Analysis of Kant´s Essay on Perpetual Peace

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In his essay on perpetual peace, Kant presents his own view on perpetual peace, which could be realized only if a few “Do’s” and “Don’ts” are met. He calls these Do’s and Don’ts “preliminary articles” and “definitive articles”, respectively. In this essay I would analyze what Kant means by “preliminary articles” and “definitive articles” and argue that contemporary globalization is not undermining the nation-state, which is consistent with the views of several other experts.
Kant, a famous philosopher, in his essay imagines a state of perpetual peace. Different than temporary peace, perpetual peace, by definition is peace that lasts forever. Kant argues that perpetual peace is that all conflicts between states are addressed, that not only the present conflicts shall be resolved, but also future conflicts would not occur at all. That is to say, instead of the end of a particular war, states need to end the “state of war”, or I comprehend as the tendencies to initiate wars. Although perpetual peace seems to be fairly ideal imagination, Kant gives certain conditions to be met in order to reach perpetual peace, which he defines as “preliminary articles” and “definitive articles”.
Literally, “preliminary” means “preparatory”, describing something coming before the main part. It is, therefore reasonable to think of “preliminary articles” as preconditions for perpetual peace. That is, only if all the preliminary conditions are met can perpetual peace have the possibility to be realized. Note that this is only a possibility, which indicates that “preliminary articles” are not sufficient for perpetual peace to occur. Kant then proceeds to “definitive articles”, which I comprehend as the conditions that allow perpetual peace to really oc...

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...ty exclusive of external authorities. Second, in terms of domestic sovereignty, for fairly long time the political structures of states have been following the global trends, from monarchy, to republics, to democratic states most recently. From above we can see that both domestic sovereignty and Westphalian sovereignty are facing challenges all the time, which are not new, but characteristic from time to time. Since sovereignty is the core value of a state, it is reasonable to conclude that nation-state is challenged by globalization but its power is not undermined.
Perhaps perpetual peace is hard to achieve, but one thing for sure is that nation-states would be consistently playing important roles in the global system. No doubt there is still increasing interconnectedness and interdependence between states, and hopefully one day we shall reach the perpetual peace.

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