It is Immanuel Kant who, in his late work On Perpetual Peace (1795), equips us with the necessary tools for understanding this problem. This short work establishes a theory of democratic peace, a theory that, at first, seems to be distant from any practical application, as Kant himself suggest with keen irony in the forward: “Whether this satirical inscription on a Dutch innkeeper’s sign, on which a church cemetery was painted, was meant for men in general, or especially for rulers, who are never weary of war, or rather only for the philosophers, who dream this sweet dream—one can set this question aside.”

Both reactions are valid, but both miss the heart of the problem. To find it, one must look elsewhere. The agitated state of the political actors involved, which is only with great effort disguised with equanimity, and even indifference, points to the fact that even the political actors themselves understand this.

In the days since the U.S. diplomatic correspondence was published by Wikileaks, two reactions dominate the public debate. On the one hand, it is suggested that one ought not to take the statements of the U.S. embassies too seriously. Horst Seehofer suggested that they were mere “party gossip,” while Hillary Clinton proposed that, “insofar as they were not falsified, they are by and large irrelevant for the foreign policy of the United States.” On the other hand, however, it is proposed that the damage for the praxis of diplomacy is immense, if those involved can no longer assume that their reports will remain confidential.

About 200 years after the emergence of Kant’s theory, it turns out that political scientists who work in international relations have come to the conclusion that this theory is correct, according to the data they have thus far. This is surprising: the dominant theory in international relations—so-called “realism”—has no explanation for this data. Realism posits that states, in foreign policy, act exclusively according to their own national interests, so that, without any supra-national body, there is a sort of Hobbesian state of nature, in which conflicts, according to the interests of the states involved, can escalate into wars, regardless of the sort of constitutions these states have.

Against this view, Kant maintained that democracies (“Republics”) would not go to war against one another, because the interests of the ruling bodies within these democracies are generally identical with the interests of those who are governed by them, because the worth of the individual has become a part of the understanding of the state, and because—and here is the crucial point for us—the international relationships in democracies are public: there aren’t any secret subsidiary agreements to international treaties; for every citizen, everything is transparent and can be checked on, and those who rule in democracies tend to avoid all duplicity and secret policies. This condition of publicity constitutes the centerpiece of Kant’s democratic peace: The democratic form of government will ensure peace between republics, independent of their particular interests, only when the goals and praxis of regimes in international politics are transparent and public.

Two alternative theories of international conflict one can regard as disproven: Economic independence does not secure peace, which both the example of the Balkan war and the wars in Africa prove. Moreover, common moral concepts and cultural proximity, on their own, are not adequate to prevent war.

It is all the more surprising that there has never been a war between two democracies, because the number of democracies has grown along with the number of wars in the past decades: that there has never been such a war ought to be regarded as an improbable occurrence: One must see the hypothesis that democracies work through their conflicts without violence as empirically well-confirmed.

Nevertheless, a condition for the survival of democratic peace is that the praxis of foreign policy in democracies should distinguish itself from the praxis in dictatorships. The Wikileaks documents show, however, that Kant’s criterion of publicity has been abused not only by dictatorial regimes but also by U.S. diplomacy and, it is likely, by all Western states. The outrageous reasons given for the war in Iraq are only the most obvious and most scandalous example until now. The public was intentionally misled. Had they been adequately informed, they would presumably not have approved of the second Iraq war.

This war was directed against a dictatorial regime and therefore doesn’t disprove the hypothesis of democratic peace. Nevertheless, the justification for this hypothesis rests on the assumption that the foreign policy of democratic and dictatorial regimes will be conducted in fundamentally distinct ways.

This fundamental difference is called into question by the Wikileaks documents. It is about time that we orient the foreign policy of democratic states according to the principles of clarity and truth. The citizens of a democratic state have a right to know the strategies of their government and its motives.

If the U.S. endorses the admission of Turkey into the E.U. and sings the praises the Erdogan government for its willingness to reform, while the American ambassador in Turkey at the same time implies that this same regime is pursuing a program of Islamization in Turkey and, moreover, is corrupt to the core, this is a glaring breach of Kant’s condition of publicity, and capable of eroding the fundamental conditions of democratic government action: transparency, coherence, and oversight.

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* Professor Julian Nida-Rümelin teaches philosophy and democratic theory at University of Munich. He is also currently President of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Philosophie (German Society for Philosophy).

This article appeared on Thursday, December 16, 2010 in the print edition of Die Zeit (no. 51, p. 52).

Translated by D.P. O’Connell, a writer and translator living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. O'Connell is currently at work on a book about the theory of knowledge in the 15th-century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa. He received a Fulbright Grant in Philosophy and Religion for 2004/05, and has studied philosophy at Trier University and at Catholic University of America. He will receive a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Catholic University of America in 2011.

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We at New APPS are grateful to Professor Nida-Rümelin, to Die Zeit, and to DP O'Connell for this opportunity to present the English translation of this piece.