Kant’s theory of international and cosmopolitan law has often been interpreted as identifying trade to be one central element of securing interstate peace. According to this line of argument, prominently advanced by liberal internationalists, transnational economic interaction has an enormous pacifying potential and therefore, free trade should be promoted globally. Yet, while Kant might generally agree on the pacifying potential of trade, his theory of Cosmopolitan Right has a different line of attack: it does not somewhat ahistorically identify trade as a positive peace-promoting means but rather as a historically specific element contributing to war. The three Definitive Articles he sets out in his Perpetual Peace each present a solution to specific sources of war on three different levels of interaction. In the transnational realm it is precisely the assumed right to trade which according to Kant constitutes a source of interstate hostilities: that is, if it is imposed upon others, as in the context of the imperialism of his day. Kant’s Cosmopolitan Right is therefore not a right to trade (and hence not a call for the promotion of the right to free trade) but rather a limit to this right. Following this historical reading of Kant’s Cosmopolitan Right, which is elaborated in its first part, the paper’s second part analyzes its relevance for contemporary debates on global justice. Given that free trade policies today are often pursued through the means of foreign aid, as for instance in the case of structural adjustment programs connected to IMF loans, this approach seems particularly promising for discussing the critique of foreign aid as a means of neo-imperialism. The paper’s main focus therefore is to investigate in how far Kant’s argument provides a basis for such a critique of foreign aid.
