Anti-colonialism

It needs to be acknowledged from the outset that Kant expresses a deep antipathy to the worst atrocities that Europeans had committed in foreign lands in the name of progress and culture. Their prohibition forms a central tenet of his peace project that he outlines in Toward Perpetual Peace. In rejecting both the balance of power doctrine in international affairs held by most of the French philosophes and the just war theories developed by Grotius, Vattel, and Pufendorf for condemning humanity to continual wars, Kant provides a far more proactive approach to the development of peace through the construction of a peace treaty in two sections (Keene Reference Keene2005, 146; Williams Reference Williams2012, C. 3). The first contains six preliminary articles that he considers necessary conditions for peace, with articles one, five, and six designed for immediate implementation to prevent the abuses they proscribe. Foremost among them for our purposes is article five that stipulates ‘No state shall forcibly interfere in the constitution and government of another state’ (Kant Reference Kant1991d, 96). Although Kant (Reference Kant1991d, 94) allows greater latitude in terms of the time frame for the implementation of articles two to four, two determines that ‘No independently existing state, whether it be large or small, may be acquired by another state by inheritance, exchange, purchase or gift’. The sovereignty of states is henceforth assured against various colonial practices.

The second section consists of three definitive articles that together provide the institutional and legal framework for his ‘pacific federation of peoples’ (Kant Reference Kant1991d, 102); a loose confederation bound by international and cosmopolitan law that he proposes will consist solely of republican states. Keene (Reference Keene2005, 148) indicates that the idea of a federation ensuring peace possessed contemporary relevance with North America having avoided war among the 13 former colonies following independence. The peace produced via federation in North America stood in stark contrast to the Revolutionary Wars in Europe.

Kant famously distinguished his republican states from democratic ones by referring to democracy as despotism, although commentators rightly indicate his conception of democracy was based on ancient participatory forms and not on liberal representative democracies. It is, nonetheless, misrepresentative of his definition of republicanism – which is based on the separation of executive and legislative power – to interpret it straightforwardly to mean ‘what we would now call a representative democracy’ (Muthu Reference Muthu2003, 162). Although he recognizes that autocracies and aristocracies have a tendency towards despotism, he also states that both forms of sovereignty can be republican and representative (Kant Reference Kant1991d, 100–01). No matter how exclusively one interprets membership in Kant’s federation,Footnote ³ it is not the case, however as proponents of the liberal peace thesis like Michael Doyle (Reference Doyle1983, 213, 230–32, Reference Doyle1986, 1157, 1160–62, Reference Doyle1993, 186, 189–91) contend that Kant only stipulates international obligations between its members. As many commentators (Ellis Reference Ellis2005, 95; Jahn Reference Jahn2006, 182, 185–87; MacMillan Reference MacMillan2006, 63; Brown Reference Brown2009, 103) indicate, members of the confederation have clear duties in international and cosmopolitan law towards non-member states, such as to respect the sovereignty of all states no matter how despotic they might be.

It is in Kant’s third definitive article that stipulates ‘Cosmopolitan Right shall be limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality’ where we find his emphatic critique of European colonialism. Cosmopolitan law guarantees ‘the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory’ (Kant Reference Kant1991d, 105). This individual right importantly serves the interests of increased global interaction, but universal hospitality is not an absolute right; a lack of hostility is conditional upon the peaceable behaviour of the visitor. In the cases of China and Japan, where the European commercial states had behaved inhospitably, Kant condones the restrictions both states had placed on future visitors, with China only allowing contact but not entrance into its territories and Japan only permitting contact with the Dutch (Kant Reference Kant1991d, 106–07). The intent of this stipulation is to outlaw a range of colonial practices that he notes from ‘the cruellest and most calculated slavery’ in the Sugar Islands to the treatment of America, Africa, the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc. ‘as ownerless territories’ so that ‘the native inhabitants were counted as nothing’ (Kant Reference Kant1991d, 107, 106).

Two years later in The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kant (Reference Kant1991b, 173) further specifies that his cosmopolitan right to visit does not entail a ‘right to settle’. Jacques Derrida (Reference Derrida2010, 420–21) has criticized the limited nature of Kant’s right to hospitality based on its failure to accommodate refugees with ‘a right of residence’. Yet Kant’s limited right of visitation needs to be read in the context of European colonialism in the 18th century.Footnote ⁴ As Timothy Waligore (Reference Waligore2009) argues, with this stipulation, Kant is attempting to balance the facilitation of cultural interaction with the prevention of further imperialism by uninvited foreigners. He insists that it is only legitimate for foreigners to settle areas of land, if that land is far away from other settlements. In cases of pastoral and hunting peoples, such as the American Indians who used extensive areas of land, he determines that settlements cannot be legitimately established by violence and without the consent of the inhabitants. They can only be established ‘by treaty; and even then, there must be no attempt to exploit the ignorance of the natives in persuading them to give up their territories’. Violence is also illegitimate in cases of ‘supposed good intentions’ such as trying ‘to bring culture to uncivilized peoples’ (Kant Reference Kant1991b, 173). In keeping with his deontological philosophical stance, the end, for Kant, never legitimates the injustice inflicted on people with the use of violent means.

