Perpetual peace – perpetual relevance

German philosopher Immanuel Kant is usually summoned in moments of hope. He appears when liberals want a patron saint for law and commerce, and for the hope that violence might be tamed by reason through institutions. In that role he is familiar enough – the philosopher of universal law and moral dignity, committed to peace pursued through lawful restraint. Yet that is only half the matter. Kant is also a philosopher for darker seasons, for periods when politics grows theatrical and power grows impatient, with states once more treating legality as a language to be spoken when convenient and suspended when costly. He is useful now because he clarifies.

The world of the mid-2020s is often described as “multipolar” or “post-liberal,” and sometimes simply as “disordered.” Each term catches something. None quite reaches the core. A more exact description, and a more Kantian one, is that we live in a condition of deep interdependence without an adequate public right. The facts are not hard to find. V-Dem’s 2026 report says that, for the average global citizen, the level of democracy has fallen back to where it stood in 1978.

Freedom House says 2024 was the nineteenth consecutive year in which global freedom declined. SIPRI reports that world military expenditure reached $2.718 trillion in 2024, the highest total it has ever recorded and the steepest annual increase in decades. UNHCR says 123.2 million people were forcibly displaced at the end of 2024. UNCTAD and the OECD both describe a world economy strained by fragmentation, trade-policy uncertainty, and repeated shocks, with confidence in the rules of trade visibly thinning.

Kant’s vision of politics

That condition would have been legible to Kant. He thought human beings would be driven together by need and rivalry, and by the ambitions and fears that follow from both. Law was necessary because conflict was permanent. The great insight of Perpetual Peace is that peace is the work of institutions that force power to justify itself publicly and submit to rules not of its own choosing. Within states, this means a republican constitution. Government must be bound by law. Citizens must be treated as ends rather than instruments, and public authority must stand apart from private will. Between states, it means a federation that checks the tendency to war. Across borders, it means at least a cosmopolitan right of hospitality, under which the stranger cannot be treated as an enemy merely for arriving. And over the whole arrangement there hovers a further test – publicity. Political maxims that cannot survive being openly avowed are, for Kant, suspect at their root.

Read in that light, the present era becomes easier to name. It is an age in which material integration has outstripped moral and political discipline. We share systems of trade and capital, and we are bound together just as tightly by data flows and migration, even by ecological risk. Yet we lack the habits and institutions that would make this proximity bearable. Our world is integrated enough that no serious state can detach itself from the rest, yet ungoverned enough that many states behave as though unilateral advantage were still the final logic of politics. Kant would have seen this as a contradiction built into modernity itself – proximity without trust and connection without right, while universality appears without reciprocity.

To say that the present crisis is Kantian is not to say that Kant offers a ready-made program for it. He does not. His world was not ours. He knew nothing of nuclear weapons or algorithmic propaganda, of financial contagion or climate migration, or of digital infrastructure so central that a cable cut in one sea can unsettle markets continents away. But he did understand something more basic than the details – that peace becomes fragile when power is insufficiently constitutionalised, and that commerce by itself does not domesticate ambition. Modern liberalism often forgot that second point. It liked the first half of Kant better than the second. It liked the promise that constitutional republics and trade, reinforced by new forms of communication, might strengthen one another, and was less eager to dwell on the fact that the same interdependence, left under-institutionalised, could become a new field of coercion.

The end of global order

That is one reason the old confidence now sounds thin. For several decades, much of the liberal world assumed that economic integration would teach political moderation. The argument was not wholly foolish. Trade does create constituencies for peace. Cross-border exchange can make war costlier. Interdependence can dull certain forms of romantic nationalism, especially when prosperity depends upon foreign markets, imported energy, or production spread across the globe. Kant himself thought commerce exerted a pacifying pressure. But he never believed that commerce alone could generate justice. He believed, rather, that it might help nudge states toward arrangements of law. If the law failed to arrive, trade would merely tie together actors who still distrusted one another.

That is uncomfortably close to where we are. UNCTAD’s January 2026 trade update says global trade has entered a critical juncture shaped by geopolitical pressure, shifting supply chains, and regulatory rivalry tied to the strategic contest over critical minerals; it also says global growth will remain subdued at about 2.6 percent in 2026. The OECD’s latest interim outlook likewise warns that global growth is moderating, inflationary pressures persist, and further trade fragmentation would harm growth prospects. This is not deglobalisation in the simple sense. Goods still move across borders. Money does too, as do data and people. What has changed is the moral and strategic atmosphere in which they move. Supply chains once praised for efficiency are now scanned for dependency. Trade routes are judged by exposure to coercion. Standards and regulations increasingly function as instruments of bloc formation. Economic policy has become, again, an extension of security policy.

