Publius Before Kant: Federal-Republican Security and Democratic Peace

Abstract

Reflecting American and allied ascent, Liberal IR theorists have revived earlier theorists, notably Kant and democratic peace, constructing neoclassical liberalism to challenge Realism. Republican security theory (RST) begins in antiquity and reaches a conceptual watershed in the Enlightenment, not in Kant, but in Publius = Federalist. Pessimistic, RST assumed republics were small and expansion would fatally deform, a conclusion derived from Roman history. In a pivotal advance, Publius advanced federal union, suggesting the federal-republican security hypothesis — federal union enables republican viability in competitive interstate systems. Kant does not address the logically and historically prior question of how democracies come to populate competitive state systems sufficiently to make pacific unions. The historical record of the global industrial state system suggests federal-republican security is more important than democratic peace.