More than 30 years earlier in his first published piece, On Diligence in Several Learned Languages (1764), Herder outlines many of the themes that were to preoccupy him throughout his life (Morton Reference Morton1989); as well as promoting cultural interaction through the learning of several languages, he emphasizes the importance of first learning one’s indigenous language well. Herder’s main contribution to the history of political thought lies in his recognition of the devastating effects of linguistic and cultural oppression, but he no less condemns the economic and political oppression that have resulted from imperialist conquests. His early essay, Yet Another Philosophy of History (1774), is well known for its critique of slavery and its denunciation of the oppression inflicted on Indigenous peoples by the European empires, a theme that he expands into a critique of imperialism throughout history in his most seminal mature work – Ideas towards a Philosophy of History of Humanity (1784–91). Again in his late Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793–97), which contains his critique of Kant’s proposal for eternal peace, Herder declares:

Except in self-defence against a direct attack, violence against other peoples is as illegitimate for Herder as it is for Kant. Where they differ is in the solutions they offer, with Herder rejecting Kant’s formalistic plan for peace in favour of a grassroots approach that focusses on the need to transform people’s perspectives about war and other peoples. Herder (Reference Herder1991, 716, Reference Herder2002, 402), unlike Kant, has little faith in the effective establishment of a long-lasting peace through a top-down process that is initiated by state leaders. He doubts, too, if perpetual peace is ever possible on this earth. It is not that Kant unrealistically considered his plan would be easily implemented or that he even believed it would be fully realized. Herder, like Kant, also treats peace as a regulative ideal, whereby he considers every step towards it worthwhile. Yet Herder departs from Kant by believing that the key to success lies in changing people’s attitudes. People do not then need to wait for state leaders to act; everyone can develop and foster his basic principles so that war is no longer glorified and people instead come to shudder in horror upon hearing the word spoken (Herder Reference Herder1991, 719–21, Reference Herder2002, 404–05).

In a clear reference to the invasions conducted by the French republicans, at the core of Herder’s vision for peace is the need to purify patriotism so that it no longer creates a sense of superiority over other peoples and undermines peaceful relations between peoples (Herder Reference Herder1991, 722–23, Reference Herder2002, 406). Keene (Reference Keene2005, 153) notes that the once orthodox view of Herder as the proponent of aggressive nationalism has undergone serious criticism in the past few decades, with Herder scholars consistently showing its erroneousness. Indeed, from his early work onwards, Herder (Reference Herder1994, 38, my translation) highlights the dangers of a ‘narrow nationalism’Footnote ⁵ that promotes an uncritical love for one’s nation. Like the more recent hermeneutic thinker Hans-Georg Gadamer, Herder (1994, 15–16, 89, Reference Herder2002, 276–77, 341) sees value in our prejudices by situating us, but he is consistently critical of an unreflective stance towards our prejudices in our treatment of other peoples (Gadamer Reference Gadamer1976, 321–30; Irmscher Reference Irmscher1977, 532; Menges Reference Menges1998, 167–68; Menze Reference Menze2002, 83–84). The method that he developed for historical and comparative studies calls for researchers to attempt to understand other peoples on their own terms. Michael Morton (Reference Morton1989, 147) indicates that Herder’s term for this method, Sichhineinfühlen, is the original source for Coleridge’s introduction of the word ‘empathy’ into English. Herder acknowledges that a hermeneutic gap always exists in understanding others, but he does not consider cultures impenetrable, isolated entities as his notion of incommensurability is sometimes misunderstood (see, e.g. Keal Reference Keal2003, 80). It is important to remember that he was a highly accomplished translator. Nor is his methodology applicable only to academic studies; he considers it essential in the way that we ought to conduct international affairs. Just as Marshall Beier (Reference Beier2009, 46) has recently called for an empathetic ‘counter-hegemonic’ approach towards marginalized peoples in international relations, Herder advocates the active cultivation of a transnational empathy to delegitimize colonial practices:

Kleingeld (Reference Kleingeld2012) has recently argued in relation to Kant’s thought that patriotism and cosmopolitanism are compatible. Rather than the kind of uncritical love for one’s state associated with the term increasingly during the 20th century, patriotism was generally understood in the 18th century in the republican sense of a commitment to civic liberty (Dietz Reference Dietz1989). There is nothing in this classical understanding of patriotism that is incompatible with a commitment to a cosmopolitan outlook, and in his earlier work Herder often uses the term in this sense. Scholars (Dobbek Reference Dobbek1959, 369; Barnard Reference Barnard1965, 81; Dreitzel Reference Dreitzel1987, 274; Koepke Reference Koepke1987, 84; Adler Reference Adler2000, 54; Löchte Reference Löchte2005, 93; Pizer Reference Pizer2007, 361; Spencer Reference Spencer2012, Ch. 6) also readily indicate Herder’s republican and democratic sympathies with his strong support for the French Revolution. However, by the time he came to write that the ‘The loudest patriots are often the most petty egoists’ (Herder Reference Herder1991, 104, my translation) in the first published collection of his Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793), French republicanism had assumed an increasingly violent and imperialist stance with the French invasions of Belgium, Germany, and the Dutch republic as early as 1792–93. Despite further French invasions of Spain and elsewhere, Herder never repudiated his support for the revolution’s republican values. However, in the 10th collection of Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1797), he calls for the need for a ‘reformed patriotism’ – one that adheres to the principle of self-determination for all peoples – as a prerequisite for peace. Patriotic and cosmopolitan values are reconcilable as Kleingeld notes, but neither necessarily rules out imperialism; it is useful to recall that in its origins in Stoic thought, cosmopolitanism was an imperialist doctrine.

Unlike Joseph Görres in his response to Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace, Kant never supported the kind of revolutionary fervour that justified the external imposition of republican values to obtain a cosmopolitan federation through force (Pizer Reference Pizer2007, 355–57). Görres’s desire for all others to imitate blindly the French model and his initial support for the French occupation of the Left Bank of the Rhine typifies the kind of patriotism that Herder was most concerned to warn against. Nevertheless, Herder also remonstrates against Kant’s formalistic legal cosmopolitan with what he sees as his ideal for all peoples to possess the same political constitution so that it is decided in advance of any empirical investigation what constitutes the best way of life for a people, irrespective of its particular circumstances. As we have seen, Kant’s republican constitution is broader than democratic peace proponents maintain. Like Kant, Herder also favours the rule of law and civil liberties associated with republican values. However, Herder does not assume that they are equally appropriate in all circumstances or that entering into a civil state is the only way in which they could be realized. He prefers a bottom-up approach to the formation of political associations, and he has virtually no faith in peace arising from negotiations among state governments in Europe in a top-down legalistic manner. In his promotion of peace and universal justice, he advocates instead the creation of a ‘quiet league’ of peoples that would be a flexible alliance in the face of changing circumstances due to its informality, and inclusive of all peoples committed to peace based on an empathetic respect for others on their own terms (Herder Reference Herder1991, 723, Reference Herder2002, 407).