One way of putting this is that globalisation has entered its Kantian phase – the sterner phase in which interdependence reveals how much political form it always required. In an under-governed world, connectedness redistributes conflict. A tariff can become a sanction by another name. A chip export rule can be a geostrategic signal. A standard written in the name of carbon control or digital security may embody a genuine public good, so may a labour rule. Yet such measures also sort the world into those who write the rules and those who must absorb them. That is why the current argument is between rival understandings of order itself – whether the world economy will remain, however imperfectly, a shared legal space, or harden into adjacent systems organised by strategic mistrust.

Kant helps here because he refuses the comforting illusion that interest and morality can be cleanly separated. He insists that interest without lawful form becomes destructive even on its own terms. States that seek absolute flexibility often purchase short-term advantage at the cost of long-term insecurity. They reserve exceptions for themselves. They weaken the authority of the rules they invoke against others. Then they complain when the same logic is turned back upon them. The result is opportunism stabilised by rhetoric.

The democratic recession

The same point applies within states. Much commentary on the contemporary democratic recession remains strangely superficial. It notices that elections still occur in many places and assumes that this preserves the essence of constitutional rule. Kant’s vocabulary is more demanding. His preferred term was not democracy in the modern, celebratory sense but republicanism. That distinction matters. For him, what makes a constitution fit for peace is that coercive power be exercised through general law. Citizens must stand in relations of equality before that law. And executive will must be checked by institutions rather than transfigured into destiny. He was explicit that republican government depends on the separation of executive from legislative power and that war becomes less likely when those who bear its costs must, in some real sense, consent to it.

This is one of the places where Kant speaks most directly to the present. The pathology of many contemporary regimes is the fusion of electoral legitimacy with executive impatience. Leaders present themselves as embodiments of the people and then treat institutional restraint as sabotage. They invoke a mandate to weaken courts or neutralise legislatures. They intimidate media and bend the civil service, until emergency itself becomes method. The point is rarely to abolish elections altogether. It is to hollow out the conditions under which law can stand apart from faction. This is why the global democratic decline cannot be read only through coups or abrupt breakdowns. Much of it occurs by corrosion – a legality kept in place at the surface while the substance of equal citizenship decays underneath. V-Dem’s 2026 report says autocratisation has been the dominant global trend since the early 2010s and notes that the current wave is extraordinary in length and scope. Freedom House describes violence around elections and repression of opponents, along with authoritarian manipulation of political competition, as central features of the present cycle.

What is striking in Kantian terms is the weakening of public reason. Modern politics has become louder and less public at once. There is more speech, but less avowal. More messaging, but less justification. The contemporary state, even when formally constitutional, often behaves as though it need only mobilise its own audience. Kant’s idea of publicity cuts sharply against that tendency. He argues that any maxim affecting the rights of others is unjust if it cannot be made public without defeating its own purpose. The point is subtle and severe. A political act may be effective, even popular, yet still fail the test of right if it depends on concealment or euphemism, or on disclosure so selective that its principles could not be openly willed for all.

By that standard, much of contemporary political language is discrediting in advance. States speak of sovereignty while violating it when necessity beckons. They defend a rules-based order while regarding some rules as binding only on rivals. They praise open markets and then scramble for exemptions and carve-outs, only to discover a new enthusiasm for national preference whenever vulnerability becomes visible. They speak of the equal dignity of persons while subjecting migrants or minorities, and sometimes whole occupied populations, to arrangements they would never tolerate for themselves. They invoke security in ways so elastic that it swallows almost every other value. requires that political principles be capable of open declaration. Much of the present order is held together by maxims that dare not appear in their own name.

Empty words in a world at war

This helps explain the curious moral exhaustion of contemporary international language. The great phrases are still available. Leaders still speak of freedom and humanity, they still invoke law, development, or responsibility, and when pressed they add deterrence. Yet the authority of these words has thinned because their use is so visibly selective. Publics are not fools. They notice when suffering becomes legible only in strategically useful locations. They notice, too, when intervention is righteous in one theatre but impossible in another, or when norms sound universal in speech yet sectional in practice. Cynicism then spreads, and with it a new appetite for sheer power. Kant would have recognised the sequence. Hypocrisy weakens law by teaching people to hear every appeal to principle as camouflage.

The realm in which this is now most obvious is war. Kant thought standing armies dangerous because they normalise readiness for conflict and incite rivalry among states. His specific prescription, that they be abolished over time, belongs to a world different from ours. Yet the underlying insight remains sharp. Security arrangements built chiefly around anticipation of hostility tend to reproduce hostility. Force may be necessary; a world of lawless actors cannot be governed by pious wishes. But a system that continually expands the means of coercion while leaving the framework of public right weak will become more combustible.

