Session 23 - Peace?

Immanuel Kant in his essay "perpetual peace" gives us a roadmap on how peace can be achieved while differentiating what people thought was peace but not actually was. The beliefs of Kant can be said to be the principles of the liberalist ideology.

A very interestng aspect of his article was the preliminary articles which are basic thoughts that a state needs to have in order for there to be peace. The first preliminary article is how if there is a current declaration of peace, but if the state has a plan to go back to war in the future, this cannot be considered as peace. The second article is how no state should be forced or bribed to do anything that it might not want to do of free will.

The third principle is that the existing armies should eventually be abolished in time. This is because if states have armies, then the other states will fear that there is a threat of attack which will mean that even they would want to keep an army. Thus there can be no peace with standing armies. The fourth principle is that there should be no national debt due to foreign actions. The fifth principle is that foreign states should not try to interfere in others states governmental and constitution matters. And lastly when states that are at war use tactics such as spying or breaking agreements, this makes future trust unlikely this making peace impossible.

The thing is that while these points are very logical and might lead to peace, there is high chance that none of these will happen. For example in regards to the third point, it has very little chance of actually happening in today's world. This is because in today's world, the topic of 'Muslim terrorist's extremely widespread, which means that the states will want to defend themselves against these terrorists and so will never reduce or abolish their army. Additionally who can force a hegemonic state to follow these principles for peace because they will never to so in the name of self defense.