Thus, although Herder is not a legal or institutional cosmopolitan, he is a moral cosmopolitan. He can also be categorized in Brown and David Held’s (Reference Brown and Held2010, 1–2, 10–11) terms as a cultural cosmopolitan who seeks simultaneously to promote global justice and cultural pluralism. Although his thought was once mistakenly seen to support the Nazi doctrine of race (Collingwood Reference Collingwood1946, 89–92; Kedourie Reference Kedourie1966, 71–72), recently scholars have tended to emphasize his rejection of Kant’s use of racial categorizations. It is not the case that Herder, unlike his contemporaries, is entirely free, however, of racial prejudices and his failure aesthetically to appreciate the physicality of certain ethnic groups will undoubtedly appear racist to modern readers. For Herder, such differences were, nonetheless, superficial with them possessing no consequence in his view for the intellectual or moral capacities of non-Europeans (Bernasconi 2001; Sikka Reference Sikka2006; Spencer Reference Spencer2012, 134–38). All individuals and peoples, he insists, possess ‘Humanität, Vernuft und Sprache’ (humanity, reason, and language; Herder Reference Herder1989, 377). Herder (Reference Herder1800, 166, Reference Herder1989, 255) also emphatically dismisses the concept of race, because it suggests to him a false difference of origin between peoples that holds the potential danger to justify treating some peoples as inferior to others.

In his mature work, Herder employs the term Humanität as a normative concept that encapsulates his commitment to a thin universality.Footnote ⁶ All individuals and peoples, he stipulates, ought to be treated according to the principle of fairness and equity contained in his concept of Humanität: ‘Do not unto others what you would not wish them to do unto you; what you expect others to do unto you, do unto them too’ (Herder Reference Herder1989, 159, my translation; also see Adler Reference Adler1994, 63–64, Reference Adler2009, 108–11). No member of the human species is excluded; insisting against those who claimed that tribal peoples had more in common with apes than Europeans, he urges them to ‘honour thyself: neither the pongo nor the gibbon is thy brother: the American and the Negro are: these therefore thou should not oppress, murder, or steal: for they are men, like thee: with the ape thou cannot enter into fraternity’ (Herder Reference Herder1800, 264, Reference Herder1989, 255).

The state, nations, and peoples

Herder uses the term Volk,Footnote ⁷ or people, interchangeably with the nation, and it is important to recognize that unlike the current normative idea of the nation in modern nationalism studies, he makes no distinction between nations and tribal communities.Footnote ⁸ He applies the terms Volk and nation equally to the Indigenous peoples in North America, Africa, and the Philippines as well as to large European nations like the Scots, the Hungarians, and the Germans. His usage of the term is entirely independent of the existence of the state. Most modern commentators similarly recognize that the state and nation are distinct entities; yet they question whether the current understanding of the nation as a specific form of community that developed from the late 18th century could have existed before the modern state (Hutchinson and Smith Reference Hutchinson and Smith1994, 132). According to Ernest Gellner (Reference Gellner1983, 137–38), for example, modern nations are the result of a complex division of labour combined with a centralized state that imposes cultural homogeneity through a standardized system of education over the inhabitants of a particular territory, features that are non-existent in traditional Indigenous communities. For Benedict Anderson (Reference Anderson1991, 6, 7), too, his well-known definition of the nation as ‘an imagined political community’ is irrevocably linked to ‘the sovereign state’ that emerged in the modern era with the demise of the dynastic system. In this respect, Herder’s usage of the term nation/Volk is more in accord with Gellner’s understanding of the kind of groups that people have always lived in and identified with.

Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey (Reference Barkawi and Laffey1999, 414–22) along with an increasing number of international relation theorists (Keal Reference Keal2003; Reid Reference Reid2004, 68–69; Shaw Reference Shaw2008; Beier Reference Beier2009) indicate how liberal-democratic peace proponents and traditional international relations theory have obfuscated continuing colonial relations and the warfare waged against Indigenous communities by defining war exclusively as violent interaction between states. Edward Keene (Reference Keene2005, 9) also notes how confining international theory to relations between sovereign states effectively means ruling out investigations into one of its major concerns, the operation of imperial systems. Against this trend, Herder’s commentary on peace is situated within a broad framework of both international and inter-state interactions that promotes non-violent relations among Völker/nations, between Völker/nations and states, among states, and between individuals and the states in which they reside. Thus, he criticizes ‘the Europeans’ behaviour toward witches and Jews’ as much as he does their colonial ‘undertakings in both Indias’ (Herder Reference Herder1991, 707, Reference Herder2002, 398). The legitimacy of self-defence does not lie solely with states against other states but equally with Völker against those who threaten their autonomy and attempt coercively to seize their land (Herder Reference Herder1991, 687, Reference Herder2002, 385). A people need not possess its own state to have the right to collective self-determination in Herder’s schema.

