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The democratic peace theory or simply democratic peace (often DPT and sometimes democratic pacifism) is a theory in political science and philosophy which holds that democracies—specifically, liberal democracies—never or almost never go to war with one another. Despite criticism, the democratic peace theory has grown in prominence among political scientists in the last two decades and has become influential in the policy world in Western countries. Scholar Jack Levy famously remarked that the democratic peace is "the closest thing we have to a law in international politics."
History of the theories
Early theories
The idea that democracy is a source of world peace came relatively late in political theory. No ancient author seems to have thought so. Early authors referred to republics rather than democracies, since the word democracy had acquired a bad name until early modern times. Nicolo Machiavelli believed that republics were by nature excellent war-makers and empire-builders, citing Rome as the prime example. It was Immanuel Kant who first foreshadowed the theory in his essay "Perpetual Peace" written in 1795, although he thought that democracy was only of several necessary conditions for a perpetual peace. Since World War I, there has been widespread popular rhetoric that democratic states are peace-loving, but the idea was not systematically studied by social science. The gradual spread of liberal democracy in the world in the second half of the 20th century drew greater attention to the relationship between democracy and peace.
Modern theories
In 1964, Dean Babst, then a Wisconsin criminologist, published a paper asserting that no two liberal democracies had ever been at war with each other. This was also claimed at greater length in 1979 by R.J. Rummel, professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, and much of this research is available on his web-site. The term also refers to an ever-increasing state of world peace, which Rummel credits to democracy. The following propositions formed the basis of Rummel's original theory:
- Democracies do not make war on each other.
- The more democratic two nations are, the less the violence between them.
- Democracies engage in the least amounts of foreign violence.
- Democracies display, by far, the least amounts of internal violence.
- Modern democracies have virtually no "democide" (i.e. genocide and mass murder)
A related but slightly different concept is Rummel's Law, which states that the less freedom a people have, the more likely their rulers are to murder them.
As the theory took shape in the 1980s, particularly through the work of Michael Doyle and Bruce Russett, it increasingly focused on the "weak" proposition that democracies tend to behave peacefully towards each other. The "strong" proposition that democracies are in general more peaceful in world affairs drew less wide acceptance.
The theory reached an audience outside academia with President Bill Clinton's State of the Union Address, Jan 25, 1994 "Ultimately, the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere. Democracies don't attack each other."
Causes
Many theoretical arguments have been put forward as explanations for the democratic peace. Dating back to Immanuel Kant, many have argued that democracies are characterized by the rule of law, and are therefore inclined to resolve disputes between them through arbitration.
Other scholars suggest a theory of common culture: the citizens of democratic societies are less likely to view the citizens of other democracies as enemies, and since their support for the war is necessary (due to the democratic system), war is less likely.
Following Rummel, some support the idea that democracies are inherently peaceful because wide citizen participation ensures that decision making power lies in the hands of those most likely to be killed or wounded in wars, and their relatives and friends. This last argument cannot explain why democracies are very bellicose towards non-democratic states while remaining peaceful towards each other, unless we also suppose that citizens of democratic states feel constantly threatened by the existence of non-democracies or otherwise are provoked by them. The argument that democratic peace arises from citizens avoiding casualties is strengthened by democracies seeming less reluctant to start low-conflict conflicts. This idea also suggests that the relationship in the DPT became stronger when graphic movies and television made wars less romantic.
See also the "Causation is not correlation" section below for a discussion of the hypothesis that it is not democracy itself but some other factor(s) associated with democratic states that explain the peace.
Statistical studies supporting the DPT
Babst (1972) concluded that no wars had been fought between democracies between 1789 and 1941. Singer (1976) supported this. Doyle (1983) found that "constitutionally secure liberal states have yet to engage in wars with one another".
Rummel studied all wars between 1816 and 1991 and found 198 wars between non-democracies, 155 wars between democracies and non-democracies, and 0 wars between democracies . He argues that this is strongly statistically significant. For example, during the 1946-1986 period there were 45 states that had a democratic regime; 109 that did not. There were thus 6,876 state dyads (e.g., Bolivia-Chile), of which 990 were democratic-democratic dyads. None of the 990 fought each other. Using the binomial theorem, the probability of the 990 dyads not engaging in war is .9953 to the 990th power or .0099, which rounded off, equals .01. The probability of this lack of war between democracies being by chance is virtually 100 to 1.
Maoz & Abdolai (1989) analyzed all wars between 1816 and 1976 and found no wars between democracies and that this is statistically significant. They also found less lower-level conflicts between democracies. Breemer (1992) reported similar findings for the years between 1816 and 1965. Ray (1993, 1995) found no wars between democracies.
