European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

THE ETHICAL DIMENSION IN EUROPEAN IDENTITY 303Secondly, Kant clearly sees the social and political process ofModernity both in need of overcoming the status in which modernclassical States find themselves and “obliged” to build a new type ofState capable of a new political game and a still not attained degree ofresponsibility. This overcoming is necessary because the existingsituation and interrelation of the state system has war embedded in it;and this paralysing situation is humanity’s cry. The overcoming can onlymean —according to this way of reading history— the proper legalillustration of the State in the framework of an internal civil constitution.In such proposal, along with the assumption of an unsatisfactorysituation, there is a hidden critical principle related to anthropologicalsuppositions. I mean, the proposal of concrete political action ispresided by the idea of a goal or an aim in history (that towards whichthe design of rationality has a tendency to) drawn in congruence withthe dynamic experimented by Europe, that is to say, the achievementof a civil society that administers law in general.It is a society in which maximum liberty under external laws ispowerfully and irresistibly united; in other words, it is about the accomplishmentof a perfectly fair civil constitution.The task of the constitution of a civil society administering law asultimate goal or horizon —since Kant warns us that we are far awayfrom this objective— allows us, however, to determine the action thatsuch a horizon propels as possible and as essential. Kant determinesthese actions-tasks:—The implementation of an external legal relation between theStates and/or—The constitution of a “Federation of States,” where what isrelevant is the constitution of united potential (Macht) andunited will according to laws. The federation or pact betweenStates is described by Kant in the same terms describing thegoal. However, evidently, the possibilities of incurring thatrealization in the order of the States are much greater, sincethere is greater order formality involved in such constitution.As we are seeing, the proposals are not only political programmesready to confront the stormy conflicts of history that Western civilizationdrags (they are also that). No. From Kant’s viewpoint, they have aworthy function as design keys that direct the course of human historyin favour of the full development of all the dispositions anchored inreason. (In general, we could say, as it has been currently recognised bypolitical science, that the greatest political advances or intents ofWestern culture in the last century are not far from Kant’s plans.)