Far from supporting the phenomenon of modern state nationalism as documented by scholars like Gellner (Reference Gellner1983) and Anderson (Reference Anderson1991), Herder opposes the centralization of states under a single unit of law and education that was occurring during the late 18th century throughout Europe (Herder Reference Herder1991, 66). Anderson (Reference Anderson1991, 85–88) indicates that during the 19th century, with the impetus to shift from Latin as the language of state to a vernacular language, European monarchs increasingly began to take on a particular language and national identity from within their dynastic empires. They then imposed it on all their subjects in the interests of state unification. One of the most brutal examples of this process of cultural assimilation was the Russification of the Baltic provinces in the late 19th century, but it was first evident in the 1780s in the Austro-Hungarian Empire when Joseph II decided to adopt German as the language of state in place of Latin and to impose it on the Hungarians. Although Joseph II was unsuccessful due to Hungarian revolts, in commenting on the centralizing tendencies of the state that were to come to characterize the formation of the modern ‘nation-state’, Herder (Reference Herder1991, 66) is highly critical of Joseph II’s attempt to impose cultural homogeneity on all the nations within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He urges sovereigns instead to respect the linguistic and cultural autonomy of all Völker under their jurisdiction.

Here lies a crucial distinction between Kant and Herder. Although Kant, like Herder, uses the term Volk and applies it to a broad range of communities, unlike Herder, he rejects outright the idea of a multinational state. In distinguishing his confederation from an international state, Kant considers the latter ‘contradictory, since every state involves a relationship between a superior (the legislator) and an inferior (the people obeying the laws), whereas a number of nations [viele Völker] forming one state [einem Staate] would constitute a single nation [ein Volk]’ (Kant Reference Kant1991d, 102, emphasis added, 1964, 209). Although Kant’s concern here is with the feasibility of an international state, to show its contradictory nature, he invokes his theory of the state at the domestic level in which he clearly adopts the doctrine of one nation per state while acknowledging the existence of a number of nations. With his adoption of this doctrine, nations within multinational states are collapsed into one nation, and therefore lose their autonomy in the assimilation drive of a centralized state. Kant might favour ‘a politics based on reason’ over ‘group sentiment’ as Nussbaum (Reference Nussbaum2010, 28) argues, but he does so at the expense of the self-determination of Indigenous peoples and other nations that happened to find themselves in a minority position as a consequence of the process of European state formation. The misnomer of the modern ‘nation-state’ that obscures the existence of nations within states and that scholars (Seton-Waton Reference Seton-Waton1977, 85–87; Connor Reference Connor1978; Anderson Reference Anderson1991, 83–111; Guibernau Reference Guibernau2004, 132) indicate is a feature of the kind of official state nationalism that developed fully during the 19th century is, therefore, established in Kant’s thought. Such official state nationalism need not take on an aggressive stance towards other states, and it can, therefore, be congruent with an anti-imperialist stance at the inter-state level. However, historically, the development of the modern European state was often highly detrimental to the cultural rights of minority nations at the intra-state level.

It is, thus, important to recognize that Kant’s international political theory does not provide a ‘law of nations’ as it is sometimes assumed (see, e.g. Hayden Reference Hayden2005, 21). It instead outlines ‘the international right of states [Staaten] in their relationships with one another (ius gentium) (Kant Reference Kant1991d, 98, Reference Kant1964, 203). Kant is perfectly aware of this distinction as he explains in The Metaphysics of Morals that ‘it is not strictly correct to speak, as we usually do, of the right of nations [Völkerecht]: it should rather be called the right of states [das Staatenrecht] – ius publicum civitatum’ (Kant Reference Kant1991b, 164–65, Reference Kant1956, 466). He acknowledges explicitly that ‘savages’ who have chosen their ‘lawless freedom’ ‘constitute national groups [Völkerschaften], but they do not constitute states [Staaten]’ (Kant Reference Kant1991b, 164, Reference Kant1956, 466). His international right was never intended to apply to Indigenous peoples outside the state system. Kant (Reference Kant1991b, 164) even instructs citizens of states not ‘to intermix with any neighbouring people who live in a state of nature’ and to ‘consider them ignoble’. Although he establishes international law for the protection of states beyond the republican states within his confederation, exclusion is the modus operandi towards stateless peoples. The common claim that Kant’s cosmopolitan principles treat ‘all peoples of the earth as a “single universal community”’ (Wood Reference Wood1998, 62, emphasis added) is, therefore, false; it can only be considered accurate if the term ‘peoples’ is replaced by states.

National groups within states are also vulnerable to violence at the hands of a belligerent colonial state. Kant’s principle of non-interference in the constitution and government of another state means that an external state cannot lend support to any national group within a state unless it has managed to separate and set itself up as an independent state. He categorizes conflicts between national groups within states as ‘internal conflict[s]’ so that ‘interference would be an active offence and would make the autonomy of all other states insecure’ (Kant Reference Kant1991d, 96). Thus, Kant implicitly provides considerable impetus to national groups wishing to protect their cultural autonomy to secede from existing states, because only with their own state will their autonomy be respected within his theoretical framework. This might accord with current international practice that prioritizes the ‘nation-state’ over other forms of communities, but it is precisely the Westphalian state system that many cosmopolitan thinkers find deficient.

It follows that ‘The principle of freedom’, which distinguishes Kant’s republican constitution, applies only to individuals and not to communities within states (Kant Reference Kant1991d, 99). Kant provides individuals with no right to be able to live as a people within a multinational state. Kant’s theory, therefore, conforms to the traditional liberal approach noted by Vernon Van Dyke (Reference Van Dyke1977, 363–68) that places ontological priority on the individual at one level and the state at another to the neglect of the communities that exist at the intermediate level between the individual and the state. Nations or peoples are delegitimized as a site for cultural and political autonomy, and justice – which Kant (Reference Kant1991d, 99) considers ought to limit the freedom to act within a state – is defined in terms of the prohibition of injustice to individuals qua individuals and not as members of communities.

