded empirical demonstration of the dyadic hypothesis as carrying with it a set of explanatory mechanisms.’Footnote ³² Drawing from Kant’s three public conditions of ‘right’ – stratified to the domestic, international, and global levels – Doyle identified three interactive ‘pillars’ to what he called the ‘theory of the liberal democratic peace.’Footnote ³³ Foundational are the internal aspects of liberal-democratic states. Accountability to the populace, the ‘rotation of elites,’ and high levels of transparency provide a special degree of deliberation, caution, and signaling.Footnote ³⁴ Once a number of representative democracies accrue, it is expected that they will seek to project their principles abroad by developing institutionalized relations with other democracies. Finally, ‘cosmopolitan ties’ were translated as largely manifesting in economic relations.Footnote ³⁵

It is in the consideration of the three pillars together that we can begin to see a theoretical (dis)connection between DPT and democratic backsliding at the core of democratic peace. For Doyle, the interaction between these pillars translated not only into seeing democratic peace as a dyadic phenomenon, but as democratic dyads multiplied, they formed a ‘separate peace.’Footnote ³⁶ Unlike interactions with or between non-democracies, democratic relations essentially overcome anarchy. Moreover, because the conflictual dynamics of anarchy persist between the ‘zone of peace’ and the non-democratic world, there are both attractive and coercive ‘paths toward peace.’Footnote ³⁷ The security and wealth of the separate peace should draw states in, and, especially as it enlarges, its strength should enable its forceful expansion. Notably, Doyle was ambiguous as to the way the latter dynamic would play out. He warned against the tendency toward aggression that democratic antipathy toward non-democracies might breed, but did not systematically interrogate how this might fit within the coercive path toward peace - satisfied that this was an ambiguity he thought even Kant failed to fully deal with.Footnote ³⁸

That Doyle was unable to determine what Kant thought about the issue of democratic bellicosity is odd, given that Perpetual Peace contains ‘Preliminary Articles’ that lay out a stringent set of restraints on a state’s foreign policy. Nevertheless, Doyle’s notion of a coercive path becomes suspect simply from the perspective of a more accurate understanding of the Definitive Articles. Famously, in Kant’s description of the First Definitive Article, he explicitly rejects democracy, distinguishing it from a republican constitution that he claims is the only governmental form that accords with right. In his description, many commentators accept that today’s representative liberal democracies are the closest approximations we have to Kant’s republics, and that his qualms were largely with what we would now categorize as direct democracy.Footnote ³⁹ Nevertheless, there are important aspects of Kant’s republics that differ from the way DPT portrayed those states within the zone of peace. For our purposes, one issue is paramount: at the center of Kant’s republicanism is the fostering of a ‘shared public ethos’ whereby, ideally, all citizens and those chosen to rule make political decisions based on their fealty to the ‘general will.’Footnote ⁴⁰ And as Georg Cavallar noted, by focusing merely on institutions, DPT de-emphasized ‘the democratic, participatory element from Kant’s republicanism.’Footnote ⁴¹

To illustrate, Kant was clear that one defining feature of the republic is a separation between legislative and executive functions, and certainly most democracies effectuate this in some way. But for Kant, this feature was in service of not allowing for a ‘despotism’ in which, because the very same person(s) that made law would be able to enforce it, there would be a strong tendency for rulers to selfishly narrow their interests. Democracies that feature highly partisan contests for control of an executive branch that has many levers to essentially ‘legislate’ its political agenda would have a long way to go before we could rest easy that the self-interest of the masses would act as a check on war.Footnote ⁴² Add to this publics that have been conditioned to ignore politics except when it directly affects them, and a professional all-volunteer military that reduces the visibility of foreign affairs, and we have both reason to doubt how effective this domestic aspect of actually existing democratic peace ever was for the United States especially, and reason to view more critically the notion that it was part of the normal Kantian process for democracies to be as warlike as any state toward those outside the ‘zone of peace.’Footnote ⁴³

Indeed, Kant would have opposed DPT’s acceptance of a warlike posture to those outside the ‘separate peace’ not only because such acceptance belies the effort to strive toward a more enlightened domestic public, but also because it was a function of a stark dichotomy between democracies and non-democracies that he would have rejected when assessing the actual world. The republic was, like all the conditions expressed in the Definitive Articles, a regulative ideal against which we can assess all states, which would all thus exist on a sliding scale, with the ideal at one end and complete despotism on the other.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is for this reason that some Kant scholars noted how problematic it was to read the Second Definitive Article as involving only democracies as part of the ‘federation of free states.’ Indeed, such an interpretation encouraged some prominent voices, especially after the end of the Cold War, to explicitly see military interventions to promote democracy as Kantian.Footnote ⁴⁵ This, of course, starkly broke with the Fifth Preliminary Article prohibiting forcible interference in another state’s ‘constitution and government.’ Each state was, for Kant, a ‘moral person,’ and their being ‘free’ referred to any established sovereign state, which was in this sense free from the abject ‘lawless freedom’ of the state of nature.Footnote ⁴⁶ In essence, the ‘pacific league,’ at least as it manifests empirically at any one time, is meant to refer to all of the international institutional arrangements that in some way involve ‘preserving and securing the freedom of a state itself and of other states in league with it.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Kant’s federation is not confined to democracies, but merely most effective for and thus centered upon those that hew closest to the ideal republic.

