Kant’s preference for a republic not democracy, as he argues in Perpetual Peace, is highly relevant to today’s political crisis. Both the American and French revolutions established independent republics that they thought of as democracies. Kant defined a republic by its members’ personal freedom and their equality as citizens under a single set of laws. They could be ruled by an autocrat, nobles or ‘the people’, but their government had to be based on a republican constitution that elevated public law as its defining principle. The condition of Western states today, especially in the US and Britain since 2016, lend support to Kant’s view that rule by and for the people is deeply flawed, since elected leaders can use their constitutional powers to flout the law with impunity.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1840) believed that the triumph of democracy was inevitable, and what he found in the early United States concretely confirmed this belief. For him, the essential feature of American society was its people's pursuit of worldly prosperity (happiness) under conditions of general equality. But the unequal treatment of blacks was “the most formidable evil threatening the future of the United States.” He foresaw the possibility of inequalities being established through the growth of a commercial aristocracy. The pursuit of efficiency through division of labor resulted in devastating dehumanization of the work process, what David Graeber called ‘bullshit jobs’. The greatest threat to a democratic society was posed by despotism, which was part and parcel of democracy itself. In isolating individuals, it weakened connections between them and undermined their resistance to political centralization. The power of society was likely to become oppressive; the potential for despotism was built into democracy from the beginning.
The need for federations of states to shape world society has arisen in recent decades since national capitalism has proven to be impotent against ‘the markets’, a lawless global money circuit. The formation of the European Union, for all its flaws, and the current attempt by an expanded BRICS to replace US financial hegemony both point to the persuasive logic of this development today. The third section of Kant’s essay on the conditions of world citizenship is, in other language, the central issue of my recent book Self in the World (Hart 2022a). The rich ageing countries, despite depending on them to work for their pensions, routinely treat immigrants as subhuman who at best deserve inferior rights to citizens.
Kant does not, however, advocate permanent settlement, only the right to free movement through a place since the earth once belonged to all humanity. Modern citizens rely on the strength of their states to stop migrants and refugees entering in such numbers as to dilute the fiction of a unitary national culture. There is much talk today of the poor countries receiving reparations from the rich for their historical exploitation by colonial regimes, even though the slave trade was usually based on partnerships between local suppliers and customers with global aspirations.
This claim to redress for past crimes, however, is now overshadowed by a much more dangerous present and future threat that has not yet entered popular consciousness in our times. A few specialists recognize it, as indeed some critics of the slave trade did then. Public opinion everywhere is now strongly divided between those who see climate change as the dominant political issue of our age and the majority who prefer to ignore the danger. It is only now entering public awareness that, although reducing carbon emissions is an urgent problem inadequately addressed so far, a far bigger problem is the stock of past carbon emissions in the atmosphere for which the rich between and within countries have been largely responsible at an ever-growing rate for the last 150 years. Hurricane Katrina destroyed more poor Black lives in New Orleans than harmed the White suburbs.
On a global scale, the North is less affected by global warming than the tropical areas of the South where disasters are already routinely apocalyptic. Reducing immobile carbon deposits by mechanized capture from the atmosphere is far more effective than planting trees. The physics and financial obstacles to large-scale reductions are already feasible, but the political obstacles are immense. The best article by far that I have read on this theme is David Wallace-Wells’ brilliant, moving and very detailed essay, ‘The case for climate reparations’ (2021).
Returning to the relevance of Kant’s essay today, if free trade was the nineteenth century’s answer to the resistance of local agrarian monopolies to urban industrialization, our challenge is to install free movement in the world that was the lynchpin of his argument. Unequal societies insist on fixing those they exploit firmly where they can be controlled. Movement of people is the antithesis of this inequality, and billions of peasants, slaves and serfs, women, youth, and ethnic minorities have taken advantage of increased movement as a means of escaping it. Today’s states, however, have many more powers for controlling people in place than in Kant’s times and apartheid has gone global at all levels of society as a result.
This system must ultimately fail to exclude the world’s poor from seeking a better life in rich countries. 78 percent of the world’s population were Asian and African in 2022, estimated to rise to 84 percent in 2100, but in very different shares with half the world’s children 18 and under African. The Americas, Europe, Russia and Oceania will amount to 16 percent. Europeans, who were 25 percent of the world’s people in 1900—36 percent including the lands of temperate zone new settlement—will have only 6 percent then, and a large part of that will be of African and Asian origin.
In Kant’s thinking, if strong states wish to protect their precious national cultures from excessive mixture, they would be better off spending their money helping the South to build up their economies and fend off climatic disasters than persisting with trying to protect their borders from an influx of poor refugees. If important coalitions of states adopted free movement as a human right, such a strategy would be preferable for many on both sides, not to mention immensely fairer than the situation today.