4.1The claim
Kant's first preliminary article reads at first as a rule about secrecy. This section argues that its commentary makes it a rule about renunciation, and that Kant's later test of publicity, in the second appendix, is explicitly weaker than a rule of openness. The case adds to the debate of Section 2 a reason why the information side and the commitment side cannot be separated in Kant: the secret reservation is a refusal to commit that hides itself.
4.2The article and its commentary
The article itself is a single sentence, and the parent study's rules allow it to be quoted.
No treaty of peace shall be regarded as valid, if made with the secret reservation of material for a future war.
The commentary that follows is short and dense.
For then it would be a mere truce, a mere suspension of hostilities, not peace. A peace signifies the end of all hostilities and to attach to it the epithet “eternal” is not only a verbal pleonasm, but matter of suspicion. The causes of a future war existing, although perhaps not yet known to the high contracting parties themselves, are entirely annihilated by the conclusion of peace, however acutely they may be ferreted out of documents in the public archives. There may be a mental reservation of old claims to be thought out at a future time, which are, none of them, mentioned at this stage, because both parties are too much exhausted to continue the war, while the evil intention remains of using the first favourable opportunity for further hostilities. Diplomacy of this kind only Jesuitical casuistry can justify: it is beneath the dignity of a ruler, just as acquiescence in such processes of reasoning is beneath the dignity of his minister, if one judges the facts as they really are.
Three things in this paragraph matter for the question of openness. The first is the distinction between peace and truce. A treaty with a hidden reservation is not a bad peace but "a mere suspension of hostilities". The article does not ask whether such a treaty will last; it denies it the name.
The second is the clause about the archives. The causes of a future war, Kant writes, are annihilated by the conclusion of peace "however acutely they may be ferreted out of documents in the public archives." The sentence does not say that the causes cannot be found. It says that finding them does not matter, because the peace has annihilated them. Discovery is not the remedy; renunciation is.
The third is the place where the danger actually lies. It is not in documents but in "a mental reservation of old claims to be thought out at a future time, which are, none of them, mentioned at this stage". The intention waits for "the first favourable opportunity". Exhaustion, not agreement, has stopped the fighting, and the treaty contains an undisclosed refusal to commit.
Here the two sides of the modern debate meet in Kant's text. The hidden claim is private information in the plain sense: one party knows it and the other does not. But its harm is a commitment harm: the party holding it has not bound itself, and waits for a moment when the balance favours it. Verification that searches records cannot reach it, because it was never written down. Kant's only defence in the article is that the treaty itself must give the claims up.
Kant closes the commentary with an ironic concession.
If, however, according to present enlightened ideas of political wisdom, the true glory of a state lies in the uninterrupted development of its power by every possible means, this judgment must certainly strike one as scholastic and pedantic.
The concession admits that the article will look naive to anyone who measures a state by its power. It does not withdraw the article.
4.3What cannot be counted
The third preliminary article, on standing armies, contains a sentence that bears directly on verification, though Kant does not use the word.
The accumulation of treasure in a state would in the same way be regarded by other states as a menace of war, and might compel them to anticipate this by striking the first blow. For of the three forces, the power of arms, the power of alliance and the power of money, the last might well become the most reliable instrument of war, did not the difficulty of ascertaining the amount stand in the way.
Armies threaten by their visible readiness; earlier in the same commentary Kant writes that standing armies "are always threatening other states with war by appearing to be in constant readiness to fight." Treasure threatens differently. Its accumulation is read by neighbours as a menace that may move them to strike first, and only the difficulty of ascertaining its amount keeps it from becoming the most reliable instrument of war. The amount cannot be checked, and the menace is felt all the same.
Kant does not propose an inspector of treasuries. His fourth article forbids national debts contracted for external affairs, which removes one source of such a store. The move matches the first article: where measurement fails, remove the thing that would need measuring.
4.4Strict articles and declared postponement
After the six preliminary articles, Kant sorts them into two kinds. All six, he says, are prohibitive laws, but they do not bind in the same way. The passage is broken in the transcription by Latin terms marked for italic type, so it is quoted here in short pieces. Some of the articles, Kant says, "are strictly valid without regard to circumstances and urgently require to be enforced. Such are Nos. 1, 5, 6." The others "allow subjectively of a certain latitude to suit particular circumstances", and their enforcement "may be legitimately put off, so long as we do not lose sight of the ends at which they aim."
The first article is strict: a secret reservation cannot be tolerated for a while and removed later.
The latitude given to the other articles has its own limit, which Kant states at once.
This purpose of reform does not permit of the deferment of an act of restitution (as, for example, the restoration to certain states of freedom of which they have been deprived in the manner described in article 2) to an infinitely distant date—as Augustus used to say, to the “Greek Kalends”, a day that will never come. This would be to sanction non-restitution. Delay is permitted only with the intention that restitution should not be made too precipitately and so defeat the purpose we have in view.
The passage gives a rule for postponement close to a design rule. A delay is legitimate only if it serves the end the rule aims at; a delay to a day that never comes is refusal. This article reads the passage as allowing what the first article does not forbid: a declared postponement, whose purpose is stated and whose term is bounded, provided it is not a disguised refusal.
