the conceptual and limited figure of the State monopolizing violence.

 

That means of mass annihilation are contrary to the law of nations is difficult to immediately dispute because the use of these weapons no longer allows for the distinction between civilians and other participants, who happen to be in uniform. Would it then be permissible to make threats with these weapons? However, the adherent of Real Politik will point to the questionable status of the law of nations and object that only scrutinizable international agreements can realize these legal principles—and this is what has been at stake since Geneva. Today, the logic of the arms race has created such absurd relationships and risks that the proscription of means of mass annihilation, as a first step toward abolishing the scandalous state of nature between states, is a legitimate objective, even if initially it must be pursued through unilateral steps. However, the law of nations itself needs innovative impulses, insofar as it is still trapped in the ideology of the European State system, existing between 1648 and 1914. The example of the history full of vicissitudes of the imposition of important fundamental rights suggests a long-term historical perspective, in which it is also necessary to see the development and progressive imposition of the principles of the law of nations. Faced with the adolescent fantasy of ritualizing friend-enemy relations in extra-legal terms, the energetic attempt at a first step toward effectively juridifying the state of nature between states is pure realism. What else could it be? Opponents claim that the United States shifted from a strategy of preventing war to waging war—not to produce atomic wars, but to be able to make threats with its great possibilities of victory. If this new strategy remains in effect, even for only as long as the previous one, planning will have prejudged a time interval within which, by human measures, many different things can happen, even when consideration is limited to errors or failures. The modern-day violence-monopolizing state made internal legal peace possible; an equally unprecedented evolutionary wave would be necessary to approach that other international legal peace that Kant projected in his book. If this utopia, necessary for survival, must not end in the nightmare of a World State, it also cannot be squeezed, in turn, into the conceptual and limited figure of the State monopolizing violence.