Thus, the notion of a ‘separate peace,’ one of the major sources of DPT’s tendency to transmute easily into an excuse for democratic bellicosity,Footnote ⁴⁸ is based on a misunderstanding. Indeed, this more ecumenical readingFootnote ⁴⁹ squares with Kant’s clear view, discussed in more detail below, that peace would be a gradual and eternal process, with no states actually reaching its true end-point.Footnote ⁵⁰ If all states are somewhere along the path of approximating republicanism and thus peace, all can potentially be working to improve their internal condition, and the (often nascent) federation, as well as (any actually existing) cosmopolitan relations, are both simultaneous means of doing so and outgrowths of developments that are available to all.Footnote ⁵¹ While Kant may have used language that makes the modern reader think of a ‘static organization’ such as NATO or the UN, it should rather be conceived as ‘a dynamic interactive community of nations.’Footnote ⁵² Crucially, then, the same dynamics that stall or prevent some greater degree of enjoyment of the fruits of peace are those to which ‘established’ democracies can just as readily succumb. Some imagined zone of peace cannot ‘lock in’ and overcome anarchy; any states one places within it are also always in relation to those one has defined as ‘outside,’ and any firm dividing line others in a way that acts as an invitation to act unjustly toward them.

Unfortunately, from a ‘separate peace’ reading, even the most sophisticated theorizations of democratic peace concretized a logic whereby not only was there ambiguous acceptance of democratic bellicosity, but with it a serious lacuna as to the possibility of democratic backsliding at the core of the democratic peace. For instance, Wade Huntley refined Doyle’s interactive schema by more explicitly juxtaposing it to the dominant systemic IR theory, neorealism, and by deploying a more meticulous usage of Kant. He rightly emphasized the way Kant saw the Second and Third Definitive Articles as necessary because the republic would be insecure as long as war between states is possible. It may be that in Kant’s republics, the necessary ‘consent of the citizens’ militates against capricious aggression,Footnote ⁵³ but the need to ‘defend themselves against despotisms’ would always chafe against their institutionalized reticence to war.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus, ‘republics can be more republican’ only within a federation, which is then ‘bolstered’ from the feedback between ‘the quality of freedom in its constituent republics … [and] the federation’s strength.’Footnote ⁵⁵ This positive relationship between freedom and strength is then reflected in and further cemented by the development of ‘conditions of universal hospitality’ between all peoples within the federation.Footnote ⁵⁶

From here, Huntley even mentions in a footnote how the ‘complex effects… of contrary systemic pressures’ might lead to ‘backsliding,’Footnote ⁵⁷ but the firm contention that the ‘federation is possible only among republics’ crowded out the dynamism this implies.Footnote ⁵⁸ Democratic peace became structurally over-determined. Our ‘necessitated association’ and the conflicts that come with it drive naturally selfish individuals to develop organized states, and eventually republics.Footnote ⁵⁹ Because republics will contain more fully realized humans – as opposed to mere downtrodden subjects – they will tend to be ‘the stronger state’ that can ‘more effectively mobilize social resources.’Footnote ⁶⁰ Once a number of republics emerge from this competitive dynamic, their internally similar conditions combine with the pressures of anarchy to motivate them to form a federation, and ‘the benefits to its members create competitive pressures on nonmembers to reform themselves sufficiently to join as well.’Footnote ⁶¹ Agency is quite restricted; this ‘is not an intentional creation as much as a gradual product of accumulating self-interested reactions to lawlessness and violence.’Footnote ⁶² And contingency, especially in the form of backsliding, is pushed to the background of our analytic vision. Despite acknowledging that ‘regressive or misdirected changes can be important, even if for generations decisive,’ Huntley emphasizes that Kant’s view of the structural effects of anarchy ‘discovers … persistent progress,’ concluding that setbacks are merely ‘aberrations that do not characterize human destiny.’Footnote ⁶³ We are thus locked into a view of the international system as rigid as neorealism’s faith in war’s eternal return, only now the system mandates that ‘the distinction between the state of war and the rule of law is continuous and gradual,’ with inevitable ‘progress along this continuum.’Footnote ⁶⁴

One of the crucial reasons for confidence in this ‘persistent progress’ is the way this systemic dynamic implicates the most secure democracies at the core of democratic peace. If republican institutions not only contribute to strength but are also maintained with the security that comes from the conditions of the Second and Third Definitive Articles, we should expect that the states least likely to experience backsliding would be those powerful democracies at the institutional core of the separate peace. Upending the received wisdom about the corrupting influence of power, Huntley writes, citing Kant, that ‘domestic progress “is safeguarded by the ambitions of those states to some extent”.’Footnote ⁶⁵ As ‘insulated states gain competitive advantages,’ they should be less subject to ‘contrary systemic pressures’ that make ‘free government’ more difficult to sustain.Footnote ⁶⁶ Responding to the realist critique that democratic peace is ephemeral because it is always possible that any democratic state could slide into authoritarianism, Huntley contended that a ‘long-successful liberal democratic state is unlikely to “change its stripes” rapidly or without very public indications.’Footnote ⁶⁷ Moreover, the theorized sources of backsliding were not conceived as possibly internal to the core of the federation, but rather could only stem from ‘autocratic leaders’ who see democratic reform as a threat to their power.Footnote ⁶⁸

