‘Un-cancelling the future’: Kantian ethics and the Ukraine war
‘Un-cancelling the future’: Kantian ethics and the Ukraine war

Summary/Abstract: International Relations discussion of the Ukraine War has revived an interest in ethical foreign policy debates that were central to the discipline in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This short article seeks to draw an important distinction in articulations of liberal idealism between the early postcold war period and today. The key point is that liberal internationalism in the post-cold war period assumed that a liberal international order was able to literally come into being, realising the Kantian cosmopolitan imaginary. However, the realisation of a liberal international also brought a problematic sense of closure, an end to imaginaries of progress. The discussion of this crisis of modernity was often displaced to debates over globalisation and, more recently, the Anthropocene and catastrophic climate change, rather than directly referencing the international order itself. In analysing the Ukraine War as the first war articulated as enabling the repair of this closure, able to ‘un-cancel’ the future, this article seeks to bring the concerns of temporal closure and international order together. It is suggested that the drive to project a liberal futural imaginary marks a return to Kantian ethics with a clear separation between liberal ideals and the ‘evil’ of empirical reality itself.

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