The latest figures bear that out. SIPRI says military spending rose in every world region in 2024 and reached its highest global total ever recorded. Europe’s rise was driven in large part by the Russia-Ukraine war. In the Middle East, spending climbed amid war in Gaza and wider regional conflict. East Asia saw mounting tensions of its own. NATO members together accounted for more than half of global military spending, and the pressure for further increases has hardly disappeared. Budgets disclose priorities. They show what states fear and what they expect, along with the burdens they are prepared to normalise in civilian life. A world devoting ever more treasure to the management of insecurity is a world admitting that it has not found a political form adequate to its dangers.

Kant’s rational alternative

There is a temptation, especially among self-styled realists, to say that all this merely confirms the nature of the international sphere – there has never been law in the strong sense between states, only prudence and balance, with hypocrisy surfacing whenever needed. Kant’s answer is more interesting than a denial. He largely agrees that relations among states tend toward a condition analogous to the state of nature. But for that very reason he refuses to romanticise it. The state of nature is a condition of insecurity and unpredictability, of permanent exposure to another’s choice. To describe the international order as lawless is to identify a problem needing remedy. The realist error is to mistake persistence for legitimacy.

Nor does Kant suppose that the remedy is a single global sovereign. He rejects that dream, partly because he fears universal monarchy and the concentration of power it would entail. His alternative is humbler and, in some ways, more plausible – a federation or league of states that reduces recourse to war and extends the rule of law without erasing political plurality. That vision is not fulfilled in our institutions, but it is not irrelevant to them either. The question is whether institutions meant to coordinate and adjudicate, to inspect and restrain reciprocally, can retain enough authority to keep antagonism from becoming normal method. In fractured times, even partial legality matters.

If war and democratic erosion reveal the weakness of public right from one side, migration reveals it from another. Here Kant’s relevance is especially striking, because he is often caricatured either as a stern formalist with little to say about human movement or as an early prophet of borderless cosmopolitanism. He is neither. His doctrine of hospitality is modest, but it is morally serious. says, that the rights of world citizenship extend at least to a right not to be treated with hostility merely for arriving. The stranger has a claim of visitation, not immediate membership. Thin as that sounds by modern standards, it is a profound claim. It means that the foreigner is not outside right. He is not raw material for state discretion. He is not beyond the reach of moral-juridical concern.

Mass displacement

In a world of mass displacement, that principle acquires a new force. UNHCR says that 123.2 million people were forcibly displaced at the end of 2024, and that displacement has nearly doubled over the past decade. A large share are children. Those figures are evidence of a global order in which violence and persecution, or state failure, or mounting ecological strain have made precarious movement a structural fact of political life. Yet the receiving side of that equation remains morally disordered. Rich states depend on foreign labour and global logistics. They also depend on transnational care work and the circulation of talent, even as they treat the involuntary movement of the vulnerable as a threat to be deterred by spectacle. The border becomes a theatre where sovereign will is dramatised precisely because so much else has slipped beyond sovereign control.

Kant does not solve the refugee question for us. To pretend otherwise would be dishonest. But he does expose the incoherence of a world that wishes to universalise market access while particularising moral concern. A genuinely cosmopolitan order cannot mean that everything crosses borders except human need. Nor can it mean that the foreigner is welcome when profitable and disposable when not. Hospitality, on Kant’s account, is the minimum juridical recognition owed to persons who inhabit the same earth and cannot avoid one another forever. That remains a radical thought, perhaps more radical now than in his own day.

It also cuts against a narrowing of political imagination visible across many societies. The citizen is increasingly encouraged to think of politics as the defence of enclosure. Borders and jobs fall under that banner. So do data and energy. Culture, territory, even memory are drawn into the same guarded frame. Some of these concerns are real and unavoidable. Political communities do owe special duties to their members. Kant is not a theorist of abstract sameness. But when politics is reduced to guarded possession, two things happen. First, citizens are trained to interpret strangers only through the grammar of risk. Second, states begin to confuse sovereignty with the freedom to refuse obligation. The result is brittleness. A society that cannot imagine duties beyond immediate membership becomes less capable of sustaining justice even within membership, because it has lost the habit of regarding persons as ends.

A common humanity

There is another side to this. The cosmopolitan dimension of Kant’s thought is about the fact that humanity shares a world under conditions of finite space. No one finally has the right to behave as though the surface of the earth were privately arranged for his own purposes alone. That intuition, though framed in eighteenth-century terms, has become still more pressing in an age of climate stress and resource competition, with ecological spillover now impossible to ignore. Carbon ignores borders. So do viruses. Financial panics and shipping shocks behave the same way, and digital disruption does too. The fantasy that states can remain morally insulated while materially entangled grows harder to sustain each year. The earth itself has become a rebuke to provincial politics.