This inside/out perspective even seemed to place blinders on those who expanded DPT by explicitly examining its ‘dark side’ of ‘democratic war.’Footnote ⁶⁹ With the separate peace notion in place, this literature sought to simply better understand the war-proneness toward non-democracies that the theory already accepted. Moreover, scholars often even assumed ‘democratic wars’ were largely conducted for democratic reasons, albeit those derived from a more militant strain of liberalism.Footnote ⁷⁰ Others simply sought to theorize away aggression by ‘reconciling’ with DPT the U.S. record of ‘covert war’ against numerous democracies during the Cold War,Footnote ⁷¹ a move Tarak Barkawi concluded was a glaring indication of ‘scientific decay.’Footnote ⁷²

Finally and perhaps most unfortunately, nowhere was the misinterpretation of Perpetual Peace starker than where the pernicious influence of the notion of a separate peace might have been most directly mitigated, given the inherently global conditions of the Third Definitive Article. Kant somewhat oddly proposed this broadest conception of public right in terms of a limitation ‘to conditions of universal hospitality.’Footnote ⁷³ Even odder, however, was its formulation within DPT. While Doyle and others paid lip service to Kant’s emphasis on ‘hospitality,’ even sometimes cogently expanding it to encompass our modern notion of human rights, this condition was largely operationalized as involving international economic integration.Footnote ⁷⁴ Citing a line about the ‘spirit of commerce’ from the essay’s discussion of the empirical and historical reasons to think perpetual peace is possible,Footnote ⁷⁵ DPT even developed a small literature that sometimes positioned itself in opposition to the theory’s emphasis on democracy to contend that it was economic development that was of primary importance for the maintenance of peace.Footnote ⁷⁶ Clearly, however, with commerce Kant was referring to a very initial and underlying ‘natural drive’ that could foster his more consequential and radical articulation of ‘cosmopolitan right.’Footnote ⁷⁷ Moreover, Kant was elsewhere very critical of the way ‘civilized, especially commercial, states’ often exploited those less developed in a way ‘which … is tantamount to conquering them.’Footnote ⁷⁸ As Cecelia Lynch modestly put it, ‘those who promote trade are not by definition “enlightened,” and do not always engage in peaceful acts.’Footnote ⁷⁹ One need only consider the economic considerations that often lead states to flout the international refugee and asylum regime – the most direct and minimal requirement of ‘universal hospitality’ – as well as the way that ‘free trade’ has translated into the exploitation of cheap labor in underdeveloped countries, to see that a blanket conception that trade and peace are always positively correlated is a dangerous (self-)deception. Moreover, the fact that hospitality is described as a limitation is only a reflection of the fact that the cosmopolitan level of right must reconcile with those conditions at the other two levels of the social strata. As Kant eventually discloses, this regulative ideal amounts to a world in which ‘a violation of right in one place of the earth is felt in all.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Or, as Sharon Anderson-Gold puts it, the ideal is one in which ‘human rights become borderless.’Footnote ⁸¹

The reader can surely already see how far from the Kantian ideal DPT has been, as well as our actual approximation of perpetual peace. What is remarkable is the degree to which DPT, in its departure from even just the core Definitive Articles, was both a reflection of and, as a theory with demonstrable real-world influence,Footnote ⁸² a constructor of our jaunty edifice of democracy and peace. In their zeal to explain an empirical regularity, scholars of DPT retconned a portion of the Kantian framework for peace to fit the major liberal dynamics at play after the Second World War. In doing so, they surely lost an immeasurable degree of criticality that would have come with the more stringent – and sometimes, in the case of the Second, less severe – conditions described by Kant in the Definitive Articles.

One might respond that even had a more genuinely Kantian interpretation of the Definitive Articles guided DPT, it might very well be the case that the approximation on hand was something to be lauded, and that insofar as it differed in certain ways from the Kantian ideal, this, as well as possibly a divergent DPT, should be expected. What can good scholars – or even the philosopher from Königsberg – really do against immense and unpredictable historical forces? Indeed, it may be that while the misinterpretation was partially driven by the historical embeddedness of DPT scholars, Kant simply could not have foreseen how the best chances at peace would actually develop hundreds of years after his death. As Christopher Hobson has emphasized, when proposing different conceptualizations of a political program, we should reflect on the fact that those that won the day may have done so partly because they displayed a better fit with a particular context, and so a proposed alternative should be able to claim a superior way forward not only in a pure theoretical sense but also given the particular character of existing power relations.Footnote ⁸³ To that, I believe once we move to the deeper issue of how to view the function and use of the essay given its place within Kant’s broader philosophy, it becomes clear that had there been a fuller appreciation of the way in which Perpetual Peace was a ‘philosophical sketch,’Footnote ⁸⁴ a very different picture would have come into focus of our own role as scholars and citizens in the ongoing analysis, maintenance, and advancement of what should have been viewed as a very tenuous and flawed democratic peace.

What is Toward Perpetual Peace?

As early as 1994, Lynch, noting how DPT was proceeding without much consideration of ‘conflicting interpretations of Kantian political thought,’ set out to juxtapose her own reading with that ‘fashionable return to Kant’ by IR theorists.Footnote ⁸⁵ The primary error she identified was the ‘privileging’ of the mechanism of a ‘cost–benefit’ calculation by democratic publics, in which they were assumed to recognize that war did not pay.Footnote ⁸⁶ This sidelined Kant’s emphasis on reason, morality, and freedom, which Lynch contended had the effect of merely advising the development of certain formal institutional structures, as well as possibly countenancing their imposition on others.Footnote ⁸⁷ The latter possibility especially contradicted the very foundation of Kant’s political writings, his moral theory. In this seemingly academic quibble is a fundamental insight that alters how we should not only understand but also utilize the schema Kant proffers in Perpetual Peace.

