Kant

Bicentenário da morte comemora-se hoje. Immanuel Kant: o filósofo dos Direitos Humanos. "Hoje, decorridos 200 anos sobre a morte do grande filósofo dos direitos humanos, da igualdade perante a lei, da cidadania mundial, da paz universal e acima de tudo do "Sapere Aude", a emancipação da razão"

Numa outra visão:

Kantians With Cruise Missiles: The Highest Stage of 'Liberal' Imperialism

The peculiar thing about some of the new liberal imperialists is their attempt to ground their system on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant [1724-1804]. Kant reasoned that in the fullness of liberal time, more and more republics would come into being. Republics would be unlikely to wage war – the sport of kings – and therefore the proliferation of republican forms of government would spark a trend toward world peace. As he wrote: "If the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide that war should be declared… nothing is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decreeing for themselves all the calamities of war."(5)

Letting republicanism stand in for liberalism here – there is no need to quibble about that – problems arise, nonetheless. First, the assumption that under republicanism/liberalism, the "people" somehow control the state seems naïve at best. It ignores the incentives presented to politicians(6) and the ability of small cliques effectively to control policy from the top. Britain's entry into World War I, where three ministers committed the cabinet, the cabinet committed Parliament, and Parliament committed the people to "the meaningless catastrophe of 1914-18" (in Joseph Schumpeter's phrase), is Exhibit A.

Many of the people died; in general, the cabinet and Parliament did not. Let us hear no more about how much more "democratic" than Germany the UK was in 1914.

Next – and unforeseen by Kant, wars, if properly "sold" by intellectuals, politicians, and the press, can be quite popular. But popularity cannot be the final judge of the justness of a war. Further, liberal states, by allowing greater economic freedom, rule over more productive economies out of which more revenue may be extracted, making possible greater effective military power. (...)

IV. THE REPUBLIC OF GOD ON EARTH

If it were true, that republics – or alternatively, "liberal states" or "democracies" – are inherently peaceful, and never attack one another, then a world made up of such states, and such states alone, would be a world of perpetual peace. Hooray!

This calls to mind Woodrow Wilson's vision, but some proponents of similar notions distance themselves from Wilson's "utopianism." For one thing, these theorists are not entirely wedded to bringing about the Better World via collective security. For Teson and Reisman, in particular, any sufficiently high-toned Super-Power is morally entitled to act as history's great agent and, entirely by accident, the United States is available for the job. In addition, these writers are less patient than Wilson. Rather than wait for "democracies," or whatever they are, to come into being and behave peacefully ever after, they lean toward imposing proper forms of state by military intervention."