Research by Michael Behrent for
KÖNIGSBEGR IS DEAD by Max & Gilbert
Perpetual Peace, Inevitable War:
Kant and Clausewitz
Immanuel
Kant, Zum Ewigen Frieden (1795)
The most striking feature of Kant's small essay is
how un-Utopian it is for a work arguing that history is moving towards every
greater harmony in human relations. Kant blends a strong argument for the
possibility of peace, grounded in the rationality of the human ability to act
morally, with a frank recognition that selfishness, force and violence
characterize most human behavior. The tension between these two views leads
Kant to define, first of all, the formal conditions for peace, and then,
secondly, to demonstrate how this peace is possible - and is indeed already
being realized - despite the forces that would appear to undermine it.
The first section of Kant's essay
presents several preliminary "articles" for achieving peaceful
relations between states. These concern practical, contingent measures, rather
than abstract principles. They include: never signing a treaty while holding
private reservations to break it; never acquiring another state without its
consent; disbanding permanent armies; not running up a public debt to finance
foreign ventures; not meddling in the internal affairs of another state; and
not engaging in hostile acts that undermine confidence between states.
The second section presents articles
for achieving permanent peace. Kant fully rejects the notion that peace is the natural state of human affairs. Peace is
a goal of moral action precisely because it must be instituted. This section can be read as presenting the conditions
of possibility for peace, i.e., as defining the very meaning of peace, before
addressing the question of whether peace is achievable in practice.
The first article for achieving
permanent peace requires that all states adopt a republican constitution. Kant
defines such a constitution as one based on the liberty of individuals, a
common dependence on a shared legal code, and civic equality. Such a constitution lends itself to peace
because the citizens who are called upon to decide on matters of war are the
very ones who would be required to fight it.
The more a community is self-regulating, the more it is inclined to
reflect and deliberate before engaging itself in war. Kant distinguishes
between what he calls "forms of domination" - i.e., whether rule in a
state is by one person (monarchy),
several (aristocracy) or all (democracy) - and forms of government,
which include a republic, in which
the legislature is separated from the executive, and despotism, in which the two power are collapsed together. A system
is only republican if the body that makes laws is not the same as the one which
applies them: otherwise, a government would only be acting according to its own
interest (even if it is a democratic system), not according to general
principle.
The second article is that
international law must be based on a pact among nations similar to the one that
citizens within each nation institute to create republics. Kant addresses the
problem which nagged the "natural right" tradition: it is clear that
the origin of society lies in the preference most humans have for civic freedom, involving shared
acceptance of laws, over the unbridled, but unstable freedom of the "state of nature"; yet states, in
their relations with one another, do not seem to prefer shared laws, and choose
to remain in the state of nature. Kant thinks that, unlike in the case of
individual human societies, states have no compelling reason to abandon the
condition of nature. However, he also thinks that not only does reason condemn
the idea of war as a principle of regulating international relations, but that
even the most calculating of princes inevitably pays some lip service to the
notion of right (Recht, Droit) (e.g.,
in invading Panama in 1989, the United States reasserted its control over the
canal and an important military base, while dubbing the operation "Just
Cause"[1]) The
solution to an international order founded on right is a peaceful federation, distinguished from an international republic,
in that individual constitutions are preserved, but also from a system of peace
treaties, in that it is permanent. Kant imagines a viable republic founding
this federation, which more and more republics will choose to join over time.
The third article concerns
cosmopolitan, as opposed to international, law. Cosmopolitan law does not
concern peaceful relations between states, but rather the right of each person
to visit any part of the world - that is, to be received as the guest of any
state in the world. This right derives from the fact that humans live on a
globe, which is finite and thus forces them to coexist within limited space.
The goal - and limit - of this cosmopolitan right is for inhabitants of one
state to be able to establish relations with the inhabitants of others. In
other words, cosmopolitan right supplements international right by establishing
actual relations (and not just peace) between peoples, while prohibiting one
nation from invading other.
Kant makes two adjunctions to these
articles.