Several different kinds of statistical analyses find support for the DPT, including such techniques as logistic regression, poisson regression, and negative binomial analyses (King 1989). Studies using the Polity Data Set have concluded that the theory is also validated when a continuous measure of democracy is used (i.e. the higher two countries' joint scores, the lower their chance of being involved in a war against each other). Recently, also statistical analyses using neural nets find support for theory, both during and before the Cold War .
Democracies do sometimes initiate wars against authoritarian states. Some argue that democracies usually enter these wars because they are provoked by authoritarian states. Several papers shows that democracies are slightly, but significantly less involved in wars in general than others states, and that they also initiate wars less frequently than non-democratic states .
Some statistical research indicates that enduring rivalries of all types are rare among democratic dyads. This pacifying effect of democracy appears to strengthen over time after the transition to joint democracy, which is consistent with the onset and deepening of democratic norms. Rivalries show a decreasing propensity for militarized conflict within a year of the transition to joint democracy, and this propensity decreases almost to zero within five years .
A recent theory is that democracies can be divided into "pacifist" and "militant". While both avoid attacking democracies, "militant" democracies have tendency to deep distrust and confrontational policies against dictatorships and may initiate wars against them. Most wars by democracies since 1950 have involved only four nations: the U.S., the U.K., Israel, and India .
The historical definition of democracy has shifted over time, as civil and political rights have been expanded to greater segments of the population. Continuous measures of democracy used in statistical studies attempt to create a consistent scale of comparison for all states. Most statistical work on the democratic peace has focused on the 19th and 20th centuries, but there is a significant body of literature on the applicability of the theory outside the modern western world.
The methodology of the studies
The studies supporting the DPT have often defined
- war as any military action with more than 1000 killed in battle . This is the definition used in the authoritative Correlates of War Project at the University of Michigan. It counts 2000 cases of armed wars or other conflicts after 1816. The project has also supplied the data regarding wars for many of the studies.
- democracy as a stabilized liberal democracy.
- Dean Babst made his own decisions on what was a democracy. He required also a secret ballot, asserting (wrongly) that this existed in the United States back to 1789 and in Britain back to the 1830's.
- The Polity Data Set is put together by a number of scholars, most prominent among whom is Ted Gurr. They apply an 11-point ordinal scale of democracy to almost every state in the world for every year from 1800 to the 1990s. Those democracy scores are themselves sums of scores on various dimensions reflecting, for example, the selection of government executives by election, the openness of executive recruitment, and the parity between the executive and legislative branches of government.
- Rummel requires democracies to pass certain absolute criteria like voting rights for at least 2/3 of all adult males and being older than 3 years at the start of the war. He also has some implicit criteria; for example, the chief officer of the democracy must have had a contested election.
- Others have instead required that at least 50% of the adult population is allowed to vote, and that the political system in question has produced at least one peaceful, constitutional transfer of executive power from one independent political party to another by means of an election.
Criticisms
There are four logically distinguishable classes of criticism of any DPT:
- That its creator was not accurate in applying his criteria to the historical record. (See Specific historic examples below).
- That the criteria are not appropriate in discussing the record. Critics may prefer that 'democracy' should exclude or include both of Germany and England during WWI, rather than separate them into democratic and non-democratic.
- That the peace theory does not actually mean very much. For example, that it applies to few states (very few before the twentieth century), and doesn't actually limit their behavior to each other very much. Any reasonable border which excludes WWI Germany may also excludes almost all states before the Cold War.
- That such peace as there has been between democracies is at least in part due to external causes. (See Correlation is not causation below).
These tend to overlap, being in fact complementary criticisms, and many critics make more than one of them. It is particularly hard to tell the first two classes apart on 1914 Germany, since DPTs must reject it on qualitative, not numerical, grounds.
Specific historic examples
Liberal democracy
For the First World War critics have argued that supporters of the DPT are mistaken, either in denying that Germany was a democracy (the Reichstag was elected by universal male suffrage, its votes of no confidence did cause governments to fall, and it did vote on whether to fund the war - which passed overwhelmingly) or that the supporter are wrong in affirming Britain to be one (the 1911 elections enfranchised only 60% of the British electorate, to say nothing of the Empire beyond the Seas, the majority of which had no say in the decision at all). Supporters respond that at the time of World War I the German Kaiser still had much power, he had direct control over the army, appointed and could dismiss the chancellor, and played a key role in foreign affairs. In effect, therefore, in foreign and military affairs, there was little democratic control. They also note that the Kaiser was also the King in the very large state of Prussia which had much influence over national politics, that Prussian government was not responsible to the Prussian Landtag (lower chamber), that the Landstag members were elected by a suffrage system based on tax-paying ability favoring the rich, and that the landed aristocracy of the junkers dominated all the higher civil offices and officer corps of the Army and Navy . If Britain was not a liberal democracy, then this is another reason why WWI was not a war between democracies.
