Kant and the Settler Contract

Kant’s cosmopolitan political philosophy has been variously interpreted as either a racist endorsement of the superiority of the European enlightenment; a searing critique of European colonialism; an argument for multilateral or international government; a justification for liberal interventionism; an argument for international law; and a self-involved European meditation concerned with peace in Europe and little else. Kant’s explicit anti-colonialism and the evident racism of his work have also made him an important node in debates about how political philosophers ought to relate to the so-called Western canon considering its complicity with imperialism and global White supremacy. One passage in the Doctrine of Right has become a focus for interpretations of Kant’s views on colonialism. In this passage, Kant discusses an encounter between European settlers and non-agricultural, non-sedentary, non-European shepherds and hunters - "nomads" as they are called in the literature. This passage rejects arguments, common at the time, that European settlers were permitted or even obligated to coercively impose the European state model on non-European, non-state peoples. This has been taken to ground Kant’s opposition to settler-colonialism. This paper argues for caution in how this passage is interpreted. In the passage, Kant argues that the nomad-settler interaction should be governed by contract. This fact is not much discussed, yet it has serious implications. We should think very carefully about the invocation of contract in the context of settler-colonialism because of the long history of contract serving as a justification for settlement and subsequent expansion of European sovereignty and empire. Not only was contract used in historical process of settler colonialism, but it has also served as a justification for it in the hands of political theorists. Most notably, of course, in the hands of the social contract tradition. This history has been theorised as the settler contract by Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills. As part of the broader domination contract theory inaugurated by Pateman and Mills, it is an approach to interpreting both the historical process of settler-colonialism and the constitutive texts of political philosophy which legitimated that process. It is a political fiction which makes salient both features of the world and aspects of texts for the purpose of theoretical purchase and argument. In this way, it is the critical reversal of the social contract theory. Whilst the sexual contract and the racial contract are perhaps more familiar as theorisations of patriarchy and global White supremacy respectively, the settler contract undertakes the same task for settler-colonialism. Read in this context, the anti-colonial credentials of the nomad-settler passage are put into doubt. According to Kant’s own theory of contract, it opens a path for the expansion of European sovereignty through a settler contract. Kant’s text can thus be situated within the historical process of settler-colonialism and theoretical justifications for it that the settler contract theorises. The paper does not call into doubt the sincerity of Kant’s anti-colonial views, it only suggests that the Doctrine of Right is ultimately an unsatisfactory expression of those views.