The first, and most intriguing,
adjunction concerns the guarantees of perpetual peace. According to Kant, the
main guarantee is nature itself. Though it is beyond the limits of reason to
detect a higher purpose in nature, it is nonetheless inevitable to impute a
finality to it.[2]
Kant's basic argument is that the conditions that make war seem inevitable are
the very same ones that will guarantee a perpetual progression towards peace.
Nature has seen to it that humans can live everywhere on the globe's surface
(e.g., Arctic moss makes life possible in polar areas); has made humans hostile
to each other, leading to wars which force them to spread throughout the world;
and, moreover, war itself has forced humans to band together into nations,
ruled by laws. Republics do not, as critics have claimed, have to have angels
as members in order to work. The problem of forming a republic is, in fact, inherently resolvable: humans with
opposing interests must, often because of the very pressures of war itself,
join together to submit to common rules in order to survive. In other words,
nature requires even devils to act in a way that suggests that they were
motivated by the intentions of angels. Nature seems to want right to prevail. Moreover, nature also appears to support the
idea of peaceful federation (rather than universal monarchy) by dividing
peoples through language and religion, and to support cosmopolitan right
through the spirit of commerce. Though right (and hence peace) is a human
institution, everything in nature seems to encourage it, even if in very
roundabout ways.[3]
The second adjunction is a
"secret article": it is that leaders should secretly agree to consult
philosophers about the formal conditions of peace. This article should be
secret because leaders, concerned with decisions that could lead to war, may
consider consulting philosophers to place limits on their own authority. In
fact, what Kant is really calling for is open public debate, a free civil
society and a state that consults public opinion. The implication is that
public debate among philosophers can define the conditions of peace in a way that
leaders concerned with power and contingent exigencies cannot.
In several appendices, Kant asks the
question of whether politics can ever be moral - or, as he puts it, of whether
politics and morality can agree on the question of perpetual peace. Kant
distinguishes between "political moralists", who define as moral
their practical skill in governing, and "moral politicians", who
govern in accordance with moral principles. Kant's basic argument is that while
the average leader fall into the category of the political moralist, who
conceives politics as a skill and whose goal is to increase his own power, his
actions are ultimately self-contradictory: he cannot help but act according
with certain maxims, the "sophistry" of which would become apparent
if they were ever acknowledged as such (e.g., "Deny all one's
misdeeds"). Ultimately, according to Kant, the reason why it is possible
for politics to be moral is simply because morality itself is possible.
Morality, for Kant, is the ability for humans to act according to rules.[4]
Rules that defeat their own purpose or that undermine their own foundation are
immoral: I cannot decree as a rule of my action (what Kant calls a
"maxim") "Seize power by whatever means necessary",
because, as a rule, it would command everyone to seize power, making power
impossible. It also follows that moral rules have to be expressed in formal
language - in other words, to be "universalizable."[5]
Because politics and morality both involve the formulation of rules and their
practical application, Kant thinks that they are ultimately compatible.
As a formal test of the morality of
politics, Kant suggests the formula of publicity:
any notion of right that cannot be made public is unjust. In international
right, for instance, the notion of a preemptive military strike must be deemed
unjust: one could never publicly announce a plan to launch a surprise attack on
another country, because to do so would negate the act itself. Kant, once
again, thinks that immoral actions are ultimately self-contradictory and
self-defeating, because those who commit them act according to rules that they
could not accept being followed by others: for Kant, it is thieves who pay the
greatest respect to the sanctity of private property, just as conquerors assume
most people are peaceful and usurpers demand respect for the law. Morality is
the ability to follow rules, the validity of which is verified by their
publicity.
Carl von
Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (written between 1816 and 1830,
published in 1830)
Clausewitz does not, like Kant, see himself as a
philosopher of war: he is not concerned with the role of war in nature's plan,
or the conditions of possibility of peace. His point of departure is that war
exists. Its meaning and purpose lend itself to reflection.
Clausewitz belongs to the Machiavellian tradition in
political thought: he is not concerned with "right", i.e. with the
"ideal" or "natural" political order, but with the question
of how rulers can best achieve their ends.
