"Perpetual Peace": A Project by Europeans for Europeans?

Abstract

Immanuel Kant's classic essay Perpetual Peace has famously informed much of the neoliberal “democratic peace” scholarship in International Relations over the past few decades. It has also influenced contemporary notions of cosmopolitanism and global governance. We need to realize, however, that Kant's essay is only one representative of the eighteenth-century European thought on perpetual peace. Several other writers have produced their own versions of the perpetual peace ideal. This article surveys some notable eighteenth-century perpetual peace proposals from a specific perspective: it seeks to find out the attitude of these various proposals toward non-European peoples. It asks, in other words, whether and to what extent non-Europeans were “included” in the eighteenth-century European visions of a perpetual peace.