Doyle identified two ways in which we might conceive of Kant’s work in Perpetual Peace: it is either a contribution to international ethics or an ‘analytical theory of international politics.’Footnote ⁸⁸ The latter, of course, is precisely how the essay was translated into the DPT research program. Thus, while Doyle understood that in one sense Perpetual Peace offers ‘an epistemology, a condition for ethical action,’ he emphasized that, quoting Kant, it is ‘most importantly, an explanation of how the “mechanical process of nature visibly exhibits the purposive plan of producing concord among men, even against their will and indeed by means of their very discord”.’Footnote ⁸⁹ This section develops a sense of how to understand the essay if we instead pose it as a work that, like all of Kant’s political essays, both grows ‘organically out of his critical philosophy’Footnote ⁹⁰ and is ‘an application’ thereof.Footnote ⁹¹

Perpetual Peace begins with Kant assuring the reader that what was being ‘expressed publicly’ was not meant to be taken as a threat to the state.Footnote ⁹² That is not because, as Kant self-depreciatingly writes, any philosophical musings are but ‘ineffectual ideas.’Footnote ⁹³ Partly meant to ward against opprobrium by Prussian authorities, the statement largely reflected the fact that Kant had something different in mind than the more earnest and practical peace plans offered by earlier thinkers like the Abbé de Saint-Pierre.Footnote ⁹⁴ Kant even quipped, in a letter to a friend, that the essay contained ‘little more than “reveries”.’Footnote ⁹⁵ It obviously involves more than that, but why not a firm prediction or a detailed plan involving practical steps that could be accomplished in at least the medium-term?

To truly grasp Perpetual Peace, we must begin with the lodestar of all of Kant’s writings on practical activity, including the development of the political institutions described in the Definitive Articles that IR theorists have found so useful. That lodestar is the Categorical Imperative, which, though defined in varying ways depending on the realm of activity being contemplated, Kant first stated as the duty to ‘act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.’Footnote ⁹⁶ Derived from the source of Kant’s ‘critical turn’ – a critique of reason – the ‘fact of reason’ presupposed a special kind of freedom, often referred to as autonomy,Footnote ⁹⁷ which all rational creatures possess as their ability to act apart from the laws of the natural world. And while Kant’s first critique of ‘pure reason’ argued for strict limitations on our ability to observe the ‘thing in itself,’ the second critique of ‘practical reason’ – reason not about metaphysics but rather ‘the study of nature and of the human being’ – contended that reason and the freedom it presupposes allow us access to this practical a priori, a truth not derived from experience but which speaks to actual human conduct.Footnote ⁹⁸ From this imperative, Kant identified the reality of what he called the ‘moral law,’ the ‘thing in itself’ with respect to the proper activity of all rational creatures, of which the Categorical Imperative is Kant’s attempt to identify its core principle.Footnote ⁹⁹ Reason presupposes freedom as the defining condition of the human species, and the Categorical Imperative is the formal principle underlying every kind of action or development that would serve its cause. In this way, Kant was able to say that morality ‘commands for everyone … merely because and insofar as he is free and has practical reason.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Being the only objective foundation to human conduct, as humans we have a duty to pursue its mandate, and thus politics for Kant was the use of this foundation to develop conditions of right. Political conditions of right are, as Hans Reiss puts it, ‘the outer shell of … the moral realm.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ Now, as critics are especially keen to note, the highly formalized nature of this shell’s core does not seem to lend itself to ready or clear answers about proper actions, let alone complex social systems. It is clearly in need of a large amount of what we might today refer to as non-ideal theorizing to flesh out how this ideal should apply, given the richness of the human experience. What must happen, what must the arrangement of human life look like, for all autonomous agents to act according to a will that is always first and foremost adopting aims that they and all others would agree could be universalized as law? Even if we agree that such a harmonious condition would maximize our freedom, how could it ever be maintained?

These are not issues that can be left to some future discovery. The moral law prescribes actions that are derived from the objective reality of our autonomous freedom, and so for Kant, ‘ought implies can.’Footnote ¹⁰² This means that even this very abstract reasoning about morality, because it is derived from a supposedly objective fact about our humanity, forces Kant into considerations of human nature and the phenomenal world more broadly, and particularly a central concern with bridging the divide between the impediments of the natural world and the moral demands of freedom.Footnote ¹⁰³ Perpetual Peace is not, then, an informed prediction or even some efficient guide, but rather an outgrowth of the fact that Kant was compelled to show that these ‘postulates of practical reason’ were practically possible.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Unfortunately, Kant also put great emphasis on the natural fact of our fallible senses, temptations, and our physical and psychological differences and limitations. There is no dependence in his philosophy of history on some sort of psychological breakthrough that would definitively put to rest our emotions or temptations toward greed or malice.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ We are bequeathed a very daunting situation: a highly abstract ideal that if correct must be possible even given the ‘crooked timber of humanity.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶

