Perpetual Peace

¹No state shall by force interfere with the constitution or government of another state.

²No treaty of peace shall be held valid in which there is tacitly reserved matter for a future war.

³Standing armies shall in time be totally abolished. For they incessantly menace other states by their readiness to appear at all times prepared for war.

⁴They incite them to compete with each other in the number of armed men, and there is no limit to this. The cost of peace finally becomes more oppressive than that of a short war, and standing armies are thus the cause of aggressive wars undertaken in order to relieve the state of this burden.

⁵No national debt shall be contracted with a view to the external friction of states. A credit system, if used by the powers as an instrument of aggression against one another, shows the power of money in its most dangerous form.

⁶The civil constitution of every state should be republican. The republican constitution, besides the purity of its origin — having sprung from the pure source of the concept of law — also gives a favorable prospect for the desired consequence, namely, perpetual peace.

⁷The reason is this: 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.

⁸Among these 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.

⁹The law of nations shall be founded on a federation of free states.

¹⁰For states in their relation to each other, there cannot be any reasonable way out of the lawless condition which entails only war except that they, like individual men, should give up their savage lawless freedom, adjust themselves to the constraints of public law, and thus establish a continuously growing state consisting of various nations which will ultimately include all the nations of the world.