Are you a fan of Kant?
(Kant is a multi-lateralist, anti-imperialist, supporter of international law, supporter of international organizations to restrain the war-making ability of nations. He supports strict respect for every nation's sovereignty. He opposes standing armies, and deficit funding of wars.)
In Zum ewigen Frieden (On Perpetual Peace) (1795), Kant proposed a high-minded scheme for securing widespread political stability and security. If statesmen would listen to philosophers, he argued, we could easily achieve an international federation of independent republics, each of which reduces its standing army, declines to interfere in the internal affairs of other states, and agrees to be governed by the notion of universal hospitality.
2. "No Independent States, Large or Small, Shall Come under the Dominion of Another State by Inheritance, Exchange, Purchase, or Donation"
A state is not, like the ground which it occupies, a piece of property (patrimonium). It is a society of men whom no one else has any right to command or to dispose except the state itself. It is a trunk with its own roots. But to incorporate it into another state, like a graft, is to destroy its existence as a moral person, reducing it to a thing; such incorporation thus contradicts the idea of the original contract without which no right over a people can be conceived.
3. "Standing Armies (miles perpetuus) Shall in Time Be Totally Abolished"
For they incessantly menace other states by their readiness to appear at all times prepared for war; they incite them to compete with each other in the number of armed men, and there is no limit to this...
4. "National Debts Shall Not Be Contracted with a View to the External Friction of States"
...This facility in making war, together with the inclination to do so on the part of rulers--an inclination which seems inborn in human nature--is thus a great hindrance to perpetual peace. Therefore, to forbid this credit system must be a preliminary article of perpetual peace all the more because it must eventually entangle many innocent states in the inevitable bankruptcy and openly harm them.
(my comment- Fewer Americans would have supported the Iraq war, if, instead of deficit spending, it had been paid for through higher taxes.)
5. "No State Shall by Force Interfere with the Constitution or Government of Another State"
6. "No State Shall, during War, Permit Such Acts of Hostility Which Would Make Mutual Confidence in the Subsequent Peace Impossible: Such Are the Employment of Assassins (percussores), Poisoners (venefici), Breach of Capitulation, and Incitement to Treason (perduellio) in the Opposing State"
These are dishonorable stratagems. For some confidence in the character of the enemy must remain even in the midst of war, as otherwise no peace could be concluded and the hostilities would degenerate into a war of extermination (bellum internecinum). War, however, is only the sad recourse in the state of nature (where there is no tribunal which could judge with the force of law)
(my comment- The UN, the ICC, these are the institutions which could act as tribunals, empowering them would mean less "recourse in the state of nature", which I called The Law Of Tooth And Fang, in the earlier discussion about "good" and "bad" killing. But, the Hegemon consistently dis-empowers these tribunals.)
...if the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide that war should be declared...., nothing is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decreeing for themselves all the calamities of war. Among the latter would be: having to fight, having to pay the costs of war from their own resources, having painfully to repair the devastation war leaves behind, and, to fill up the measure of evils, load themselves with a heavy national debt that would embitter peace itself and that can never be liquidated on account of constant wars in the future.
(my comment- The Bush solution, is to obtain consent by a lie, to defer the cost to future generations, to use our superior technology to limit our casualties, and thereby make painless this "poor game".)
...there must be a league of a particular kind, which can be called a league of peace (foedus pacificum), and which would be distinguished from a treaty of peace (pactum pacis) by the fact that the latter terminates only one war, while the former seeks to make an end of all wars forever. This league does not tend to any dominion over the power of the state but only to the maintenance and security of the freedom of the state itself and of other states in league with it, without there being any need for them to submit to civil laws and their compulsion...
The concept of a law of nations as a right to make war does not really mean anything, because it is then a law of deciding what is right by unilateral maxims through force and not by universally valid public laws which restrict the freedom of each one. The only conceivable meaning of such a law of nations might be that it serves men right who are so inclined that they should destroy each other and thus find perpetual peace in the vast grave that swallows both the atrocities and their perpetrators.
(my comment- "unilateral maxims through force" is a good description of the Bush foreign policy.)
"The Law of World Citizenship Shall Be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality"
Here, as in the preceding articles, it is not a question of philanthropy but of right. Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another. (my comment-I guess he wouldn't approve of ethnic profiling by the U.S., and nations set up for the exclusive benefit of one race/religion/culture, like Israel.)
...the inhospitable actions of the civilized and especially of the commercial states of our part of the world. The injustice which they show to lands and peoples they visit (which is equivalent to conquering them) is carried by them to terrifying lengths. America, the lands inhabited by the Negro, the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc., were at the time of their discovery considered by these civilized intruders as lands without owners, for they counted the inhabitants as nothing.
It is only a right of temporary sojourn, a right to associate, which all men have. They have it by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other.
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