4.5The mental reservation in the first appendix
The first appendix, on the disagreement between morals and politics, returns to the reservation as a feature of what Kant calls sham politics. On the uncertainty of a law of nations made by ministers, Kant writes:
Still more uncertain is a law of nations, ostensibly established upon statutes devised by ministers; for this amounts in fact to mere empty words, and rests on treaties which, in the very act of ratification, contain a secret reservation of the right to violate them.
Here the reservation is of a right, the right to break the treaty, and the phrase "in the very act of ratification" places it at the moment of commitment. It is not a later change of mind but a commitment made with a hidden clause that unmakes it.
The same appendix sets out the maxims of the political moralist, introduced with a remark about their concealment.
The principles which he makes use of here, although indeed he does not make them public, amount pretty much to the following sophistical maxims.
Kant then makes an observation that complicates any simple faith in disclosure.
For the great Powers never feel shame before the judgment of the common herd, but only before one another; so that as far as this matter goes, it is not the revelation of these guiding principles of policy that can make rulers ashamed, but only the unsuccessful use of them.
Revelation alone, on this account, does not shame the powerful. The point anticipates the limit Kant places on his own test of publicity in the second appendix.
4.6Publicity as a test
The second appendix turns publicity into a test. Kant first claims that publicity belongs to the form of every legal title, and then gives what the translation calls the transcendental formula of public right.
All actions relating to the rights of other men are wrong, if the maxims from which they follow are inconsistent with publicity.
He explains why.
This principle must be regarded not merely as ethical, as belonging to the doctrine of virtue, but also as juridical, referring to the rights of men. For there is something wrong in a maxim of conduct which I cannot divulge without at once defeating my purpose, a maxim which must therefore be kept secret, if it is to succeed, and which I could not publicly acknowledge without infallibly stirring up the opposition of everyone.
The test is not whether a maxim has been published but whether it could be published without defeating itself. A secret reservation fails at once. A state that announced at the signing that it reserved its old claims for the first favourable opportunity would have announced that the peace was a truce. The reservation works only if hidden, which by the test makes it wrong.
Kant applies the test to three maxims of international law. Of a state that would evade a promise by claiming to act in a second capacity, he writes that "if a nation or its sovereign proclaimed these maxims, the natural consequence would be that every other would flee from it, or unite with other states to oppose such pretensions." Each maxim fails because publishing it would defeat it.
4.7The limit of the test
Kant does not stop there. He states that the test is negative.
Further, this testing principle is merely negative; that is, it serves only as a means by which we may know when an action is unjust to others.
And later he draws the consequence.
In this principle of the incompatibility of the maxims of international law with their publicity, we have a good indication of the non-agreement between politics and morals, regarded as a science of right. Now we require to know under what conditions these maxims do agree with the law of nations. For we cannot conclude that the converse holds, and that all maxims which can bear publicity are therefore just. For anyone who has a decided supremacy has no need to make any secret about his maxims.
This is the limit of openness, stated by the author of the test. A maxim that cannot survive publication is wrong; one that can survive it is not thereby right, because the strong can publish what they intend without fear. The first appendix has already said why: the great Powers feel no shame at revelation, only at failure.
Kant then names the casuistry of sham politics, beginning with "its mental reservation", which he describes as working "as in the drawing up of a public treaty in such terms as we can, if we will, interpret when occasion serves to our advantage". The reservation has moved from the unspoken claim to the ambiguous text: a treaty can be wholly public and still contain one.
Finally, Kant proposes a second, affirmative principle, which he leaves undeveloped.
All maxims which require publicity, in order that they may not fail to attain their end, are in agreement both with right and politics.
He gives a reason that touches directly on trust.
Now, if this end should be attainable only by publicity, or in other words, through the removal of all distrust of the maxims of politics, these must be in harmony with the right of the people; for a union of the ends of all is only possible in a harmony with this right.
The affirmative principle picks out a narrower class than the negative one. It is not enough that a maxim could be published; it must need publication to work, and Kant ties such an end to the removal of distrust. A verification regime is a candidate for this class: it can remove distrust about compliance only if its results are made known.
4.8Three propositions
The reading yields three propositions for the records.
First, the remedy for the hidden reservation is renunciation in the act of agreement, not discovery afterwards. Kant says outright that searching the archives is beside the point. A verification record that finds hidden material addresses something real, but not the danger the first article names, which is an unmentioned intention.
Second, publicity is a negative test. A maxim that must be hidden to succeed is wrong; a maxim that survives publication is not thereby right, because the strong need no secrets. Disclosure is necessary to the credibility of a peace, on this reading, but it is not sufficient.
Third, Kant distinguishes the strict prohibition of the secret reservation from a bounded, declared postponement. A reserve that is stated, given a purpose, and kept from becoming a deferral to the Greek Kalends is not a secret reservation. This article calls such a reserve an open reserve.
These propositions add to the debate of Section 2 a reason to hold its two sides together. Fortna's verification and Fearon's private information belong to the first proposition's object; Walter's commitment problem belongs to the unmentioned intention that the first proposition says discovery cannot reach. The second proposition qualifies any claim that openness makes peace credible on its own. The third gives a design criterion that the records can be read against.