Abstract

At the beginning of the 21st century stand the dates 9th November 1989 and 11th September 2001. The one date marks the commencement of the second European revolution, which puts the free market economy, demilitarisation, and pluralist democracy in the place of the arms race and Soviet state socialism. The other date reminds us of the vulnerability of technologically advanced civilisations of wealth and the gap between the so-called ‹West› and the affliction, feelings of hate and the possibilities to use violence of those parts of the world with which, since the end of the cold war, the processes of modernity have definitely caught up. The one date can be read as a ‹historic sign› in the sense of the Kantian hope of legal progress and peaceful-federal world citizenship; the other as crass denial of such ideas. Those, like the American Robert Kagan, who are critical of Kant and who argue against the prohibition of war as reflected in international law and in the European refusal to conduct ‹world order wars›, like to refer to Hobbes’s ‹state of nature›. Closer inspection however quickly revelas that the alternative ‹Hobbes vs. Kant› is misguided in several ways and that political realism and Kantian ‹Weltinnenpolitik› do not constitute contradictory opposites. This is, the lesson of the example case of Iraq