Perpetual Peace: Relationships between Kant’s thought and the Italian Political Context in the Nineteenth Century

In the years when it made its first appearance in Kant’s writings, the project for perpetual peace found very bad conditions for its realization, and for its understanding by the public. In the Europe of the great empires, in which an international law could exist only in limited forms of law in war, or the jus in bello harshly criticized by Kant, a perpetual peace based on a federalism of free republican states could only be considered as utopian. In addiction, that idea of peace, although welcomed, had no result, because its historical feasibility was questioned, completely misunderstanding its transcendental and normative value. Twenty years later, Europe's international relations were decided in a very different theater. The experience of the Napoleonic wars, the initiatives arising from the Congress of Vienna and the legacy, albeit late, of the French Revolution, gave rise to suspicion that a durable peace was to be built with different premises in place of the good will of European rulers. Several Companies, Unions and Leagues for peace rose that based their work on the assumption that relations between states should be regulated by a system of international law, and that they could no longer be excluded representatives of the people, although they intended different meanings of the idea of republican federation. It was in this context that the Kant’s theories enjoyed a renewed fortune. The concepts of international federation and republicanism returned to play an important role in political science, and were taken as targets by several peace movements, which found in Kant a model of authoritativeness. But what’s the relationship between the Kantian theories on peace, exposed only in theory, and the federative and republican nineteenth projects, drawn up with the aim of their practical implementation? Charles Lemonnier, founder of the International League for Peace and Freedom, one of the most famous initiatives of that era, connected his theories explicitly to Kant and his concept of Weltrepublik. It was this spirit that led in 1867 to the convening of the first International Peace Congress in Geneva. The concept of a republican federation of states found explication in many other contexts, but often in very different meanings. So, for example, federalism and republicanism of Mazzini and Giuseppe Ferrari were closely linked to the idea of revolution, perspective firmly excluded by Kant; but in Ferrari’s thought, who remained republican and federalist opposed to Mazzini, lived the belief that a profound transformation of the internal political arrangements in each state was the necessary precondition to any project of an international policy formation. And therefore, a federation of states would have to take on the appearance, in line with Kant, of a federation of republics. The kantian Weltrepublik can therefore be an interesting clue for investigation of these realities, which pointed the way for the establishment of an international peace organization, and this paper will analyze precisely the relationship between them and the Kantian thought.