In the broadest sense, then, Perpetual Peace must be understood as part of an effort to identify the full breadth of the practical implications of the moral law and, at the same time, impress upon the reader that they are possible to achieve.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Both tasks are entwined, necessarily, and so the essay’s content cannot be bracketed into offering either a normative or analytical theory. Instead, it is a sometimes unwieldy amalgamation of so-called ‘unconditioned’ ideas and determinations about how they would manifest in our ‘conditioned’ world,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ as well as stylistic and argumentative choices meant to encourage us to embrace what Kant thought was the resultant activated duty to strive toward their manifestation.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The final unconditioned idea was expressed most clearly in the later work The Metaphysics of Morals, where Kant declared that ‘morally practical reason pronounces in us its irresistible veto: there is to be no war, neither war between you and me in the state of nature nor war between us as states.’Footnote ¹¹⁰ In a concise form, Perpetual Peace essentially took up the task of determining the external ‘laws’ that might establish this veto, but which we cannot initially reach solely out of an inner sense of duty, given that they are also crucial to facilitating our ability to act morally. It is a determination ‘subordinated to ethics but not exhausted by it.’Footnote ¹¹¹ As such, Kant must deal with an inherent tension: the conditions described would have to be stringent and comprehensive enough that we could plausibly agree they would secure the condition of right; they must also be shown to be actionable at least at some point by quite morally deficient humans in a world of scarcity. Identifying a world state run by angels might accomplish the former, but certainly fail the latter.

Tacitly acknowledging this tension, Kant’s discussion of the ‘guarantee of perpetual peace’ paradoxically ends by admitting that nothing he said is so assured that it could be taken as a prediction.Footnote ¹¹² This seeming contradiction illustrates the first major implication of approaching Perpetual Peace from the perspective of Kant’s broader critical philosophy. In reading the entire work as fodder for an ‘analytical theory,’ DPT scholars took that guarantee – where Kant argued that even ‘if a people were not forced by internal discord to submit to the constraint of public laws, war would still force them from without to do so’Footnote ¹¹³ – as identifying a structural mechanism in which anarchy put ineluctable pressure on states to become democratic. Remember that for Doyle and Huntley, this would make for gradual progress toward peace even if, and sometimes because, democracies maintained an intrinsically warlike posture toward non-democracies. Beyond the way this was derived from the problematic ‘separate peace’ conception, the most glaring issue with this view is that it chafes against the core of Kant’s moral philosophy. For Kant, moral action is only possible from a free will.Footnote ¹¹⁴ If the ‘guarantee’ is really literal, it is hard to escape the sense that our will matters very little, if at all, at least with respect to the longue durée. However, once we foreground the notion that Kant must struggle with the tension between the high bar of transcendentally derived conceptions of the ideal conditions of peace and the need to demonstrate they are possible, we can see how the language of a guarantee could be more a rhetorical flourish than a literal claim. There is no guarantee of an ultimate end but of a certain possible trajectory for humanity. Indeed, some Kant scholars have interpreted what they call the ‘guarantee thesis’ as largely an attempt to anticipate and meet the highest possible bar of objection.Footnote ¹¹⁵ How could it possibly be worthwhile to waste time and effort on perpetual peace when perpetual war has always been the norm? Kant’s articulation is thus a somewhat hyperbolic way of contending that ‘nature’ does not ultimately stand in the way of peace, and is in fact part of its very generation in addition to our capacities to freely utilize reason. Footnote ¹¹⁶

Rather than seeing us through to the end, then, conflict is better understood as a base and unwieldy prompt capable of aiming us in the right direction. From a social-theoretical perspective, at most what is being identified is a tendency, and at the least a mechanism capable of having an effect under the right conditions. This is all it needs to be to accomplish what Kant wants it to, which is to show that we should strive toward peace because its ‘impossibility cannot be demonstrated.’Footnote ¹¹⁷ As Williams writes, ‘the hidden plan is not right in itself, rather it provides us with an incentive to do what is right.’Footnote ¹¹⁸ This means that the more we ‘neglect’ our own duty to learn its lessons, the more the process of perpetual peace will involve ‘great inconvenience.’Footnote ¹¹⁹ Thus, much can go wrong – even and especially with respect to conflict and war – in our ‘duty to work toward this (not merely chimerical) end.’Footnote ¹²⁰

This same argumentative gambit is apparent elsewhere in the discussion of what today we might describe as additional social and psychological mechanisms. Rather than the ‘Second Supplement’ literally requiring a ‘secret article’ that decadently carves out a special role for ‘the maxims of philosophers,’ Kant is contending that perpetual peace is possible even though rulers naturally feel that taking the advice of philosophers is ‘humiliating.’Footnote ¹²¹ Luckily, all that is needed is that philosophers ‘be given a hearing,’ by which Kant means an ability to speak publicly.Footnote ¹²² From there, because humans will at least come into contact with the language of morality, they will not be prevented from having their inner dispositions move in its direction, even if philosophers are not in positions of power. Speaking to those who might have doubts about the schema as they look around them and see both oppression from above and ignorance reigning from below, Kant is saying that unless there is literally an absolute form of totalitarian control over public expression – an impossible feat even in history’s most tyrannical states – the seeds of enlightenment can find ways to grow.

