Europa y una federación global: La visión de Kant

Abstract

In “Perpetual Peace,” Kant officially endorses the ideal of a pacific federation of sovereign states, but then also states that such a federation is only a “negative surrogate” for a world republic and cannot make peace truly secure. The reason for his ambivalence is that both models are flawed: A federation fails to achieve a thoroughgoing juridical condition, while a world government is unrealistic and dangerous. Had Kant been able to shed his unsound belief in the indivisibility of sovereignty, he might have endorsed a superior intermediate ideal of a vertical (and horizontal) dispersal of sovereign powers. The emerging European Union exemplifies this intermediate model–though, from a Kantian point of view, it still needs to be perfected in four important respects before it can serve as an ideal for the world at large.