Global Security: Learning from Possible Futures

In the late 18^th century, soon after the French Revolution, Immanuel Kant (1983 [1795]) argued that the republican constitution of states would guarantee their freedom and peacefulness (although republicanism was for him only one of several necessary conditions for a perpetual peace). By constitutional republicanism Kant meant basically liberal-democratic rule by the capable and free, i.e. property-owning, males, conceived as rational citizens who are not willing to bear the consequences of wars, such as loss of life, property, and money. Famously, President Woodrow Wilson took over the idea and advocated it during — and also in the immediate aftermath of — the First World War. However, it seems that he did this also in reaction to the war, since Germany was at this time redefined negatively as ‘autocratic’ (see Oren 1995). The Kantian hypothesis existed in the collective memory of the discipline of International Relations throughout the 20^th century (it was strongly criticized for instance by Kenneth Waltz, 1959). Yet it was only in the 1980’s, during the “third wave of democratization” (Huntington 1993), that it re-emerged as a major point of reference. Although Michael Doyle’s (1986) path-breaking article discussed the Kantian hypothesis of democratic peace less empirically and more in terms of political theory, the bulk of scholarship has been devoted to testing the general correlation by means of empirical-statistical means. For instance, R.J.Rummel (1985) maintains that the more liberal freedom individuals have within a state, the less the state engages in foreign violence. This claim is based on quantitative and allegedly unequivocal empirical evidence (see also e.g. Gleditsch 1992). However, it is worth stressing that, ethico-politically, the theory of democratic peace has also resonated well with the ideological Neoliberalism of the regimes of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and their followers since the early 1980’s. Particularly after the end of the Cold War, the democratic peace theory became the basis of both celebrating the inherent peacefulness of the West and, simultaneously, justified NATO-countries’ attempts to spread liberal-democracy and freemarket economics elsewhere in the world, also by means of violence. Thus, former US President Bill Clinton (1994) maintained shortly after the end of the Cold War: “Ultimately, the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere. Democracies don’t attack each other.” Current (from 2001 to 2008) US President George W. Bush (2005) is even stronger on ‘promoting democracy’ on these grounds: “And the reason why I’m so strong on democracy is democracies don’t go to war with each other. And the reason why is the people of most societies don’t like war, and they understand what war means.... I’ve got great faith in democracies to promote peace. And that’s why I’m such a strong believer that the way forward in the Middle East, the broader Middle East, is to promote democracy.”Google Scholar

See for instance Allan and Goldmann 1992, including also PatomÄki 1992; and Gaddis 1993.Google Scholar

On the fallacy of composition, see: Elster (1978: 97–106); for Richardson’s arms race model, see: Rapoport (1960: 15–30).Google Scholar

The idea of a federalist world state is sometimes falsely associated with Immanuel Kant (as is the idea of collective security). Kant advocated republican institutions within the state, worldwide free trade, and a loose system of international contracts and multilateral negotiations that he called the League of Nations. There may have been precedents in other times and places, but in modern Europe the idea emerged basically in the mid-19^th century (and simultaneously in the Middle East between 1852 and his death at 1892, Bahá’u’lláh, founder of the Bahá’í Faith, set the establishment of global unity, obtained via a global commonwealth of nations, as a key principle of his new religion). While it is possible to find scattered remarks on the will-be world state by 19^th century poets, novelists, religious leaders and philosophers, it really came up as a major political idea only immediately before and during the First World War. One of the key advocates of the world state during the early decades of the 20^th century was H. G. Wells (1866–1946). Wells was a popular British author of numerous essays and books in science fiction, drama, politics, and various scholarly fields. In 1902, in his non-fictional Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, Wells proposed a world republic, an idea which he started to cultivate in many of his writings that appeared before the First World War. Some of his later books developed the idea to various degrees, including A Short History of the World (1922), The Open Conspiracy (1928) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), and sold hundreds of thousands, or even millions of copies. Wells was also responsible for giving the idea of a nuclear chain reaction to Leo Szilard, a physicist, who also wrote Albert Einstein’s famous summer of 1939 letter to President Roosevelt about the urgency of developing an atomic bomb. However, Szilard was strongly moved by Wells’ horrifying vision of a future nuclear war and advocacy of a worldwide movement to create a world state. After the Second World War, Szilard became a key organizer of the emerging transnational peace movement. Moreover, Szilard was well networked and he knew both Hans Morgenthau, with whom he worked at the University of Chicago, and Raymond Aron, with whom he exchanged ideas. It is likely that Aron’s and Morgenthau’s discussions on the world state were, at least in part and indirectly, responses to Wells, although Aron and Morgenthau do not spell this clearly out in the references of their major works. On the other hand, in the US of the late 1940’s, Emery Reves’ The Anatomy of Peace was probably better known than Wells’ works. In his bestselling book, Reves argued that only “a common sovereign order of law” and “a world government” would secure mankind from self-destruction (1947: 242–244).Google Scholar

“Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumblings hands” (Wells 1913:117; cited in Wagar 2004:147).Google Scholar