“PERPETUAL PEACE”

As we’ve seen so far in this course, major theoretical advances towards modern human rights emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Repeated wars among the great European powers during this period prompted a growing sense of disgust at their human cost.

In response, the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (pictured, slide 11) published Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) that argued for cooperation among the European states and asserted the view that a rules-based international order would sustain an era of peace, prosperity, and the advancement of humanity.

In Kant’s view, there were immediate actions that needed to be taken to avoid war.

He detailed these in what he termed “preliminary articles.”

He also listed three more general principles or “definitive articles” – which he described as “laws” – that needed to be respected long-term.

Kant’s “preliminary articles”:

1. No secret treaties between countries

2. No imperial possession of other territories

3. The abolition of standing armies

4. Sovereign debt holding (one state borrowing from another) should not be used to coerce the debtor state

5. No external interference in the constitution or government of another country

6. No poisoning the well: "No state shall, during war, permit such acts of hostility which would make mutual confidence in the subsequent peace impossible”

Kant’s “definitive articles”:

1. Constitutional law: every state should be republican in character – in other words, state sovereignty should arise from the people, not a monarch

2. International law: there should be a federation of free states

3. Cosmopolitan law: citizens of one state should have a right to hospitality in other states in which they do not hold citizenship

One can see in Kant’s program anticipation of the types of institutional arrangements that would develop in the twentieth century with the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations.

In addition, there are also gestures towards the sorts of rights that would eventually be enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).

These rights include the following:
!The right to a nationality (UDHR 15)
!The right to security and freedom from harm (esp. UDHR 2-5, 9, 12)!The right to mobility and asylum (UDHR 13, 14)
!Democratic rights (UDHR 21)
!The right to a secure international order (UDHR 28)

Lastly, it’s important to note that Kant did not originate the notion of perpetual peace.

Similar ideas were evident in English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s A Plan for Universal or Perpetual Peace (1789).

In this work, Bentham called for abolishing colonies, disarmament, and neutral third-party arbitration of conflicts between states.

THE “FOURTEEN POINTS” AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

World War I was a watershed moment in history.

Part of its legacy was the world’s first attempt to establish an international body to mediate and prevent international conflict: the League of Nations (1920-1946).

WWI was, to that point (1914-1918), the most destructive and gruesome war in human history.

But it had antecedents that rivaled it for sheer brutality.

The Napoleonic Wars (1804-1815) cut a massive swatch of destruction across Europe.

The Crimean War (1853-1856) was a highly industrialized and destructive conflict that was closely documented in the press and popular culture. It elicited powerful reactions for the scale of human suffering.

The US Civil War (1861-1865), a still more devastating industrial-scale conflict, heavily reported and documented using photography.

The Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) was a gruesome and costly war. Japan’s victory nearly toppled the tsarist regime in Russia.

The Crimean War and US Civil War, among other conflicts, prompted the establishment of the Red Cross (1863) – a neutral organization that provided relief for wounded soldiers in battle.

Likewise, the first international Geneva Convention (1864) and three subsequent conventions (1906, 1929, 1949) provided protections for wounded combatants, prisoners, and civilians in war zones.

The catastrophe and unspeakable suffering of WWI, however, prompted renewed calls for the elimination of war, not simply the management of its effects.

Among those championing a new international order was the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson. In 1918, Wilson delivered his famous “Fourteen Points” speech outlining his vision of a postwar liberal-internationalist order, which is often referred to as Wilsonian idealism.

The “Fourteen Points” called for, among other things, free trade, reduction of arms, an end to colonialism and its replacement with national self-determination, and an “association of nations,” which in 1920 would become the League of Nations.

One can hear echoes of Kant and Bentham in Wilson’s speech.

For its part, despite considerable apprehension on the part of some countries (including most notably Wilson’s own) and criticisms of Wilson’s naivety, the League of Nations was established.

It would prove itself to be a paper tiger.

Unable to curtail German rearmament under Hitler, or to intervene meaningfully in Nazi Germany’s incursions into Austria and Czechoslovakia, or to prevent Japanese aggression in Manchuria in the 1930s, the League fell into disrepute.

WORLD WAR II AND THE UNITED NATIONS

The German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 (pictured), with Soviet complicity, plunged the world into a renewed phase of brutal aggression, mass destruction, and human suffering and death on a scale eclipsing even that of the First World War.

The inability of the international community to halt Hitler and the tragic appeasement of his designs in Western Europe, coupled with Josef Stalin’s cynical maneuvering designed to prompt a war among the Western powers, couldn’t have been a more distressing setback for the cause of international peace and human rights.

The war visited heretofore unimaginable horrors on soldiers and civilians, including the use of highly sophisticated weaponry, airplanes, tanks, and mass destructive ordinance, including by 1945 the atomic bomb.

Summary execution or brutal prisoner of war camps were typically the lot of captured soldiers, in stark defiance of the Geneva Convention.

For their part, civilians unfortunate enough to be caught in war zones endured endless bombing raids, including the mass leveling of entire cities (Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki) and often brutal enemy occupation, which included forced labour.

In the midst of this, of course, was the Holocaust, the first technologically implemented and bureaucratically regulated genocide, which resulted in the death of six million European Jews while also claiming Roma peoples, LGBTQ people, and people with physical disabilities.

These were what the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights described as the “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.”

The defeat of the Nazis and Imperial Japan was followed immediately by an era of “reconstruction” of both the warzone countries and the domestic societies and economies of countries spared the destruction.

This effort, planned by Allied leadership during the war, included a renewed push to set up a replacement for the failed League of Nations.

The idea of the United Nations arose in 1942 during discussions about forming a permanent alliance among the Allied nations.*

These discussions were expanded to include all of the world’s countries, a goal set in motion with the formation of the United Nations on 24 October 1945.

It is not difficult to see the general plan outlined by Kant in these objectives, which are meant to mediate conflict and, more critically, to prevent it.