Kant Showed Way to Perpetual Peace in Europe

My Note in Financial Times today 2 April 2022

Mark Mazower surveys 200 years of efforts to create peace in Europe but fails to mention Kant’s Perpetual Peace written in 1795 in what is now Kalingrad, Moscow’s small European enclave on the Baltic coast.?(FT Long Read 26 March) Kant set out three conditions for peace - an end to monarchies in the manner of republican America and France, a union between states, and an open door to peoples speaking different languages, sharing different cultures.?

Europe has on the whole achieved those three conditions and most of the Enlightenment values of rule of law, freedom of expression, and human rights well established. There is a?strong and getting stronger partnership between states if not a full union with the EU raising and spending money to tackle the pandemic, seek energy security, or pay for arms to defend democracy in Ukraine.?

Europe also has open?borders to citizens and languages and cultures of other European nations and a remarkable opening of hearts and homes to refugees fleeing Putin’s Tsarist imperialism (and again today’s UK?government is an outlier).?Sadly, the forces of old-fashioned nationalism persuaded 37% of?British voters to quit this Kantian existence in 2016 and Britain is getting poorer in consequence.

There has long been a handsome statue of Kant in Kalingrad, formerly Konigsberg, which disappeared when the Nazis and Soviets imposed fascism and communism on the city but it is now back in place. Perhaps the EU might put up a small statue to Vladimir Putin as no man in recent times has done more to prove the worth, value and?need today and in the future for a European peace based on a union of nations and peoples along with partners across the Atlantic.?

Denis MacShane, Former Europe Minister, UK