By contrast, it is precisely these communities that Herder prioritizes. Some commentators question whether Herder could ever have envisaged a multinational state (Eggel, Liebich, and Mancini-Griffoli Reference Eggel, Liebich and Mancini-Griffoli2007, 65). Even if his thought is no longer linked to an aggressive form of state nationalism, due largely to his claim that ‘the most natural state is therefore one Volk, with one national character’, he is still commonly credited with being the father of nationalism (Herder Reference Herder1800, 249, Reference Herder1989, 369; Gilbert Reference Gilbert1998; Adams and Dyson Reference Adams and Dyson2003, 93; Goldie and Wokler Reference Goldie and Wokler2006, 742). Three points are noteworthy here. First, this comment is situated within his critique of the excessively large dynastic and imperial states that had no connection to the people or any sense of solidarity and community. Second, it captures his democratic view that the best political associations arise from the people and are not imposed from above. Third, he is not suggesting that all Völker require the kind of modern state that was developing in the late 18th century and that is associated with the modern phenomenon of nationalism. For him, there is not one ideal form of political association suited to all times and peoples:

Herder, therefore, places no duty upon Indigenous peoples to give up their own forms of governance.

Far from advocating that all peoples ought to adopt a modern bureaucratic state, Herder’s ideal is to do away with the ‘artificial contrivance’ of the state with its centralized administrative and coercive functions in favour of loose forms of co-operation based only on the law. He describes the 12 Hebrew tribes as bound together by the Mosaic Constitution, but with each also possessing their own autonomy. In this model, sovereignty is dispersed rather than centrally unified in a single entity with sole jurisdiction over a particular territory (Herder Reference Herder1880, 115–20, Reference Herder1989, 369–70). Although Kant’s concept of the state is equally based on the rule of law and the existence of a civil constitution, his concern to ensure the existence of a single source of sovereignty within a state means that Herder’s anarchist and decentralized ideal accords far more with the kind of loose federation that Kant proposes between states. Due to his pragmatism, Herder recognizes the danger of disintegration into separate and distinct parts that exists with this ideal, and he instead comes to see the entire art of government as the attempt to balance unity with diversity (Herder Reference Herder1887, 600). Although he remains an advocate of decentralized power, he accepts the existing state system. Based on his principle of collective self-determination, cultural communities struggling for their autonomy can, therefore, find support in Herder’s political theory to seek their own independent state, particularly within the historical context of a ‘nation-state’ system that only accords sovereignty to states. However, any nationalist doctrine that insists all Völker require a Westphalian model of the state is antithetical to his political thought.

By way of comparison, Kant (Reference Kant1991b, 137–38, 1991c, 73, 1991d, 90) places a duty upon all peoples living in a stateless condition to leave the state of nature and enter into civic relations under the coercive apparatus of the state. Following Thomas Hobbes (Tuck Reference Tuck2001, 207–10), he regards the ‘the state of nature … [as] a state of war’ (Kant Reference Kant1991d, 98). It is not that war itself is always present, but peace does not exist where there is constant insecurity. Nor is it always ‘a state of injustice (iniustus)’, but without a judge to resolve disputes in a legally valid manner it is by necessity ‘a state devoid of justice’. Although Kant thinks experience demonstrates that people are violent, and he even attributes an inherent wickedness to humanity in his Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone (1793), his argument in The Metaphysics of Morals is not derived from empirical evidence:

Muthu (Reference Muthu2003, 200–01) admits that the one possible exception to Kant’s anti-imperialism lies in his social contact theory, but he dismisses the significance of Kant’s views on the state of nature due to its purely hypothetical nature. Yet, while Kant employs a hypothetical account of the state of nature in his social contract theory, Kant’s disparagement for the stateless condition in which certain peoples choose to live is not simply hypothetical when he writes in Toward Perpetual Peace:

It is important to recognize that in his use of the term ‘savages’, Kant is not only referring to stateless Indigenous peoples but also to any persons living outside the state system so that his comment equally applies to pirates. Yet to equate Indigenous communities with the lawless existence of pirates only delegitimizes them further.

Marshall Beier (Reference Beier2009, 15) indicates how ‘the idea that Indigenous peoples do not constitute authentic political communities’ is fundamental to the narrative of advanced colonialism, and the part that the one-sided focus on the state in mainstream international relations theory has played in its workings. In Kant’s case, this failure is not merely due to benign neglect. He delegitimizes Indigenous communities, despite his knowledge of Indigenous forms of self-governance that clearly demonstrate that their stateless condition did not mean they were all ‘lawless’. In his early work, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), for example, Kant (Reference Kant2007a, 60) distinguishes the ‘savages’ of North America as having the most ‘sublime character of mind’ and ‘a strong feeling of honor’ with the ‘Canadian savage … moreover truthful and honest’. His understanding of the operations of the Iroquois Great Council is, moreover, sufficiently detailed that he was aware of the matrilineal nature of Iroquois society with women in possession of the power to command the male delegates who they chose to represent them (see Snow Reference Snow1994, 62–65). Kant (Reference Kant2007a, 61) knew the Iroquois possessed their own complex system of governance with a deliberative council that decided ‘the most important affairs of the nation’. However, heavily influenced by Rousseau’s appreciation for those untainted by the corrupting influence of ‘civilization’ at the time of writing his early anthropology, Kant soon became critical of Rousseau (Kuehn Reference Kuehn2001, 131–32). His depiction of American Indians and their way of life likewise changed. Having placed them in the Beautiful and the Sublime in a hierarchically superior position to Africans whose skin colour he thought was ‘distinct proof’ that anything black Africans stated was ‘stupid’ (Kant Reference Kant2007a, 61), in On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy (1778) he reversed this ranking. In contrast to his previous depiction of American Indians, he now maintained that they were ‘too weak for hard labor, too indifferent for industry and incapable of any culture’ (Kant Reference Kant2007b, 211).

