ABSTRACT
More than two hundred years ago, Immanuel Kant identified in “commerce” a potential force to pacify the relations among states. He pointed at an intrinsic logic of commercial relations that eventually could render the means of force dysfunctional. Not in the application of cosmopolitan norms or the acquisition of a higher standard of morality, but rather in the economic rationality of commercial exchange did Kant localize the dynamic towards peaceful relationships. In line with this “economic” aspect of his perpetual peace, a liberal tradition has viewed the evolution of capitalist market economies as a development toward overcoming the propensity for resorting to military force in international relations. In analogy to the homo œconomicus, so the argument goes, states increasingly pursue their interests in a contractual manner, replacing forceful self-help by a system of shared norms and rules whose observance is in the mutual interest of all actors involved. Similar to the internal pacification of national societies, inter-state relations would tend to acquire the nature of market relations in which the acquisition of resources by force has been replaced by violencefree competition among economic actors.