What, then, would a genuinely Kantian reading of the present ask of us? He would ask instead for a politics less childish in its expectations and less indulgent in its exceptions. He would ask that we distinguish order from mere dominance and law from useful rhetoric. He would ask, too, that we separate republican freedom from plebiscitary acclamation, and hospitality from sentimentality. He would ask that states be judged by whether the maxims behind their conduct could survive publicity.

That last test deserves to be taken more seriously than it usually is. Publicity, in Kant’s sense, is the more difficult demand that political principles be such that they can be avowed without self-destruction. Imagine applying that rule, rigorously, to the contemporary order. Could any state publicly defend a double standard under which rules bind adversaries more tightly than allies? Could it avow that human rights matter only where strategic partnerships remain untouched? Could it say openly that markets should stay open only until vulnerability is exposed, or that sovereignty is sacred only until a stronger power decides otherwise? Plainly not. Yet these maxims, or versions close enough to them, structure a good deal of real conduct. That is why appeals to principle sound increasingly brittle. The embarrassment is built in.

One objection will arise here. Is this not simply moralism, a philosopher’s demand for consistency in a world that punishes the over-scrupulous? Does not every state, under pressure, bend rules and hide intentions, while favouring its own citizens whenever advantage can be had? Of course it does. Kant knew perfectly well that politics deals in force and deception, under conditions of contingency. His point is that interest unrestrained by publicly defensible right corrodes the very order upon which enduring interest depends. Prudence without principle becomes shortsighted. It destroys trust. It multiplies enemies and makes every bargain provisional. The supposed realist ends up governing a world of permanent emergency.

Two sides of realism

This is why the real alternative today is between two kinds of realism. One treats law as ornamental and assumes that stability can be managed by deterrence and selective pressure, with temporary deals among the strong filling the gaps. The other sees that a densely connected world cannot remain governable for long on that basis alone. The first realism is adolescent – fascinated by power and contemptuous of restraint, yet forever surprised by blowback. The second is the sterner one. It knows how frail institutions are and how compromised norms can become. It knows, too, how hard reciprocity is to win and how easily it is lost, for precisely that reason, the work of public right is indispensable.

If one wished to translate that judgment into contemporary priorities, the result would be prosaic rather than messianic. Constitutional restraints within states have to be strengthened before executive exception becomes normal method. Courts and legislatures, along with an independent media, must keep their authority, because they stand between coercion and arbitrariness. Strategic dependency may sometimes need to be reduced, but within frameworks that preserve shared rules instead of rewarding pure bloc discipline. The temptation to convert every supply shock into a license for permanent economic nationalism has to be resisted. International institutions need preservation and reform, rather than the familiar alternation between moral grandstanding and neglect. Displaced persons must be treated as bearers of claim, not as props in domestic theatre. Above all, states must narrow the gap between the principles they profess and the practices they excuse.

None of that amounts to a final peace. Kant’s own title has often misled readers into imagining a serene terminus of history. But his deeper lesson is almost the opposite. Peace is a discipline imposed upon beings who remain vain and ambitious, fearful, and competitive. Politics never outgrows those materials. What changes, when a civilisation matures, is whether it can give them legal form. That is the question now before us. Can a world more interdependent than any before it build institutions and habits, along with standards of justification, equal to that fact? Or will it continue to behave, between states and often within them, as though law were for fair weather and exception were the deepest truth of politics?

Kant cannot answer that question for us. But he helps us ask it without evasion. He strips away two consoling myths at once – the myth that commerce civilises by itself, and the myth that naked power can build a stable order. Between those illusions lies the hard ground of politics properly understood. We need a Kant for these compromised times – one who reminds us that where public right is weak, peace becomes provisional and freedom vulnerable, while universality survives mostly as a slogan.

Interdependence and lawful restraint

The current global era, then, is better understood as a world-historical mismatch between interdependence and lawful restraint. We are tied together too closely to live by old fantasies of sovereign insulation, yet we remain too suspicious and too selective, and far too undisciplined, to submit ourselves fully to a common rule of right. That is why the age feels crowded and lawless at once. It moralises even as it grows cynical. Its language is universal, yet its practice remains factional. In the strict sense, it is a Kantian age of danger.

And that is also why Kant remains worth reading, because he sees through our evasions. He forces us to admit that the central political problem of a connected world is the absence of a public order adequate to connection. Until that changes, we will continue to arm in the name of peace. We will trade in the shadow of rivalry and invoke law as a weapon, while treating the vulnerable as the price of our arrangements. We will continue, in other words, to inhabit one world as if it were many unrelated ones.