For a Common European Defence. Kantian Ideas on Why it does not Exist, How to Achieve it and at What Price

The objective of achieving a common European defense has accompanied the EU integration process without ever being realized. The explanation for this failure lies in the difficulty of reconciling, on the one hand, the sovereignty of member states and, on the other hand, the transfer of defense and foreign policy functions to community institutions. Drawing on parts of my recent work on the Kantian federation (Caranti 2022), this article demonstrates how Kant provides the necessary resources to understand the underlying reasons that hinder this reconciliation and the price that would need to be paid, specifically in terms of the sovereignty of member states, to achieve the goal of a common defense. To obtain such resources, we must delve into the much-debated issue in Kantian studies of why Kant appears, not without ambiguity and reconsiderations, to ultimately prefer the solution of a supranational federation over that of a world republic (the Völkerbund instead of the Völkerstaat) as one of the three pillars on which his project of perpetual peace rests. The first part thus presents three Kantian arguments for preferring the Völkerbund solution to the Völkerstaat, and the second analyzes some cosmopolitan criticisms of this preference. The third and fourth parts respond to these criticisms by showing that Kant’s perceived “sovereignty dilemma” cannot be circumvented in the manner suggested by moderate cosmopolitans to arrive at the conclusion that a common European defense is both possible and desirable but requires (or implies) the transformation of the European Union from what it is today, an entity halfway between confederalism and federalism, into a fully-fledged federation with a central government, closely approaching the recurrent dream of the United States of Europe.