A distinguishing attribute of Kant’s political philosophy is its cosmopolitanism, globalism or internationalism. He does
not isolate domestic politics from
international politics. Wolfgang Kerstin says:
While Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau were satisfied with overcoming the interpersonal natural condition and allowed the authority of
political philosophy beyond the borders of states and saw its foremost object in the “highest political good”…. of a just order of world peace.
Kant recognized that for gaining this “highest political good”, that is to say, perpetual peace among the nations/states of the world, we have to prevail over not nations or states but also the “natural condition” of anarchy or war-proneness among the states. To speak the truth, he found these two facets of natural condition to be linked with each other.
He proclaimed that the prevalent concept of right/justice has to dominate not only domestic politics but also international politics…He writes:
Moral practical reason within us pronounces the following irresistible veto: there shall be no war, either between individual human beings in the state of nature, or between separate states, which although internally law-governed, still live in a lawless condition in their external relationships with one another. For war is not the way in which anyone should pursue his right…It can indeed be said that this task of establishing a universal and lasting peace is not just a part of the theory of right within the limits of pure reason, but its entire ultimate purpose.
Kant did not grant of the diminution of global politics to international diplomatic relations of governments. He demanded for re-reconceptualising international society as the global society of mankind.
Kant however realized that there is a difference between domestic laws and the law of nations because the latter as distinct from the former is involved with the relationship of one state to another and with “relationships of individuals in one state to individuals in another and of an individual to another whole state.”
In Kant’s view, as mentioned above, what uplifts the human being beyond the animal world is one’s ability for action in compliance with the principles of moral-practical sensibility. This indicates that men “is not to be valued merely as a means to the ends of other people, or even to his own ends, but is to be prized as an end in himself.” Thus when dogmas of political justice are established upon moral practical reason, they will contribute warding off wars, in which there is the flagrant application of human beings as reason to the ends of others. The sovereign principle of moral practical reason, assumes Kant, too claims for a “republican” forms of government, beneath which the citizen will not to be taken to as mere implements in the hands of the sovereigns.