I will be presenting a paper titled ‘Kant on self-determination in international law’ at the Winter School ‘Kantian Political Thought Today’ of the ECPR Standing Group on Kantian Political Thought in Colchester, UK.
Abstract
The right to self-determination is one of the cornerstones of modern international law. It provides that all peoples may “freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development” (Art. 1(1) ICCPR) and constitutes “one of the essential principles of international law” (ICJ, East Timor). Histories of the right to self-determination generally portray its development as starting with the American and French Revolutions and the doctrine of popular sovereignty, through its elevation by Lenin and Wilson at the end of World War I, to the process of decolonization after World War II.
A name notably absent in most histories of self-determination is that of Immanuel Kant. Although recent work on Kant’s legal philosophy (e.g. Ripstein’s Kant and the Law of War) hints at this idea of self-determination, it stops short of developing a more comprehensive account. This paper aims to correct that narrative. It does not claim that there is some yet-undiscovered lineage by which the development of the right to self-determination was directly influenced by Kant’s political thought, but argues that there is a nascent idea of self-determination to be found in Kant’s writings that resembles the modern conception of self-determination in international law.
Kant’s theory of the state repeatedly compares the state to a “moral person” that cannot simply be disposed of (ZeF, AA 8:344) and in whose constitution other states are not allowed to intervene by force as that would be “a violation of the right of a people dependent upon no other” (ZeF, AA 8:346). Both of these prohibitions are explicitly linked to the original contract which is at the basis of the Kantian state, and “apart from which no right over a people can be thought” (ZeF, AA 8:344). The original contract, the idea of which also requires the state to have a republican form of government, thus grounds Kant’s form of the idea of popular sovereignty that is closely linked to the development of the right to self-determination in international law.
The disenfranchisement of a population evidently violates this idea of the original contract and popular sovereignty. Kant therefore staunchly opposes any form of colonialism: he explicitly states that “a defeated State or its subjects do not lose their civil freedom through the conquest of their country, so that the State would be degraded to a colony and its subjects to bondage” (MS, AA 6:348). Rule over a people that has not given its – even hypothetical – consent to an original contract is directly contrary to the idea of the rightful state Kant proposes.
Kant’s idea of a “league of nations” also invokes this idea of self-determination. His remark in Perpetual peace that “what holds in accordance with natural right for human beings in a lawless condition, ‘they ought to leave this condition,’ cannot hold for States in accordance with the right of nations” (ZeF, AA 8:355) supports political self-determination for states in relation to their neighbours: no state can be forced into such a league.
Joris van de Riet 