Chapter 6: The Idea of a World Commonwealth
6.3. Institutionalization of Permanent Peace
Permanent peace without standing armies, as proposed by Immanuel Kant about 200 years ago, is still respected as an ideal, but it has never been realized. In particular, in the current situation where nearly 200 sovereign states are standing and competing across the globe, it must be said that we are moving further away from the realization of permanent peace.
The two world wars of the 20th century gave birth to the current global security organization known as the United Nations (UN), after the League of Nations, which was an incomplete achievement after World War I. However, this organization was originally not a permanent peace organization, but merely a provisional international security framework aimed at preventing a major war for the time being.
Kant envisioned the establishment of a federation of free nations and the abolition of standing armies as conditions for permanent peace, but as long as sovereign states exist side by side, whose existence is conditional on the possession of exclusive territory, they will not, in principle, give up their standing armies, and the United Nations is merely a federation that is premised on the maintenance of standing armies by each country.
The possibility of the United Nations itself organizing a UN army is recognized, but it is not a "sword hunt" (confiscation of weapons) system in which the standing armies of member states are confiscated and concentrated in the UN, and the right of member states to maintain standing armies is reserved. Moreover, since it is an asymmetric operating organization centered on the five great powers that have officially been granted the privilege of possessing nuclear weapons, there is no prospect of even meeting the basic requirement for international peace, the abolition of nuclear weapons.
Even so, the UN has somehow managed to prevent the threat of World War III to the level of the Cold War and has endured the storms and hardships up to this point, but since the end of the Cold War it has been hit by new crises such as the War on Terror and the nuclear development of ambitious nations seeking to rival the five great powers.
In particular, the War on Terror, unlike world wars, is no longer a war between nations and therefore cannot be fundamentally resolved within the framework of the United Nations, which is merely a federation of sovereign states. Furthermore, the nuclear development of rival nations is the price of the unequal structure of the United Nations, which grants only the five major powers the official privilege of possessing nuclear weapons.
To overcome these essential limitations of the UN and truly realize lasting peace, it is necessary to abandon the notion of sovereign nations and envision a more global governing organization.
Looking at it from a historical perspective in a somewhat schematic way, the world community is an organization for lasting peace that should will come into being after the Cold War and the War on Terror, following on from the League of Nations, which was an organization for unstable truce-like peace after World War I, and the United Nations, which has been a contradictory organization for security with nuclear weapons after World War II.
👉The table of contents so far is here.
👉The papers published on this blog are meant to expand upon my On Communism.
