Kantian Peace and Liberal Peace: Three Concerns

In the definitive articles of Toward Perpetual Peace (1795), Kant advocated three main institutional reforms to eliminate the greatest self-inflicted tragedy of humanity, which is war. Kant thought that if national governments became “republican” (what we would now call liberal-democratic), an international federation of states (along the lines of the UN or the EU) was established, and a certain degree of permeability between states to allow visits by foreigners (“the right to visit”) was ensured, an ever-lasting peace among nations would eventually occur. In the 1980s, Michael Doyle interpreted a two hundred year absence of conflicts between democracies— a historical fact whose significance is challenged by only a few—as a striking piece of evidence in favor of Kant’s theory. Doyle sparked one of the most important research programs in the social sciences of our times—the Democratic Peace Theory (henceforth DPT)—a program that interestingly sits at the intersection of political philosophy, political science, and international relations.