ABSTRACT
Immanuel Kant seems an unlikely candidate to have become one of the most oft-invoked figures in appraisals of international security in the last decade of the twentieth century. For one thing, he had been dead for nearly 200 years. For another, to the extent that Kant had made any impact at all on discussions of international politics, it was usually to be cast as a quintessential idealist, the author of an interesting but fundamentally misguided and certainly un-realistic (in both practical and academic senses) treatise on perpetual peace. Yet over the course of the 1990s, Kant became one of the most frequently mentioned thinkers in international security. With Perpetual Peace as their touchstone, numerous analyses declared that Kant had basically been right all along, and that the link between democracy and peace – and particularly the claim that liberal-democracies do not go to war with one another – constitutes one of the most important discoveries concerning the nature of security, and the one of the most important insights for its construction.1
