foedus pacificum

English

Etymology

From Latin foedus (“alliance”), pācificum (“peaceful”), in reference to the work of Immanuel Kant.

Noun

foedus pacificum (uncountable)

1. (politics) A theoretical global league of republics that would produce world peace.
   • 2003, Klaus Dicke, “Peace Through International Law and the Case of Iraq”, in Gerhard Beestermöller, editor, Iraq: Threat and Response, →ISBN, page 21:

     Moreover, the imbalance of Article 2 para. 4 and the right to self-defence is paralleled to a “significant oscillation” in Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” between the positive idea of a world-republic and the negative substitute of a foedus pacificum.

   • 2006, Alyssa R. Bernstein, “A Human Right to Democracy? Legitimacy and Intervention”, in Raw Martin, David A. Reidy, editors, Rawls’s Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia?, page 290:

     But still, he argues, if Kant’s hypothesis of a foedus pacificum is correct, as Rawls believes it is, armed conflict between democratic peoples will tend to disappear as they approach the ideal of constitutional regimes.

   • 2013, Nicholas Rengger, Just War and International Order: The Uncivil Condition in World Politics, →ISBN, page 58:

     The other face of the foedus pacificum, in other words, is a democratic war theory, an account of how and why republics will fight wars and a recognition that such wars may be very fierce and very frequent until such time as the foedus pacificum covers the earth.