Likewise, there is the Appendix’s discussion of ‘the disagreement between morals and politics,’ which emphasizes the necessity of a ‘moral politician’ rather than a ‘political moralist’ – the former being genuinely guided by moral maxims and the latter cynically using moral language to ‘suit the statesman’s advantage.’Footnote ¹²³ That the former is vanishingly rare, taking the entirety of Perpetual Peace as either a strict normative theory or a practical plan would seem to require utopian expectations. However, an understanding of it as it is meant to function within Kant’s broader philosophy points instead to a subtler and more realistic message: the political moralist is to be expected, but their moral ‘sophistry’ causes people to become ‘susceptible to the influence of the mere idea of the authority of the law,’ and then eventually desire that false pretenses be unmasked.Footnote ¹²⁴ In this unmasking, we are offered the opportunity to ‘find the supreme principle from which the aim of perpetual peace issues’ – that is, the Categorical Imperative – and so ‘the political moralist begins where the moral politician correctly leaves off.’Footnote ¹²⁵ The transcendentally conceived end of peace must involve a moral politician, but our efforts to ‘keep constantly approaching the end’ are not determinatively prevented by the more common phenomenon of the political moralist.Footnote ¹²⁶

From this vantage, what may seem like a prescient identification of the conditions most conducive to peace becomes much more speculative in nature; less a prediction or guide and more a sophisticated plea. As Susan Meld Shell puts it, Kant sought to ‘make and stage’ the future in order to lift the ‘external freight’ that prevents people from realizing they can enact progress.Footnote ¹²⁷ Thus, many of the essay’s celebrated features must be read while recognizing that Kant was addressing ‘mainly those skeptics who deny the very meaningfulness of any effort to establish a lawful international order.’Footnote ¹²⁸ Instead of a structurally driven process, we are thus pointed toward the many times that Kant makes explicit that the enactment of peace will be a difficult and eternal effort. On the federation, Kant concludes by emphasizing how it would ‘hold back the constant danger’ of war, but only if it ‘endures, and always expands.’Footnote ¹²⁹ In defending the necessity of the Third Definitive Article, he contends that ‘only under this condition can we flatter ourselves that we are constantly approaching perpetual peace.’Footnote ¹³⁰ And in concluding the essay, Kant qualifies the ‘duty to realize the condition of public right’ by admitting this involves ‘approximation by unending progress,’ in which we can only hope that ‘the times during which equal progress takes place will … become always shorter.’Footnote ¹³¹ Thus, while Kant often used the phrase ‘perpetual peace’ as if it were an identifiable condition, a more appropriate meaning may be that it references the perpetual process of striving toward peace.Footnote ¹³²

To foreground what I take to be the upshot of the work, then – and one that I think once foregrounded allows us the epistemological orientation to understand our own progress toward and now movement away from some semblance of democratic peace – the final section operationalizes Kant’s schema for the empirical analysis and critique of actually existing democratic peace in a way that remains consistent with its philosophical foundation.

Toward a critical cosmology of peace

With (an eternal) process foregrounded over outcomes or precise conceptualizations of ideal conditions, the various components of the essay take on a dramatic new light. First, if our efforts are never really accomplished, all the components outlined in the essay – the foreign policy practices in the Preliminary Articles, the conditions of the Definitive Articles, and the natural, social, and psychological mechanisms described in the Supplements and Appendices – are in perpetual relation with one another, and depending on the character of these relations are moving us either closer or further away from an ideal condition of peace. Scholars of Kant have alluded to this implication especially with respect to the way DPT ignored the Preliminary Articles, contending that ‘both Preliminary and Definitive Articles need to be implemented at the same time.’Footnote ¹³³ Indeed, the practices and conditions of the Preliminary and Definitive Articles are not meant to be thought of as temporally unfolding,Footnote ¹³⁴ but approximations of the elements in the entire set move together at once, always, and not only gradually forward.Footnote ¹³⁵ As Matthias Lutz-Bachmann puts it, the ‘Preliminary Articles prove that he [Kant] sees very clearly that states’ domestic and foreign politics constantly intermingle and continuously affect one another.’Footnote ¹³⁶ The Preliminary Articles are thus preliminary only in a moral sense; they speak to the way the everyday practices of a state’s foreign policy must align with right for there to be a chance to build and maintain the broader conditions described in the Definitive Articles.Footnote ¹³⁷ The primary and unique practical advice to be found is thus in the holism of the schema, drawing together as it does practices and institutions at every level of the social strata and for all of humanity through time and space – an ‘inclusiveness’ that Chris Brown thought to be ‘the most impressive feature of Kant’s international theory’Footnote ¹³⁸ – all which move together in a necessarily complex manner toward or away from an ideal horizon.

It follows that, second, emphasis is shifted from the precise articulation of individual components of the schema to the idea of doing right in relation to all other components. Daniel Deudney convincingly argues that a superior guide to what he calls ‘republican security theory’ can be found in The Federalist Papers, largely because the content of Kant’s various articles and supplements is vague and often impractical.Footnote ¹³⁹ This, however, is a feature rather than a bug. If the main thrust of the essay is to activate our sense of duty, which for Kant is guided by a highly abstract principle that determines ideal ends, then precise plans could be at odds with that goal. As Deleuze writes in the conclusion of his rumination on Kant’s critical philosophy, because of nature’s ‘pure relations of forces, conflicts of tendencies, which weave a web of madness like childish vanity,’ peace cannot be had by way of the wisdom of enlightened individuals, but can only be grasped ‘within the framework of the human species.’Footnote ¹⁴⁰

