The principle of international law, as the universal right that is supposed to hold in and for itself between states, as distinct from the particular content of positive treaties, is that treaties, as that on which the obligations of states toward one another rest, are to be kept. But because the relation between them has their sovereignty as its principle, they stand, to that extent, in a state of nature toward one another, and their rights have their actuality not in a universal [power] constituted [with] authority over them, but in their own particular will. That universal determination therefore remains at the level of an ought, and the condition becomes an alternation between relations conforming to treaties and the suspension of such relations.

There is no praetor [to adjudicate] between states — at most arbitrators and mediators, and even these only contingently, that is, according to particular wills. The Kantian conception of a perpetual peace secured through a league of states, which would settle every dispute and, as a power recognized by each individual state, resolve every disagreement, thereby making decision by war impossible, presupposes an agreement between states which — resting on moral, religious, or other grounds and considerations, but in any case always on particular sovereign wills — would remain afflicted with contingency.