John Game post, and wandering in Kantian mazes lost

Greg Nowell GN842 at CNSVAX.Albany.Edu
Wed Apr 14 18:25:12 PDT 1999


1. Impression #1. File in the "Whew! How's that again?" Obscurantism File. Next to Kratochwil's Rules, Norms, and Decisions.

2. Impression #2. The references to Kantian morality is evidently thinking about the Critique of Pure Reason kinda stuff and not, I think, to the famous "Perpetual Peace" essay which posits a league of nations and international bourgeois democracy, into which mold Mr. Milosovic doth not fit. Kant, too, had his "mort aux tyrans" side. Consider:

Precept #5. "No State Shall by Force Interfere with the Constitution or Government of Another State." Looks anti bomb the Yugos, non? But he qualifies: "it would be quite different if a state, by internal rebellion, should fall into two parts, each of which pretended to be a separate state making claim to the whole. To lend assistance to one of these cannot be considered an interference in the constitution of the other state (for it is then in a state of anarchy)."

Now I would wonder why Marxists would want to wander off into Kantian glades to ascertain the material interests at stake. But make no mistake about it. Kant supports a liberal bourgeois democratic international order of independent states with some nice touches, like no state debts (to easy to finance wars). And at bottom the idea in Yugoslavia, however maladroit, is that Milo is not compatible with a bourgeois order. Could this therefore be a Kantian war?

--gn

-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222

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