Vice-Minister Deng Li,
President of the DAAD, Prof. Joybrato Mukherjee,
Excellencies,
Distinguished guests,

As you may have seen on your way in, our celebration for the Day of German Unity is dedicated to the 300^th birthday of philosopher Immanuel Kant. That may seem a surprising theme, but I hope you will agree, by the end of this speech, that it’s very fitting and highly relevant to our times.

When Kant was born in 1724, in Königsberg – which was part of Prussia then and is now the Russian Kaliningrad – the memory of the Thirty Years’ War was still raw.

Kant saw for himself that peace cannot be taken for granted, when Russian troops marched into Königsberg in 1758 and occupied it for four years.

To quote the man himself,

Kant was under no illusions about human nature.

But that does not mean that he resigned himself to such realities.

On the contrary – as he saw it, since peace is not a natural state, it needs to be established and secured.

Kant explained his vision for this in his 1795 treatise „Perpetual Peace“.

I read it as a student, have kept it with me on many travels, and it now sits on my bookshelf here in Beijing. Decades after I first read it, and with all my experience as a diplomat, I can see all the more clearly how right Kant was – sadly – in his assumptions.

He says, for example,

Otherwise, no peace could be concluded, and the hostilities would degenerate into a war of extermination.

What Kant is calling for is the maintenance of a minimum standard of humanity, of decency, even in war – the beginnings of what is now enshrined as international humanitarian law.

It has once again become shockingly necessary to recall attention to those principles.

Kant also examines what conditions are required to make peace last.

The first he identifies is the civil constitution of states, which he says should be „republican“: all citizens should be equal before the law, and the government should represent the will of the people.

He reasons that, if war depends on the consent of the citizens who would themselves suffer its effects, then – and I quote,

His view has since been empirically proven: democracies practically never go to war with one another.

Things are different under a constitution where – in Kant’s words –

If we were to transpose that to nowadays, what would it make you think of?

I can think of several examples from recent history – including German history – where dictators or autocrats, driven by their own obsession with power, tried by any means possible to expand their patch on the map.

The division of Germany in 1945 was a direct consequence of Hitler’s wars of conquest. By contrast, the peaceful reunification of the two German states in 1990 was only achieved because the democratic Germany prioritised peace rather than control of former German territories, in accord with its neighbours and embedded within the European Union.

I’d like to mention one more idea from „Perpetual Peace“:

that of the league of nations, and a law of nations founded on a federation of free states.

Kant wrote that a „league of peace“ among states should seek, in his words,

In 1795, that idea described a distant utopia – but Kant’s ideas lived on: they inspired the creation of both the League of Nations in 1920 and the United Nations in 1945.

However, Kant also feared that, though such a league of peace could hold back states’ war-like inclinations, it would be „in constant peril of their breaking loose again“.

And that’s exactly where we are again today. Russia’s attack on Ukraine more that two years ago is challenging the peace order of the United Nations.

There had been other conflicts and wars before; the United Nations system certainly doesn’t work perfectly. But for a nuclear power, a permanent member of the Security Council, to deny a neighbouring state its right to exist and invade it by military force – that is new.

Russia’s war of aggression is an existential threat to Germany, to peace throughout Europe and to the peace order of the United Nations.

That’s why it’s so important that Russia, the aggressor, does not win this war.

That’s why Germany continues to support Ukraine – with financial aid, with humanitarian assistance, and with weapons too.

And to any doubters, I say this: that will continue for as long as necessary.

The Federal Chancellor has repeatedly confirmed the same.

The United Nations system has its weaknesses, and reform is needed in various areas – but it remains the most comprehensive and best attempt so far in human history to create a global system to maintain peace. Anyone who helps those taking an axe to that edifice should think long and hard about what is at stake. China, as a permanent member of the Security Council, has a special responsibility.

Interest-led alliances between individual states will certainly be no substitute for the United Nations. That applies with regard not only to war and peace but also to those global problems that we can only solve in collaboration – above all, the climate crisis.

That’s why Germany advocates reforming and strengthening the United Nations. That’s why we are standing for a non-permanent seat on the Security Council from 2027.

We are in favour of multilateralism. We are in favour of cooperation, including with China – indeed especially with China, for all our differences.

We have had visits this year, as you know, from the Federal Chancellor, the Vice-Chancellor and various ministers. Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck and Chairman of the NDRC Zheng Shanjie jointly chaired the first session of the Climate and Transformation Dialogue. Two weeks ago, we had a joint seminar of high-level military officials.

We also welcome the fact that there is multifaceted cooperation between Germany and China in the cultural and academic spheres. A stand-out role in that regard is played by the DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service, whose Beijing office is celebrating its 30^th anniversary this year.

Those close relations exist in music too. Currently, with the involvement of several German singers, Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle opera is being performed in Beijing for the first time – which is also a piece, incidentally, about a world order that ends in a cataclysmic twilight of the gods.

As you see – we are working together. We don’t want any de-coupling. Nor, incidentally, are we afraid of competition. But we do want competition to be fair and conducted according to transparent rules.

Let me conclude by returning to Immanuel Kant.

– that was how Kant formulated the motto of the Enlightenment. What it meant was that that neither the church nor the state should determine what people ought to think.

What it also means today is that everyone has the right to question an authority – be it a state, a religion or a party – and to do so in free public discourse. After all, it is only the public exchange of arguments that enables us to think not on the basis of our own prejudices but in terms of reasoning that follows universal logic.

No wonder that Kant came into conflict with Prussia’s censors.

Censorship – and any restriction of the freedom to exchange arguments and opinions in public discourse – is the opposite of enlightenment.

That’s why freedom of opinion is so important, as are artistic freedom, academic freedom and freedom of the press.

Even Kant, incidentally, is not an authority who mustn’t be questioned. He was a product of his time. The way we look at other cultures and peoples today is very different; so is the way we see the roles of women, men and everyone else.

There is a lot more to be said about Kant, but I will just add this for now:

If you enjoy quotations, we have a little quiz that you can play with on your phones, with quotations from Kant and from Chinese philosophers. It reveals once again that, on some notions, we are not all that different between Europe and China.

Thank you all for joining us in celebrating the Day of German Unity. I wish you all a very pleasant evening!