It is essential, in this context, that war is never for Clausewitz anything but a means for achieving an end. War is not an end in itself. This is the
primary meaning of Clausewitz's most famous assertion. Rejecting the assumption
that "war is to be equated with the end of political relations and that
with it, an absolutely new state of affairs is established", he affirms
"to the contrary" that "war is nothing other than the
continuation of political relations through the intervention of other
means." "Other means" signifies that political relations do not
end with war, that they are not transformed by it into something completely
different, and that the course of a war must never be anything other than the
imprints of politics. Practically, this means that generals and field commanders
must never be given free rein, and must always remain subordinate to the goals
defined by the cabinet and its ministers.
As a means, war is thus necessarily subject to an end, which is always political. The
military leader is always, in this regard, a specialist or a technician;
political leaders alone operate on the level of generality. One might imagine,
Clausewitz says, war as having its own "grammar", but not its own
"logic".
To the extent that it is a means, war can never be
perpetuated for its own sake: its end is always to bring a return to the state
of peace. The concept of "victory" (Sieg) belongs only to a tactical vocabulary, to military
"grammar". Victory, in other words, is relative only to the
accomplishment of military goals, which themselves are only means to a larger
end. Victory is never a political goal: the only political goal of a war is a
return to a state of peace.
Peace, as Clausewitz understands it, means the
balance of power. Peace is best guaranteed by the coexistence of states with
comparable power, and not by the existence of a single political entity to
which all are subordinated. Indeed, it is the attempt to achieve the latter -
which Clausewitz calls "empire" - which leads to instability and war,
as Napoleon's efforts to conquer
According to Raymond Aron, Clausewitz's basic insight
was that the state cannot exist solely for the sake of perpetuating war.
However, this statement itself was an ideal, assuming that the purpose of the
state was to define the interests of society in its totality. In the 20th
century, Aron argues, the implicit synthesis of Clausewitz's insight becomes
unravelled: Generals like Ludendorff and political leaders like Hitler argued
that the state could not not put
itself in the service of war (i.e., they made war an end in itself), while
revolutionaries like Lenin and Mao rejected the notion that the state could
ever represent society in its totality (thus making possible the inversion of
Clausewitz's formula - "Politics is the pursuit of war, but by other
means" - and its application to class struggle).[6]
Thus while rejecting a philosophical approach to war
and favoring the question of political skill over that of right, Clausewitz
nonetheless overlaps with Kant at several levels. Like Clausewitz, Kant
implicitly says that war can never be an end in itself: its ultimate purpose is
to bring about peace. Clausewitz, like Kant, also tends to equate rationality
with the definition of general goals, as opposed to private, particular needs and
interests. Moreover, both thinkers see the solution to peace as lying in the
idea of a federation of states, seeking peaceful relations with one another
while remaining juridically independent.
Michael Behrent
Copyright © 2002, TABULA RAZA
[1] The name of the operation at the time lent itself to considerable derision: did it mean that the operation was a "just cause" in the sense of a goal that was morally right, or that it was an arbitrary, unilateral act? Question: "Why the hell did you do that?" Reply: "Just 'cause." But I ramble.
[2] The question of "finality" or "purposefulness" in nature - i.e., "teleology" - is the object of the second part of Kant's third critique, The Critique of Judgment (1795), which is a critique of teleological reason.
[3] In this way, history appears as the solution to the disjuncture between what "is" and what "ought" to be, through the medium of twists and turns that have moral consequences unanticipated by those who initiated them - an idea that Hegel would later call "the ruse of reason."
[4] This is one of the main insights to Kantian moral thought, which Kant developed notably in Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals and the second critique, The Critique of Practical Reason (1788).
[5] This is the idea of Kant's famous conclusion of his moral philosophy: the existence of a "Categorical Imperative" that is the formal criteria of all morality. It stipulates: "Act in such a way that you could will the maxim of your action as universal law." The other feature of Kantian moral thought, alongside its formalism, is its definition of morality as duty: to be moral is to act in accordance with one's duty, as defined by reason. In this sense, Kantian morality is considered deontological, making the intention of the actor the criteria of a moral action, rather than utilitarian or consequentialist, which defines morality in terms of the outcome of an action.
[6] Raymond Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz. Volume II: L'âge planétaire. (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 61.