Perpetual Peace: Strangers, Trade and a Race of Devils

Kant’s third article reaches beyond single nations to the whole earth, and then he asks a hard question: can selfish human beings ever really keep the peace?

“The rights of people as citizens of the world shall be limited to universal hospitality.Hospitality here means the right of a stranger who arrives in a foreign land not to be treated as an enemy.He may be sent away, if that does not cause his death, but as long as he behaves peacefully, he must not be treated with hostility.This right belongs to all people, because the earth is round: we cannot scatter ourselves endlessly, and in the end we must learn to live side by side.Originally, no one had more right than anyone else to live on any particular part of the earth.

Compare this with how the ‘civilised’ trading nations of Europe behave when they visit foreign lands: to them, visiting means conquering.When America and other lands were discovered, they were treated as if they belonged to nobody, because the people who lived there were counted as nothing.

People often say that a republic would need a nation of angels, because human beings are too selfish for such a fine constitution.But the problem of setting up a state can be solved even for a race of devils, as long as they are intelligent.A good constitution sets each person’s selfish interests against the others, so that they check one another, and everyone is forced to be, if not a good person, at least a good citizen.

Nature helps in another way, too: the spirit of trade cannot live side by side with war, and sooner or later it takes hold of every nation.So states find themselves pushed, not by morality but by their own interest, to prevent war wherever it threatens to break out.In this way nature guarantees perpetual peace, not with certainty, but clearly enough to make it our duty to work for it, for it is no empty dream.”