Perpetual Peace - Immanuel Kant

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to the happiness of human society to show itself ready for every means of reconciliation, in cases where the interests at stake are neither vital nor important.” (ibid. § 332.) At the same time, it is never advisable that a nation should forgive an insult which it has not the power to resent.

      The Dream of a Perpetual Peace.

      But side by side with this development and gradual popularisation of the new science of International Law, ideas of a less practical, but not less fruitful kind had been steadily making their way and obtaining a strong hold upon the popular mind. The Decree of Eternal Pacification of 1495 had abolished private war, one of the heavy curses of the Middle Ages. Why should it not be extended to banish warfare between states as well? Gradually one proposal after another was made to attain this end, or, at least, to smooth the way for its future realisation. The first of these in point of time is to be found in a somewhat bare, vague form in Sully’s Memoirs,[33] said to have been published in 1634. Half a century later the Quaker William Penn suggested an international tribunal of arbitration in the interests of peace.[34] But it was by the French Abbé St. Pierre that the problem of perpetual peace was fairly introduced into political literature: and this, in an age of cabinet and dynastic wars, while the dreary cost of the war of the Spanish succession was yet unpaid. St. Pierre was the first who really clearly realised and endeavoured to prove that the establishment of a permanent state of peace is not only in the interest of the weaker, but is required by the European society of nations and by the reason of man. From the beginning of the history of humanity, poets and prophets had cherished the “sweet dream” of a peaceful civilisation: it is in the form of a practical project that this idea is new.

      The ancient world actually represented a state of what was almost perpetual war. This was the reality which confronted man, his inevitable doom, it seemed, as it had been pronounced to the fallen sinners of Eden. Peace was something which man had enjoyed once, but forfeited. The myth- and poetry-loving Greeks, and, later, the poets of Rome delighted to paint a state of eternal peace, not as something to whose coming they could look forward in the future, but as a golden age of purity whose records lay buried in the past, a paradise which had been, but which was no more. Voices, more scientific, were raised even in Greece in attempts, such as Aristotle’s, to show that the evolution of man had been not a course of degeneration from perfection, but of continual progress upwards from barbarism to civilisation and culture. But the change in popular thinking on this matter was due less to the arguments of philosophy than to a practical experience of the causes which operate in the interests of peace. The foundation of a universal empire under Alexander the Great gave temporary rest to nations heretofore incessantly at war. Here was a proof that the Divine Will had not decreed that man was to work out his punishment under unchanging conditions of perpetual warfare. This idea of a universal empire became the Greek ideal of a perpetual peace. Such an empire was, in the language of the Stoics, a world-state in which all men had rights of citizenship, in which all other nations were absorbed.

      Parallel to this ideal among the Greeks, we find the hope in Israel of a Messiah whose coming was to bring peace, not only to the Jewish race, but to all the nations of the earth. This idea stands out in the sharpest contrast to the early nationalism of the Hebrew people, who regarded every stranger as an idolater and an enemy. The prophecies of Judaism, combined with the cosmopolitan ideas of Greece, were the source of the idea, which is expressed in the teaching of Christ, of a spiritual world-empire, an empire held together solely by the tie of a common religion.

      This hope of peace did not actually die during the first thousand years of our era, nor even under the morally stagnating influences of the Middle Ages. When feudalism and private war were abolished in Europe, it wakened to a new life. Not merely in the mouths of poets and religious enthusiasts was the cry raised against war, but by scholars like Thomas More and Erasmus, jurists like Gentilis and Grotius, men high in the state and in the eyes of Europe like Henry IV. of France and the Duc de Sully or the Abbé de St. Pierre whose Projet de Paix Perpétuelle (1713)[35] obtained immediate popularity and wide-spread fame. The first half of the eighteenth century was already prepared to receive and mature a plan of this kind.

      Henry IV. and St. Pierre.

      The Grand Dessein of Henry IV. is supposed to have been formed by that monarch and reproduced in Sully’s Memoirs, written in 1634 and discovered nearly a century later by St. Pierre. The story goes that the Abbé found the book buried in an old garden. It has been shewn, however, that there is little likelihood that this project actually originated with the king, who probably corresponded fairly well to Voltaire’s picture of him as war hero of the Henriade. The plan was more likely conceived by Sully, and ascribed to the popular king for the sake of the better hearing and greater influence it might in this way be likely to have, and also because, thereby, it might be less likely to create offence in political circles. St. Pierre himself may or may not have been acquainted with the facts.

      The so-called Grand Dessein of Henry IV. was, shortly, as follows.[36] It proposed to divide Europe between fifteen Powers,[37] in such a manner that the balance of power should be established and preserved. These were to form a Christian republic on the basis of the freedom and equality of its members, the armed forces of the federation being supported by fixed contribution. A general council, consisting of representatives from the fifteen states, was to make all laws necessary for cementing the union thus formed and for maintaining the order once established. It would also be the business of this senate to “deliberate on questions that might arise, to occupy themselves with discussing different interests, to settle quarrels amicably, to throw light upon and arrange all the civil, political and religious affairs of Europe, whether internal or foreign.” (Mémoires, vol. VI., p. 129 seq.)

      This scheme of the king or his minister was expanded with great thoroughness and clear-sightedness by the Abbé St. Pierre: none of the many later plans for a perpetual peace has been so perfect in details. He proposes that there should be a permanent and perpetual union between, if possible, all Christian sovereigns—of whom he suggests nineteen, excluding the Czar—“to preserve unbroken peace in Europe,” and that a permanent Congress or senate should be formed by deputies of the federated states. The union should protect weak sovereigns, minors during a regency, and so on, and should banish civil as well as international war—it should “render prompt and adequate assistance to rulers and chief magistrates against seditious persons and rebels.” All warfare henceforth is to be waged between the troops of the federation—each nation contributing an equal number—and the enemies of European security, whether outsiders or rebellious members of the union. Otherwise, where it is possible, all disputes occurring within the union are to be settled by the arbitration of the senate, and the combined military force of the federation is to be applied to drive the Turks out of Europe. There is to be a rational rearrangement of boundaries, but after this no change is to be permitted in the map of Europe. The union should bind itself to tolerate the different forms of faith.

      The objections to St. Pierre’s scheme are, many of them, obvious. He himself produces sixty-two arguments likely to be raised against his plan, and he examines these in turn with acuteness and eloquence. But there are other criticisms which he was less likely to be able to forestall. Of the nineteen states he names as a basis of the federation, some have disappeared and the governments of others have completely changed. Indeed St. Pierre’s scheme did not look far beyond the present. But it has besides a too strongly political character.[38] From this point of view, the Abbé’s plan amounts practically to a European coalition against the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, we notice with a smile that the French statesman and patriot is not lost in the cosmopolitan political reformer. “The kingdom of Spain shall not go out of the House of Bourbon!”[39] France is to enjoy more than the privileges of honour; she is to reap distinct material and political advantages from the union. Humanity is to be a brotherhood, but, in the federation of nations, France is to stand first.[40] We see that these “rêves d’un homme de bien,” as Cardinal Dubois called them, are not without their practical element. But the great mistake of St. Pierre is this: he actually thought that his plan could be put into execution in the near future, that an ideal of this kind was realisable at once.[41] “I, myself, form’d it,” he says in the preface, “in full expectation to see it one Day executed.” As Hobbes, says, “there can be nothing so absurd, but may be found in the

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