By Daniel Chung

In many of Tufts’ Intro to International Relations classes, students are assigned Jack Snyder’s piece “One World, Rival Theories.” In the piece, German philosopher Immanuel Kant is associated with the liberal position in international relations theory – that of democratic peace theory. This theory asserts that since democracies elect “accountable” leaders, and the people bear the burdens of war, democracies will not go to war, especially with one another, as these regimes view each other as “legitimate and nonthreatening”. The institutions and processes of democracies, subjecting leaders to the will of the people, will, according to this logic, make international cooperation easy to sustain.

This commonly held view of a democratic peace theory, unfortunately, does not approximate, but rather vulgarizes the position of Kant from his famous essays, “Perpetual Peace” and “An Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent.” Snyder’s article acknowledges that liberal theory, which has become “largely self-evident” in the US and has taken hold abroad, foresees that increased trade will forge ties between nations and facilitate the spread of democratic norms, enabling an escape from realist anarchy. However, even Kant recognized that foreseeing a progressive movement in history is not necessarily grounded on reason as liberals may claim. In his essay on Universal History, Kant prefaces his argument by acknowledging that the idea of progress is based on a “hope” to discern a movement, hedging his argument as only an attempt. Further, at the end, he characterizes his efforts as a justification of “Providence” itself, out of a refusal to “turn [his] eyes from [the world] in disgust” which would result from renouncing the idea of a rational purpose in history. Kant’s language implicitly would indict current theories based on the certainty of progress in peace as based on something that cannot ever be certain, but must result instead from a certain form of faith which people are compelled to believe in.

Beyond the realization of the irrationality of liberalism as dependent on a form of faith, the full possibility of liberal internationalism can be further questioned by leaning on another German theorist, this time of the early 20th century, Carl Schmitt. Although Schmitt ended up participating in the politics of the Third Reich, he formulated critiques of liberal internationalism which remain salient today. Particularly, he critiqued liberalism for holding two separate and self-contradictory norms: the “equal weight of states,” or the sovereignty norm, and the “nation assimilating” current of liberalism which trends to “overturning the old concept of state into a universalistic-imperialistic world law” inherent in its universal arguments for human rights; of course, the universalism of human rights arises from arguments formulated around domestic liberalism based on the equality of individuals and the necessity of creating toleration, a norm which eventually expands in weight until it becomes seen as needing to be applied on the international scale, even by force. As Western states define themselves as superior by their advancement in human rights, and influence international organizations like the United Nations, universalistic human rights arguments have led to claims of intervention against the states of Central and Eastern Europe in Schmitt’s time and the Middle East in ours, with arguments for remaining committed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan resulting at least partially from arguments of the necessity of ensuring universal human rights. In such a world, the sovereignty norm is undercut, and liberalism undermines one of its own values. According to the own demands of the effects of liberal internationalism, the strongest strand of it, democratic peace theory, becomes self-defeating and incoherent.

All of this is not to say that we ought to unthinkingly abandon liberalism as a political project. Its benefits, especially in a material sense, have been undeniable, serving as the engine of economic growth for the world over the last number of centuries. And even on the international scale, it is undeniable that liberalism has played at least some role in securing a world less beset by open great power wars – something I am sure that we can all celebrate. But we should certainly reconsider the basis of the world we live in. Surely, this last task will require the expenditure of massive intellectual energies, and this consideration has been aimed at, at least in a popular manner, clearing the way for further efforts at reconstituting liberal democracy on a solid basis.

Daniel Chung is a junior at Tufts University Studying International Relations.

Image: Immanuel Kant, c. 1790 (Norwegian Digital Learning Arena (NDLA))

This piece is a reproduction from its original issue in Hemispheres vol. 47, no. 1.