Jus post bellum

Jus post bellum

Immanuel Kant and the ethics of peace

Glenn Bezalel relates Kant’s teachings to Just War theory

Glenn Bezalel

Edexcel: 6RS01 OCR: G572

While studies of the ethics of war are dominated by the Just War theory and its major rivals of realism on the one hand and pacifism on the other, Immanuel Kant’s influence is often overlooked. Yet in the age of democracy and capitalism, the great Enlightenment thinker’s ideas on how to secure a global ‘perpetual peace’ may be more relevant than ever.

Make money, not war

Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times, is one of the leading voices celebrating the impact of globalisation. Describing himself as a ‘free-trader’, Friedman came up with the ‘Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His thesis? ‘No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.’ For Friedman, the logic is simple:

‘…when a country reaches a certain level of economic development, when it has a middle class big enough to support a McDonald’s, it becomes a McDonald’s country, and people in McDonald’s countries don’t like to fight wars; they like to wait in line for burgers.’

Friedman, T. L. (8 December 1996) ‘Foreign Affairs Big Mac New York Times

In other words, why go to war when you make money?

Realists would answer that national geopolitical interests still seem to trump mutual economic ones. For example, the many McDonald’s outlets in Russia didn’t prevent Vladimir Putin from invading and annexing Crimea in 2014, which also had a McDonald’s presence.

Undeterred by such events, Friedman developed his capitalist peace theory with the ‘Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention’, named after the multinational technology company. As Friedman puts it:

‘The Dell Theory stipulates: No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain.’

Friedman 2007, p. 421

’While there may well be some exceptions, Friedman’s point is that war is much less likely when there is financial interdependence between countries that results from multinational companies investing in those economies. While Friedman accepts that there are no guarantees — as the Russia–Ukraine standoff shows — he believes that developing countries and burgeoning democracies will be less likely to resort to violence should such conflict cost them the economic benefits of global capitalism.

Europe’s ‘Ode to Joy’

This was precisely the sort of thinking that went into the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951, the precursor of today’s European Union (EU). Masterminded by Jean Monnet, a French economist and diplomat now known as the ‘father of Europe’, the ECSC secured the peace by integrating the French and German coal and steel industries under its centralised control. By taking away the means of manufacturing weapons from national governments and placing them into the hands of a High Authority of Europe (now known as the European Commission), another European war would be impossible to wage. As Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister at the time, predicted:

‘By pooling basic production and by instituting a new High Authority, whose decisions will bind France, Germany and other member countries, this proposal will lead to the realisation of the first concrete foundation of a European federation indispensable to the preservation of peace.’

The Schuman Declaration (9 May 1950)

Indeed, Monnet’s and Schuman’s efforts were rewarded by an unprecedented postwar legacy of European peace and prosperity. This was recognised by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in 2012, which praised the EU as the ‘central driving force’ behind the region’s ‘processes of reconciliation’:

‘For Europe, where both world wars had broken out, the new internationalism had to be a binding commitment. It had to build on human rights, democracy, and enforceable principles of the rule of law. And on economic cooperation aimed at making the countries equal partners in the European marketplace. By these means the countries would be bound together so as to make new wars impossible.’

Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony speech (2012)

Where Kant comes in

Yet the roots of what has become known as the democratic peace theory can be traced back to 1795, when Immanuel Kant wrote his classic anti-war pamphlet, ‘Perpetual Peace’. While traditional Just War theories were more interested in the just causes of war (jus ad bellum) and how war is conducted (jus in bello), Kant led the way on how to ‘secure the peace’ (jus post bellum) and his thinking was remarkably prescient regarding the development of the United Nations (UN) and the EU, recognising that ‘the commercial spirit which cannot exist along with war’ will lead to ‘states find[ing] themselves driven to further the noble interest of peace, although not directly from motives of morality’ (Kant 1795, p. 32).

OF ALL POLITICAL SYSTEMS, SUPPORTERS OF ‘LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM’ CLAIM, ONLY DEMOCRACY’S BELIEF IN THE UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS CAN BE APPLIED JUSTLY TO ALL HUMANS ACROSS THE GLOBE.

How are states to arrive at this ‘perpetual peace’ in the absence of an overarching global authority? For Kant, the starting point — what Thomas Hobbes called ‘the state of nature’ — is bleak:

‘A state of Peace among men, who live side by side with each other, is not the natural state. The state of Nature is rather a state of War; for although it may not always present the outbreak of hostilities, it is nevertheless continually threatened with them.’

Kant 1795, p.12

Just as rational individuals in society realise that they must accept the authority of the state in order to be protected from the Hobbesian state of nature, where life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’, so too would rational states accept a binding ‘law of nations’ that would protect countries from each other. For this to be successful, Kant formulated three ‘definitive articles’ that would achieve ‘a perpetual peace between states’:

■ ‘The Civil Constitution in every State shall be Republican’. (As Steven Pinker writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature (p. 166), Kant ‘preferred the term republican, because he associated the word democracy with mob rule; what he had in mind was a government dedicated to freedom, equality, and the rule of law’.)

■ ‘The Right of Nations shall be founded on a Federation of Free States’ —a ‘League of Nations’.

■ ‘Universal hospitality’ — the free movement of people to live in safety.

Democracy/republicanism

As Kenneth Waltz writes in his realist classic on international relations Man, the State and War, Kant’s faith in democracy as ‘inherently peaceful’ stemmed from the belief that ‘giving a direct voice to those who suffer most in war would drastically reduce its incidence’. In contrast, Kant reasoned in ‘Perpetual Peace’, for dictators to decide to go to war ‘is a matter of the smallest concern in the world. For…the Ruler, who, as such, is not a mere citizen but the Owner of the State, need not in the least suffer personally by war’.

