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I In search of perpetual peace In the final decades of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant set forth his now paradig-matic vision of what he called a ‘universal cos-mopolitan condition ’ among states, ‘a peaceful, if not yet friendly and universal community of all peoples on the earth who can come into active relations with one another ’ (Kant, 2006: 146). Kant pointed out that all human beings share ‘the right of com-mon possession of the surface of the earth’. Since humans ‘cannot scatter themselves on it without limit’, he reasoned, ‘they must... ultimately tolerate one another as neighbors’ (2006: 82). As a political project, then, Kant’s cosmopolitanism anticipates a kind of world citizenship within a federation of free and sovereign states, the first step toward the possibility of a ‘perpetual peace ’ (se