From a simple yet highly stringent maxim comes a complex interactive schema, the approximation of which draws back to the maxim to act out of duty rather than some calculation about likely ends. Likewise, the reverse is true: the ‘political moralist’ who operates by cunningly ‘subordinating principles to the end … frustrates his own purpose.’Footnote ¹⁴¹ If we approach peace largely as a ‘technical problem’ à la DPT, we are at the whims of our own epistemological shortcomings, never to be certain that we have enough ‘knowledge of nature’ to properly calibrate how to ‘make use of its mechanism for the end propose.’Footnote ¹⁴² The key, then, is to subordinate our ‘analytical’ insights to what Gérard Raulet calls the moral ‘guide-thread,’Footnote ¹⁴³ recognizing that to move toward peace will always mean, as Kant warned, ‘not to draw toward it precipitately by force but to approach it steadily as favorable conditions arise.’Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In this way, Kant sought not to give us detailed plans but to delimit and direct our prudent calculations within an encompassing sense of the relations within the necessary moral whole that allows us to assess whether certain actions or developments are moving us toward or away from a more perfect condition.

Finally, this relational whole necessitates context-dependent malleability of its various features. Some recent studies on Kant highlight what might be called his ‘non-ideal theory,’Footnote ¹⁴⁵ which Dilek Huseyinzadegan argues is ‘complementary’ and undergirds Kant’s ideal ‘rights and obligations.’Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Rather than seeing components of Perpetual Peace that serve the ideal of peace as solely derived a priori from reason, they are shown to be suffused with empirical assumptions and theorizations of natural and social mechanisms. Even the particularities of such uber-Kantian notions like a cosmopolitan end to history, the development of humanity toward a culture of freedom, or indeed a global federation of perpetual peace are, for Huseyinzadegan, at least partially fallible and empirically informed postulates. As such, and especially given Kant’s late eighteenth-century biases and blind spots, Huseyinzadegan argues we are not only allowed but encouraged within a Kantian approach to develop different non-ideal conceptualizations that better consider and incorporate ‘a lawful account of these contingent human conditions.’Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In essence, once we recognize that Perpetual Peace is a reflection of the fact that for Kant ‘a morally grounded ought demands that we think hypothetically and fallibly about progress in history,’Footnote ¹⁴⁸ our fealty not only shifts from specific conceptualizations to the idea of the schema as a whole, but those specifics then necessarily become sites of contestation over whether some new understanding or factor improves the schema’s worth as a way to understand and critique our present and possible future. In short, if non-ideal elements are always contingently connected to ‘the normative content of his considerations and the systematic construction of his idea of peace,’Footnote ¹⁴⁹ we have a schema that must critically adapt with changing vistas.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

For these reasons, I believe that it is fitting to orient our approach to and use of Perpetual Peace by seeing it as offering a critical cosmology of peace: an all-encompassing schema containing an evolving and relational set of practices (e.g., non-intervention), conditions (e.g., ‘republican’ governments), and mechanisms (e.g., ‘unsocial sociability’) meant to simultaneously motivate actors toward its ultimate goal and act as a resource for critiquing our efforts to approximate it. This is not to be confused with Kant’s pre-critical attempt to develop his own cosmology according to the then-standard view of it as ‘objective metaphysical knowledge of the world as a whole and its transcendent cause.’Footnote ¹⁵¹ Kant’s ‘critical turn’ involved rejecting this traditional view of cosmology, driven by ‘antimonies’ he saw arising from it.Footnote ¹⁵² Indeed, it is precisely the way the critical turn mandated for Kant that cosmologies be seen as regulative ideals rather than ontological foundations that I utilize the term to describe the schema found in Perpetual Peace.

The deployment of the idea of a cosmology is important because it conveys the enormity and systematicity of Kant’s attempt to derive from reason a conception of what must practically occur for peace, and ultimately the moral law, to flourish. As the great peace researcher Johann Galtung writes, all major conceptions of peace involve ‘vast, ephemeral and deep states or processes, close to or identical with the … telos of humankind,’ and thus are usually coincident with any civilization’s ‘cosmology or deep ideology.’Footnote ¹⁵³ Kant presents just that: peace as both a constellation of processes, practices, and conditions that together coincide with the telos of humanity – a description of the ‘celestial mechanics’ involved when humans strive to realize the moral law. In this sense, the cosmological idea is both metaphorical and instrumental, usage that is meant to orient our thinking toward the vastness and inner-workings of some particular idea, practice, thing, or condition – whether mind,Footnote ¹⁵⁴ soul,Footnote ¹⁵⁵ capitalism,Footnote ¹⁵⁶ or, in this case, peace – in order to better offer a guide to action. Take, for instance, Robert Cummings Neville’s development of a ‘cosmology of freedom,’ where he sought to convey what he saw as the requisite expansiveness, systematicity, and abstractness involved in a full understanding of freedom.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ His, like ours, is a cosmology ‘with respect to affairs of human life,’Footnote ¹⁵⁸ where the cosmological scale denotes giving ‘accounts of individuals, change, causation, developments, groupings, and … especially judgments for intentional action, standards, criticism, and so forth.’Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Moreover, such cosmological ‘accounts are dominated by, and in some sense derived from, a theory of value… [from which] it illustrates the distinction between essential and conditional features.’Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Kant’s ‘theory of value’ is, of course, grounded in freedom and formalized as the Categorical Imperative. And like that concept’s derivation from a critique of reason, this Kantian cosmology is ardently critical. Here, I mirror the construction of Raulet, who developed the notion of a Kantian ‘critical cosmology’ in response to the optimistic view of globalization as a welcomed supersession of the nation-state.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Concerned that globalization’s evangelists were forgetting that when we enter the ‘domain of history’ we must deal with ‘the chaos of active reason,’ Raulet warned that a critical approach was necessary in attempting to seek ‘a universal meaning across the disorder of empirical history.’Footnote ¹⁶² To skip to the global when many difficulties of developing lawful conditions within nation-states remained would only generate backlash and failure. Similarly, I have suggested that the democratic bellicosity that occurred in the midst of that backlash and failure is something that a proper reading of how to utilize Perpetual Peace would have recognized as a major problem. We utilize the critical cosmology to understand and critique our past and present, and simultaneously test its mettle, given our particular approximation of perpetual peace at any one time.Footnote ¹⁶³