In his mature cosmopolitanism, it is the influence of Hobbes’s anarchic portrait of the state of nature on Kant’s thinking that is, however, paramount. Although Kant never believed that civil society was in reality founded on a social contract, his portrait of statelessness in Toward Perpetual Peace strongly parallels Hobbes’s depiction of the factual existence of a state of nature at the international level. They both share the belief too that not only is the state essential in the maintenance of peace at the domestic level but also that only an indivisible sovereign is feasible. Karena Shaw (Reference Shaw2008) has detailed the ways in which Hobbes’s conception of sovereignty is detrimental to minority nations by marginalizing them within states. Hobbes’s focus is largely, however, on the domestic sphere with his concern to prevent civil war, whereas Kant considers the anarchic nature of the international state system in the late 18th century a direct impediment to peaceful relations at the domestic level as well. Addressing the anarchic nature of the international situation, thus, possesses additional urgency in Kant’s theory (MacMillan Reference MacMillan2006, 61–63).

Herder directly challenges Kant’s Hobbesian claims about the ‘incessant strife’ and insecurity endemic in a stateless condition in his Letters for the Advancement of Humanity. To remind Kant (and others) that American Indians had developed sophisticated forms of peaceful self-governance, he extensively cites G.H. Loskiel’s account of the peace treaty between the Delaware Nation and the Iroquois confederation in North America. Although he recognizes that it eventually failed in the face of colonial pressures – as he notes had many other attempts at maintaining formal peace treaties in both Europe and Asia – it is clear that Herder considers the ability of communities to live in lawful conditions and to form peace treaties with neighbouring nations are not dependent on the existence of the state (Herder Reference Herder1991, Reference Herder2002, 400–03, 713–17; Pizer Reference Pizer2007, 358–59; Spencer Reference Spencer2014).

In Kant’s legal framework, by contrast, the state is the only legitimate entity with the ability to establish peaceful relations. The result for stateless Indigenous peoples is a precarious existence: ‘unless one neighbour gives a guarantee to the other at his request (which can happen only in a lawful state)’, Kant (Reference Kant1991d, 98) writes in a footnote, ‘the latter may treat him as an enemy’. As Kant thinks that stateless Indigenous peoples do not possess the legal capacity to provide such a guarantee, despite his anti-colonial statements on the way Europeans had behaved in Africa and elsewhere, he can be read as granting legitimacy to states that treat them as their enemy. At the very least, there is a clear contradiction here in Kant’s thinking. The further inference that it is imperative for states to act towards stateless Indigenous peoples as if they are their enemy eventuates because Kant considers those outside the state system effectively injure us through the insecurity that their refusal to submit to the coercion of public law in a state creates:

Kant, as noted above, explicitly rules out the use of overt violence, and yet the permission he grants a sovereign state to require stateless Indigenous peoples to become subsumed under its jurisdiction or to leave their homeland legitimates the pre-emptive use of state coercion against a free people. His use of the harm principle means that such coercive state action can be seen as both legitimate and essential in the pursuit of justice.

There is not merely a tension in Kant’s thought between his anti-colonial sentiments and his cosmopolitan ideal of peace that is irrevocably tied to the existence of the state. There appears to be an outright contradiction between these statements and the conditions he places on colonial powers in obtaining land from Indigenous peoples through a non-coercive process of treaty formation. It might be objected that because Kant refers to the peoples of America, Africa, the Spice Islands, and the Cape in his third definitive article on cosmopolitan right that he does not regard them as ‘savages’ living in a state of nature. Following the previous quotation, he stipulates that a legal constitution can take one of three forms: a civil constitution at the level of the nation-state, a constitution that protects international right between states, and one based on cosmopolitan right (Kant Reference Kant1991d, 98–99). Thus, cosmopolitan right might be seen to provide legal protection to the peoples of America, Africa, the Spice Islands, and the Cape. Yet cosmopolitan right did not exist in constitutional form either at the time of initial European contact or in the late 18th century. As Kant states in his opening paragraph of the second section of Toward Perpetual Peace that concludes with the footnote containing the above quotations, ‘the state of peace must be formally instituted’ (Kant Reference Kant1991d, 98). Since cosmopolitan right still needed to be formally and fully instituted, it follows that despite his criticisms in his third definitive article of the way Indigenous peoples had been treated by Europeans, within his theoretical framework Africans and American Indians at the time of European contact were devoid of a civil constitution, and therefore living in an anarchic state of nature (Cavallar Reference Cavallar1999, 53; MacMillan Reference MacMillan2006, 70). For them to remain in that ‘lawless’ situation was, thus, a threat to the security of others.

Kleingeld (Reference Kleingeld2012, 112) nonetheless sees a clear shift in Kant’s perspective on race with his acceptance of the ability of American Indians and Africans to sign contracts in The Metaphysics of Morals, when he had previously considered slavery appropriate for them. Although as late as 1792 Kant re-affirmed Hume’s claim of the natural inequality of people with black skins, three years later in Toward Perpetual Peace his critique of the way commercial states had treated the peoples in Africa, the Americas, and the Spice Islands as if they were ‘ownerless territories’ (Kant Reference Kant1991d, 106) suggests that in developing his mature cosmopolitanism he had come to regard the consent of the pre-invasion inhabitants as important in the fate of their territories. In The Metaphysics of Morals, he also insists that the ignorance of Indigenous peoples ought not to be exploited when acquiring land through contractual agreements. Moreover, he explicitly rules invalid arguments justifying the use of violence against stateless peoples, because the world would still have been in ‘a lawless condition’ if it had not been used. A good end, he claims repeatedly, can never justify the use of unjust means (Kant Reference Kant1991b, 173).