Moreover, Kant also argued that since democracies were themselves based on ‘the original source of the conception of Right’, they would aim to be just and keep to the law in their relations with other nations just as they do to safeguard their own citizens.

‘League of Nations’

For Kant, the anarchy of the international arena needed a neutral, higher authority which could resolve disputes in an objective way. The UN or EU, for all of their faults, were certainly more what Kant had in mind than, say, a single world government backed by a world army. However, for Kant, the key to such an international organisation’s success would be the make-up of its membership: democracies can be relied upon to uphold international law, not autocracies.

This is based on the categorical imperative that the maxim of one’s actions can be universalised. Of all political systems, supporters of ‘liberal internationalism’ claim, only democracy’s belief in the universal principles of human rights and freedoms can be applied justly to all humans across the globe. This is why the French and Germans don’t worry any more about mutual invasion from each other in the democratic age. In contrast, the people of the middle east, where democracies are in short supply, are suffering tremendously from the wars and terror engulfing the region.

‘Universal hospitality’

The free movement of people, which would allow for social and economic interaction, would ensure that ‘a violation of Right in one place of the earth, is felt all over it’ (p. 24). This aspect of Kant’s programme for ‘perpetual peace’ is a key basis for the complementary capitalist peace theory that philosophers like Adam Smith and Thomas Paine advocated. In the words of Kant:

‘Trade…would increase the wealth and power of the peace-loving, productive sections of the population at the expense of the war-oriented aristocracy, and would bring men of different nations into constant contact with one another; contact which would make clear to all of them their fundamental community of interests.’

‘Liberal Internationalism’ in Burchill and Linklater 1996, p. 35

John Stuart Mill also agreed with this approach, arguing that, ‘it is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which act in natural opposition to it’ (cited in Burchill and Linklater, p. 36).

With capitalist economies strongly linked to democratic societies (China being the obvious exception), the capitalist peace theory does seem to hold up well, and is the basis for modern interdependency theor y, where Western countries are now more than ever dependent on each other for their security and prosperity. Indeed, many have argued that this is why the EU has been so eager to keep Greece within the monetary union: for one country to leave could see the economic enterprise unravel and an ensuing rise in political extremism, challenging the continent’s liberal democratic status quo.

Fighting for peace

Kant’s ideas thus go to the heart of the democratic peace theory in the belief that countries that respect their own citizens’ human rights are less likely to go to war with other countries. Academics such as Michael Doyle and Steven Pinker point to much empirical evidence that substantiates this claim. As Brian Orend, a specialist on Kant and the ethics of war, writes:

‘If we look at history, we see that the embodiments of international aggression have, indeed, made horrible domestic regimes: Nazi Germany; Stalin’s Russia; Hussein’s Iraq. There is a clear connection here, and it probably runs quite simply like this: a rights-violator is a rightsviolator. A group engaging in domestic rightsviolation will not hesitate, if it can and if it wants, to violate rights internationally.’

Orend 2013, p.56

It is this analysis that has led some liberal internationalists like Francis Fukuyama to champion the view that ‘a world made up of liberal democracies…should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognise one another’s legitimacy’.

Controversially, this approach guided the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, including justifying the invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. As George W. Bush concluded in his State of the Union speech to Congress in 2004:

‘America is a nation with a mission and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace, a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman. America acts in this cause with friends and allies at our side, yet we understand our special calling: this great republic will lead the cause of freedom.’

Roger Scruton, an English philosopher, argued that this justification is in keeping with Kantian principles. The categorical imperative demands that we treat each person as an end in his-or herself rather than as a means. Scruton applies this Kantian duty at the state level:

‘States in which this command [to treat each rational being as an end] is not obeyed by the rulers, or made impossible to be obeyed by anyone else, are states that violate the moral law… . Such states are intrinsically illegitimate, which means that their disappearance is good in itself, and the aim and desire of all rational beings.’

Scruton 2004

MORE THAN ANY OTHER THINKER BEFORE HIM, KANT DEVELOPED THE IMPORTANCE OF JUS POST BELLUM AND ITS PART IN SECURING A JUST PEACE

To be sure, this does not mean that democracies should seek to overthrow every despot, as the ‘fog of war’ leads to inevitable moral costs. At the same time, the democratic republics, which make up the ‘League of Nations’, have the moral duty to confront dictatorial rulers if they prove to be a threat to the moral order. In the tradition of Just War theory, the violence must be proportional to the threat, and there must be a ‘right intention’ of securing a lasting peace. If these conditions are met, Scruton argues, then ‘war conducted for the sake of peace was, for Kant…a paradigm of legitimate belligerence’.

On an optimistic note

As Brian Orend has shown, more than any other thinker before him, Kant developed the importance of jus post bellum and its part in securing a just peace:

‘Kant favoured widespread internal regime change in the direction of rights realisation, and thought some international policies — like diplomatic engagement, cultural linkages, and free trade — would help bring this about. Pro-rights societies, he predicted, would eventually band together to form a prosperous, peaceful federation of free nations.’

Orend 2013, p.20

For supporters of Kant’s democratic peace thesis, the remarkable growth in democracies is the best hope we have of securing a perpetual peace between nation states. As Steven Pinker concludes:

‘Democracy by definition is associated with less government violence, and we know that it is statistically associated with an aversion to interstate war, deadly ethnic riots, and genocide, and with a reduction in the severity of civil wars.’

Pinker 2011, p. 665

As liberal democracies continue to flourish into the twenty-first century, it may well be that the Kantian recipe for the perpetual peace is finally having its deserved influence on the ethics of war.

Glenn Bezalel is head of religion, philosophy and ethics at St Helen’s School, Northwood.