World Order by Henry Kissinger Read Free Book Online Page B

Baron of Montesquieu, applied the principles of the balance of power to domestic policy by describing a concept of checks and balances later institutionalized in the American Constitution. He went on from there into a philosophy of history and of the mechanisms of societal change. Surveying the histories of various societies, Montesquieu concluded that events were never caused by accident. There was always an underlying cause that reason could discover and then shape to the common good:
     
It is not fortune which rules the world  … There are general intellectual as well as physical causes active in every monarchy which bring about its rise, preservation, and fall. All [seeming] accidents are subject to these causes, and whenever an accidental battle, that is, a particular cause, has destroyed a state, a general cause also existed which led to the fall of this state as a result of a single battle. In short, it is the general pace of things which draws all particular events along with it.
     
    The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, probably the greatest philosopher of the Enlightenment period, took Montesquieu a stepfurther by developing a concept for a permanent peaceful world order. Pondering the world from the former Prussian capital of Königsberg, casting his gaze on the period of the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolutionary War, and the French Revolution, Kant dared to see in the general upheaval the faint beginnings of a new, more peaceful international order.
    Humanity, Kant reasoned, was characterized by a distinctive “ unsocial sociability ”: the “tendency to come together in society, coupled, however, with a continual resistance which constantly threatens to break this society up.” The problem of order, particularly international order, was “ the most difficult and the last to be solved by the human race.” Men formed states to constrain their passions, but like individuals in the state of nature each state sought to preserve its absolute freedom, even at the cost of “a lawless state of savagery.” But the “ devastations, upheavals and even complete inner exhaustion of their powers” arising from interstate clashes would in time oblige men to contemplate an alternative. Humanity faced either the peace of “ the vast graveyard of the human race ” or peace by reasoned design.
    The answer, Kant held, was a voluntary federation of republics pledged to non-hostility and transparent domestic and international conduct. Their citizens would cultivate peace because, unlike despotic rulers, when considering hostilities, they would be deliberating about “ calling down on
themselves
all the miseries of war .” Over time the attractions of this compact would become apparent, opening the way toward its gradual expansion into a peaceful world order. It was Nature’s purpose that humanity eventually reason its way toward “ a system of united power , hence a cosmopolitan system of general political security” and “
a perfect civil union of mankind
.”
    The confidence, verging on brashness, in the power of reason reflected in part a species of what the Greeks called hubris—a kind of spiritual pride that bore the seeds of its own destruction within itself. The Enlightenment philosophers ignored a key issue: Can governmentalorders be invented from scratch by intelligent thinkers, or is the range of choice limited by underlying organic and cultural realities (the Burkean view)? Is there a single concept and mechanism logically uniting all things, in a way that can be discovered and explicated (as d’Alembert and Montesquieu argued), or is the world too complicated and humanity too diverse to approach these questions through logic alone, requiring a kind of intuition and an almost esoteric element of statecraft?
    The Enlightenment philosophers on the Continent generally opted for the rationalist rather than the organic view of political evolution. In the process, they