Yet these anti-colonial statements and Kant’s attempts noted earlier to prevent European imperialism are at odds with his theory of property rights that means no one outside the state system can legally possesses any land. Respect for others’ property requires reciprocity that cannot be guaranteed where the parties involved are not constrained by civic rights. When this standard is publicly violated, no obligation to respect others’ rights exists. Any rights of ownership are merely provisional in the state of nature (Williams Reference Williams1983, 89–90; Reiss Reference Reiss1991, 22; Waligore Reference Waligore2009, 42). Thus, while Kant’s cosmopolitan right provides adequate protection against colonialism for nations with their own a civil state as Walligore argues, his theory of property rights provides a significant challenge to the rights of stateless Indigenous peoples without the kind of reconstruction of his thought that Walligore and others attempt. Although in Section III of the Theory of Right in The Metaphysics of Morals on Cosmopolitan Right Kant regards violence against stateless Indigenous peoples as a violation of the conditions of right, whatever the good intentions behind the use of such means, earlier in section I he considers force acceptable:

In the same work, Kant’s theory of property rights, therefore, legitimates colonial occupation upon discovery of a territory where no state exists, while he elsewhere condemns it. Since it is his social contract theory that sets up the conditions of right based on reason that determines land is not legally owned outside a civil constitution, its implications for stateless peoples in the empirical world cannot be dismissed lightly due to its hypothetical nature.

As minority nations, Indigenous peoples within a state fare no better in the realm of practical reason. Once a state has been formed, the property rights of Indigenous peoples would be assured in terms of right reason. However, any colonial dispossession that previously arose from trickery, deceit, or violence is also validated. Claims for historical justice are not legitimate in Kant’s theory, either on legal or moral grounds (Williams Reference Williams1983, 250), even in cases where states are occupied due to ‘inheritance, exchange, purchase or gift’. Although he outlaws such state occupation in preliminary article two of Toward Perpetual Peace, Kant (Reference Kant1991d, 94, 97) goes on to stipulate that the means employed in gaining state power are irrelevant ‘to the present state of political possessions. For although this present state is not backed up by the requisite legal authority, it was considered lawful in the public opinion of every state at the time of putative acquisition’, it follows that since the European empires were at one on the legality of their actions in Africa and elsewhere – also in their engagement in the slave trade – it follows that Kant’s theory effectively delegitimizes the ability of people to obtain any redress for the ills that he so eloquently outlines were committed against them. Once a civil constitution has been formed, he clearly states in The Metaphysics of Morals that practical reason requires ‘men to obey the legitimate authority now in power, irrespective of its origin’ (Kant Reference Kant1991b, 143). Thus, any practical implications arising from his critique of the methods Europeans used in treating Africa and other territories as ‘ownerless’ are effectively nullified wherever dispossession has occurred to such an extent that a colonial power has established a state constitution in a particular territory. The mode of acquisition is irrelevant to the current state of affairs.

Nor are continued injustices sufficient warrants for civil disobedience. According to Kant (Reference Kant1991b, 143), a subject may lodge a complaint if the ruler violates the law, ‘but he may not offer resistance’. It might be objected that Kant retrospectively supported the French Revolution, but he did so on the highly disputable grounds that the monarch had surrendered his sovereign power (Williams Reference Williams1983, 210–11; Reiss Reference Reiss1991, 30). His support for authority with the need to accept the ultimate power of the state and an indivisible sovereign consistently overrides any moral argument for justice making Kant’s political theory decidedly conservative. According to Wolfgang Proß (Reference Proß2006, 246–47), the development of ‘German conservatism’ during the 19th century was far more indebted to Kant’s position of obedience to the state than it ever was to Herder. Kant’s prohibition against rebellion is ‘absolute’ even when it is believed that ‘the head of state, has violated the original contract by authorising the government to act tyrannically’ (Kant Reference Kant1991c, 83). It is the people’s duty ‘to tolerate even what is apparently the most intolerable misuse of supreme power’ as to do otherwise would be unlawful (Kant Reference Kant1991b, 145). At most, people have a negative right to resistance so that they may refuse to comply with administrative demands from the executive. If there happens to be a rebellion, the previous ruler cannot be punished for any previous mismanagement of the state, and even though Kant considers any such revolution unjust, the subjects are still obligated to obey the new constitution. His sole exception lies with the dethroned monarch as Kant leaves it to the discretion of other state powers to determine whether they are prepared to assist the monarch’s restoration through the use of force (Kant Reference Kant1991b, 146–47).

The power Kant accords to a sovereign ultimately overrides the concerns he expresses towards the prevention of colonial practices. Although his cosmopolitan right means that foreigners have no right to settle, he, nonetheless, stipulates that ‘The lord of the land has the right to encourage the immigration and settlement of foreigners (colonists) even though the native subjects should look askance at it’. Only their ‘private ownership of land’ needs to be respected, because they live in a civil state (Kant Reference Kant1991b, 160). Yet many Indigenous peoples never adhered to a system of private property. Moreover, as rebellion is always illegitimate, if ‘the lord of the land’ fails to respect the property of the Indigenous people under his jurisdiction or to forge a fair treaty with pastoral and hunting peoples, no redress is possible within Kant’s theoretical framework.

It is questionable too whether Indigenous peoples have any effective capacity to refuse to agree to sign a treaty to hand over their land, whether on fair or unfair terms. Despite Kant’s moral prohibition on the use of violence, no effective limitations exist within his political theory on a sovereign’s use of violence. If Indigenous peoples refuse to comply with a sovereign’s request for a contractual agreement to be able to use their land or if they actively protest against a lord’s settling of their lands, the use of the coercive apparatus of the state appears inevitable. Kant shows some ambiguity towards state power. He claims in Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784) that ‘man is an animal who needs a master’ (Kant Reference Kant1991a, 46) – a proposition that Herder took considerable objection to while turning it on its head.Footnote ⁹ At the same time, as Muthu (Reference Muthu2003, 156–57) indicates, Kant (Reference Kant1991a, 46) is equally aware that the ‘master’ is ‘an animal who needs a master’ and he laments the non-existence of a perfect solution to overcome this dilemma. However, without the provision of any ultimate check on the sovereign through resistance, the balance of power within Kant’s theoretical framework consistently leans towards state authority over minority nations who lack recognition as legal entities. Although Kant’s anti-imperialism ensures the sovereignty of all states, no matter how despotic they might be, his political theory accords no effective protection against colonialism in the cases of either stateless Indigenous peoples or minority nations within multinational states. Kant’s theory might prohibit enforced assimilation, but due to his over-riding concern to ensure the strength of a single sovereign entity, it is no less a doctrine of colonial assimilation, whereby minority nations are absorbed into the dominant nation in the ‘nation-state’ system.