If our freedom to do otherwise mandates that we are fated to eternally strive to approximate peace in practice, it is counterproductive to examine and support any actually existing democratic peace by identifying certain isolated and supposedly transhistorical conditions that seem to correlate with peace. Instead, as the critical cosmology of peace would encourage, any instantiation of democratic peace is revealed as an ongoing and highly complex process capable of shifting in myriad directions relative to the ideal of perpetual peace. With respect to our own experience, obvious sites of critical warning emerge beyond the relations between states within some ever-expanding separate peace. When, contra the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Preliminary Articles, respectively, the United States enthusiastically maintains a massive ‘standing army,’ funds its foreign policy with debt spending, intervenes relatively often in the affairs of numerous ‘free’ states against their will, and develops and utilizes methods of war that make a future peace next to impossible, it is difficult to chalk up U.S. aggression and militarism to, as Doyle does, ‘mistrust’ or ‘liberal imprudence.’Footnote ¹⁶⁴

The task of the researcher shifts to mapping the connections between the practices, conditions, and mechanisms placed in motion by the critical cosmology of peace. How does something like a particular war, the character of its settlement, or the development of a new weapons system influence the arrangement of power within states, between them, and between their people more generally? Literatures as disparate as science and technology studiesFootnote ¹⁶⁵ and state developmentFootnote ¹⁶⁶ touch on such issues already, and can be drawn upon with a focus toward critiques of our past and present that expose possibilities for practices and conditions that move us closer to the Kantian ideal. Indeed, even those moments seemingly bursting with genuine progress, and which DPT can only but laud as evidence of the ‘mechanism of nature’ at work, become sites of critique by way of the epistemological orientation the critical cosmology of peace provides.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ So, for instance, the Allied victory in World War II not only involves institutional construction that sees, as DPT rightly emphasized, the United States becoming Kant’s ‘focal point’ of democratic peace – a ‘powerful and enlightened people’ to which other republics could ‘attach themselves’Footnote ¹⁶⁸ – but it is also at the same time a moment in which that same focal point introduces the world to a weapon that would become capable of ending human civilization – a weapon that Elaine Scarry has somewhat hyperbolically argued also functionally turned the U.S. state into a ‘thermonuclear monarchy’Footnote ¹⁶⁹ – and which certainly contributed to a post-war situation in which there was, contra the First Preliminary Article, a frightening ‘secret reservation of material for a future war.’Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Or, instead of the end of the Cold War indicating we would soon be on the verge of ‘a flourishing of civilization on a scale never experienced’ – as declared by democratic peace theorists as late as 2014Footnote ¹⁷¹ – we are directed toward grappling with the effects of the way its peace dividend did not, contra the Third Preliminary Article, result in much effort to reduce the U.S. ‘standing army,’Footnote ¹⁷² and was instead mainly leveraged to spread a highly destabilizing and alienating form of capitalism, both internally and abroad, that quite purposely eroded any sense of the ‘general will’ in favor of moneyed interests.Footnote ¹⁷³

Such an approach is not meant to imply the possibility of perfection, nor that armed with the critical cosmology of peace some dramatically different and salutary direction might have been taken in such historical moments. The admittedly often overdetermined paths such moments take can, however, be recognized as involving certain problems and pathologies in need of being addressed and mitigated, lest they seed the future degradation of the republic, the federation, and what cosmopolitan conditions exist. Rather than merely examples of the ‘persistent progress’ Kant ‘predicted,’ and thus moments that merely await further progressions to be built upon them, we are able to observe that, as well as any glaring shortcomings and pitfalls that Kant would see as critical to the development of peace.

DPT proponents would no doubt respond that because the theory is meant only to concentrate on war between states, it can be forgiven for not concentrating on such elements of democratic peace. The point, however, is that the theory was not only designed to focus elsewhere, but also actively worked against seeing such developments, and they are in fact those that are very much within the purview of how its inspirational source thought about the phenomenon. Democratic peace may endure, but to do so, it will help to develop a research program centered on a Kantian critical cosmology of peace rather than maintain DPT as it currently exists.

For now, I will end with an obscure quote from Perpetual Peace that I think reflects where we are today, and which the critical cosmological orientation allows us to view with simultaneous hope and determination. In speaking about states led by political moralists who think there is ‘no wrong when they attack each other by force or fraud,’ Kant avers that ‘when the two destroy themselves it happens to both of them quite rightly, though in such a way that there is always enough of this race left to keep this game going to the most distant times, so that posterity may some day take a warning example from them.’Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Let us hope we soon begin learning from examples.