Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace? Reflections on the Realist Critique of Kant’s Project

Popular vs. elite democratic structures and international peace

“…Our dataset, which draws heavily on the data archives of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (2013), covers 21 countries over a 61-year period (1950–2010) resulting in 1,281 country-year observations. 12 These countries were chosen because our aim was to compare the role of institutional combinations across stable, consolidated democracies, those whom Kant expected to be most peaceful (Caranti, 2006: 343), rather than to compare democracies to non-democracies and semi-democracies. To illustrate variation in popular democracy, Figure 1 plots the values of the IDI over time for these states.…”

“…Since our hypothesized causal mechanism involves stable institutional structures that facilitate popular influence over policy , we consult the literature on comparative democratic institutions in developing innovative measures to use instead of the Polity index. The Kantian logic implies not only that democracies will be more peaceful than non-democracies, but also that more popular democracies will wage war less often than more elite democracies (Caranti, 2006). Testing this logic on long-established democracies between 1961 and 2001, we find that higher levels of institutionalized popular influence are associated with significantly lower international conflict propensities, irrespective of the regime type of potential adversaries.…”

Luigi Caranti, Kant’s Political Legacy: Human Rights, Peace, Progress Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2017 Pp. xii + 303 ISBN 9781783169795

“…The second part of the book deals with Kant’s project for perpetual peace, a topic Caranti has addressed in previous work (cf. Caranti 2006). In a series of writings beginning with ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim’ (1784), Kant proposed domestic, international and cosmopolitan arrangements that, he claimed, would together promote the goal of a stable and lasting global peace.…”