in the cosmo-political system, shall have free access to any State of the world, and a title to reside therein.
The main force of the contribution made by Kant to the study and history of this subject was compressed by him into a few words towards the close of his Rechtslehre, which was published about two years after his essay on Perpetual Peace.
The natural condition of nations as of individuals, he says,[1] is a condition that it behoves us to pass out of in order to enter into a condition founded on law. Before such transition, all the Right of Nations and all the external property of States that can be acquired or maintained by war are provisory merely; it is only in a Universal Union of States analogous to that by which a nation becomes a State[2] that they become peremptory. In no other way can a real condition of Peace be established. But there may be a too great extension of such a Union of States. The extension may include such vast and dissimilar territories that any real government of the Union, and any genuine protection of its individual members, will become impossible; we should be brought round again to a condition of war. 'Hence it is that the Perpetual Peace, which is the ultimate end of all the Right of Nations, becomes an impracticable idea.' But we must not therefore withdraw our allegiance and support from the political principles which have this end as their aim. These principles call upon us to aid the formation
- ↑ Rechtslehre, ii, § 61.
- ↑ Men and nations, owing to their mutual influence on each other, require a juridical constitution uniting them under one will, so that they may participate in what is right. This relation of the members of a nation to each other constitutes the civil union in the social state; and when viewed as a whole as affecting its constituent members it forms the State. When we are thinking of 'the supposed hereditary unity' of the people we speak of 'nation' rather than State; when we are thinking of the common interest pertaining to all to live in a juridical union, we speak of 'State' or 'Commonwealth'. Ibid., ii, § 43.
