Perpetual Peace: The Rules for Ending War

In 1795, when Europe had been at war for years, the seventy-one-year-old Kant published a short essay on how wars between nations could end for ever.He wrote it like a real peace treaty, with articles that every state would have to accept.

“A Dutch innkeeper once had a sign that showed a graveyard and the words ‘Perpetual Peace’.We need not decide whether the joke was aimed at mankind in general, at rulers who never tire of war, or at philosophers who dream the sweet dream of peace.

First: no peace treaty is valid if it secretly keeps a reason for a future war.Such a treaty would only be a truce, a pause in the fighting, and not peace; real peace means the end of all hostility.Second: no independent state, large or small, may be acquired by another state through inheritance, exchange, purchase or gift.For a state is not a piece of property; it is a society of human beings, and like the trunk of a tree, it has its own roots.

Third: standing armies shall, in time, be abolished completely.By always being ready to fight, they threaten other states and push them into a race to have more soldiers, a race that has no limit.In the end, peace becomes more costly than a short war, and the armies themselves become the cause of new wars.Paying people to kill or be killed also uses them as mere machines in the hands of the state, which does not fit with the rights of humanity.

Finally, no state shall interfere by force in the government of another, and even in war no state shall use methods, such as murderers and poisoners, that would make trust impossible once peace returns.Otherwise, a war of destruction could bring perpetual peace only in the great graveyard of the human race.”