Cultural imperialism

The assimilationist drive within Kant’s theory is perhaps most explicit in his cosmopolitan view of history. It displays, as James Tully (Reference Tully2002) has argued, the kind of cultural imperialism that lingers within the ideological sphere long after the demise of direct colonialism. In both Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose and Toward Perpetual Peace, Kant outlines his hierarchical conception of historical development that places Indigenous stateless peoples at the bottom of the hierarchy and the republican constitution that was emerging in Europe at the highest point. Although he guarantees the sovereignty of all states and he criticizes those who justify the use of violence on the basis of bringing culture and progress to the savages, European superiority is, nonetheless, confirmed at the ideological level. Kant firmly adheres to a conception of low and high culture (Heinz Reference Heinz1996). ‘Savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ exist at lower stages of development, whereas ‘cultivation’, ‘civilization’, and ‘culture’ only exist at the higher levels on our path towards the goal of ‘moral maturity’ (Kant Reference Kant1991a, 48–49):

The key towards moral maturity lies in the international sphere where ‘the highest point of nature’ will be achieved with ‘a universal cosmopolitan existence’ (Kant Reference Kant1991a, 51). That cosmopolitan existence is dependent on all peoples adopting a republican civil constitution and the European model of the ‘nation-state’ in which nations within states are assimilated into one nation. Where Herder attempts to achieve a balance between unity and diversity in the art of governance, uniformity over diversity is central to Kant’s vision and a key feature of his theory of state sovereignty. Europeans might have some way to go in Kant’s estimation to achieve moral maturity, but the perfect state already exists in nascent form in European models. Nature will ultimately ensure this end as human beings’ propensity for unsociability propels them towards war and revolution, whose devastation Kant regards as the motive force to encourage people to abandon ‘their lawless state of savagery’ and enter into ‘a federation of peoples in which every state, even the smallest, could expect to derive its security and rights not from its own power or its own legal judgement, but solely from this great federation’ (Kant Reference Kant1991a, 47). Thus, despite Kant’s deontological stance that determines unjust means like the use of violence are illegitimate, violence, forms a central function in the realization of his ‘nation-state’ ideal. Right reason dictates that every state ought to adopt a republican constitution that guarantees legal equality to everyone, a single common legislator, and freedom under the law, but it is Nature that will eventually ensure the abandonment of inferior forms of political organization (Kant Reference Kant1991d, 99–100, 108–114).

Herder dismisses Kant’s theory of development ‘towards a future better republic, towards the best form of state, indeed of all states’ as ‘a dazzling phantom’. He finds such ideological pronouncements of progress particularly problematic as they seduce and delude people ‘with the names of “freedom,” “enlightenment,” “highest happiness of the peoples”’ (Herder Reference Herder1991, 734, Reference Herder2002, 413). Happiness cannot be attained by blindly imitating another people, because each culture has its own standard of happiness that evolves from its own history and circumstances to suit its particular time and place. ‘Hence’, Herder (Reference Herder2002, 413, Reference Herder1991, 734) writes, ‘a history that calculates everything in the case of every land with a view to this utopian plan in accordance with unproved first principles is the most dazzling deceptive history’. Freedom cannot be imported through the imitation of institutional structures from elsewhere that might be entirely inappropriate to the unique conditions of a place. In encouraging people to learn from other cultures, adaptation to one’s own circumstances is vital to ensure the authenticity that lay at the core of Herder’s conception of self-determination. Freedom needs to grow from below through the empowerment of a people. Herder’s international theory, thus, stands apart from mainstream international relations theory with the legitimacy he accords to all peoples and their political communities. Authenticity, for Herder, exists by following one’s own path and not a European model of ‘nation-state’ formation.

Herder further perceives that the colonial project is not only evident in the direct exploitation and coercion of other peoples. It operates equally, if more subtly, through the sense of superiority that a people exudes over another at the ideological level. Constant belittling of another’s way of life negatively impacts on the latter’s sense of self-worth. In his Fragments on Recent German Literature (1767–68) – the work that first elevated him to the forefront of the German intellectual scene – he notes critically the tendency of past French writers to denigrate the German language and insists that ‘no genius need be ashamed of their mother tongue, or lament it’ (Herder Reference Herder1985, 212, 259). His understanding of the workings of French cultural imperialism means that he recognizes Kant’s international theory similarly perpetuates colonialism at the ideological level by sending a clear message that Indigenous political communities are inferior.

From his earliest writings, Herder, therefore, emphasizes the role of historical writing in the perpetuation of European hegemony. In Yet Another Philosophy of History, he ridicules the arrogance of the idea he attributes to some of his contemporaries that Europe has attained the peak in a linear progression of history. The enlightenment, universality, and cosmopolitanism that European ‘civilization’ purports to offer is instead a guise for the destruction of cultural diversity that is predicated on the categorically mistaken belief held by Kant (and many others in the 18th century) that Europe alone possesses culture (Herder Reference Herder1991, 741, Reference Herder1989, 11–12, Reference Herder1994, 40, 75–76, Reference Herder2002, 297–98, 328–29). Repeating these points as a prelude to his peace plan in his late Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, he writes:

Thus, the writing of history becomes a key site in Herder’s theory in which to overcome the workings of colonialism and promote peaceful international relations inclusive of all peoples. Kant’s critique in his mature cosmopolitanism of the worst excesses of European behaviour towards other peoples has much in common with many of Herder’s own criticisms of European colonialism. However, the elimination of the direct subjugation of other peoples is, from Herder’s perspective, insufficient to combat the far more commonplace European sense of superiority that lay at the heart of cultural imperialism and that he believes is evident in Kant’s theories of development and the state.