Two Conceptions of Cosmopolitan Justice

Abstract

Commenting in 1795 on the interstate system inaugurated with the Peace of Westphalia a century and a half earlier, Immanuel Kant expressed familiar misgivings concerning the principle of state sovereignty and the right of states to resort to arms to protect their vital interests, both of which remained cornerstones of international law into the twentieth century: The concept of international right becomes meaningless if interpreted as a right to go to war. For this would make it a right to determine what is lawful not by means of universally valid external laws, but by means of one-sided maxims backed up by physical force. It could be taken to mean that it is perfectly just for men who adopt this attitude to destroy one another, and thus to find perpetual peace in the vast grave where all the horrors of violence and those responsible for them would be buried’.1 And in the next breath he proposed an idea of legal pacifism that is still the principal alternative to the state of nature in international affairs: ‘There is only one rational way in which states coexisting with other states can emerge from the lawless condition of pure warfare. Just like individual men, they must renounce their savage and lawless freedom, adapting themselves to public coercive laws, and thus form an international tate (civitas gentium) which would necessarily continue to grow until it embraced all the peoples of the earth’.2