There can be similar responses to other objections. During the War of 1812, only a small minority had the right to vote in the United Kingdom, many new urban areas had no representation, the ballot was not secret, many seats in Parliament were appointed or openly bought from the owners of rotten boroughs, and the House of Lords could veto all laws. The defenders of DPT exclude the American Civil War because, in addition to it being an internal conflict, in the Confederate States of America, only 30-40% of male population could vote and there was never a competitive presidential election. Similarly, only a minority had the right to vote in the Boer states. Nawaz Sharif, the president of Pakistan at the time of the Kargil War, used terror tactics to silence critical press and the previously independent judiciary, for example storming the Supreme Court in order to force the Chief Justice out of office. Yassir Arafat, the president of the Palestinian Authority at the start of the latest conflicts with Israel, can be criticized on similar grounds. There was never a democratic election in the Philippines before the Philippine-American war. All the Mexican presidents at the time of the conflicts with the U.S., like Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga, took their power in coup d'etats. The nations in the War of the Pacific were ruled by Caudillos or had suffrage requirements like literacy or property that excluded a large part of the populations.
Liberal democracies before the late nineteenth century?
Whether the pre-modern states that once identified themselves as democracies fulfill modern criteria remains controversial. In Ancient Greece, such city-states did fight wars between each other (most noted is the Athenian expedition against Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War). Many do not deem Ancient Greek city-states as sufficiently democratic because of the large numbers of slaves and other non-voting inhabitants. It is estimated that only 16% of the population in Athens had the right to vote. There were also three great wars between Rome and Carthage; and the Roman republic sacked Athens. Similar questions arise about the persistent wars among Venice, Florence, Genoa, and other Renaissance city-states. These states were also not as democratic as modern democracies, but at least as much as Athens and more so than Syracuse.
An interesting case is the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had some qualities of today's democracies and in which szlachta (the nobles), using Sejm (a parliament), blocked many monarchs' attempts to declare a war on other countries. Some scholars have put forward the Swiss Confederation (or parts of it) and the Six Iroquois Nations as early examples of communities of democratic states upholding the theory.
Deaths in battle
The rule of at least 1000 killed in battle excludes attacks by one democracy on another in such overwhelming force that there is no effective resistance, and thus few deaths in battle (some Indian Wars and small scale foreign interventions by the United States may be examples.)
Democracies have engaged in covert conflict resulting in a change of regime on the losing side. The British- and American-supported 1953 coup d'etat in Iran against Mohammed Mossadegh and the 1954 U.S.-backed coup in Guatemala, led by Carlos Castillo Armas as examples of such events. The rule also excludes these events.
There is at least one democracy which formally declared war on another when the United Kingdom declared war on Finland on December 6, 1941 in reaction to the Continuation War, when Finland allied with Germany in attacking the Soviet Union. However, the United Kingdom's only significant act of war happened prior to the declaration (a Royal Air Force raid on the port of Petsamo on July 31, 1941). However, Finland spent World War II fighting a totalitarian opponent who had attacked the nation, the United Kingdom and Finland for almost the whole of WWII carefully avoided attacking each other, and the casualties in the conflict with the United Kingdom were too few to be classified as a war statistically. The lavish material support the United Kingdom and the United States provided to Soviet Union raises the question if democracies can make war against other democracies through proxies.
Rummel's time limit
Rummel's version of the DOT has a requirement that the democratic states must be older than three years excludes the war between the French Second Republic and the Roman Republic (19th century). The First Balkan War is excluded if one considers the Ottoman Empire to have become democratic after the first election in November 1908 or when the constitution was amended so that the parliament could control the cabinet in April 1909. The war started in October 1912, which would be before four years had passed. Critics instead argue that democracy occurred in July 1908 when a constitution was introduced. It is also doubtful if the opposing Christian states fulfill the democratic criteria since the Kings continued to have extensive powers in all of them.
The time limit and and other requirements like democratic institutions and elections on both sides, also exclude civil wars within democracies over legitimacy or secession, such as the American Civil War, the Sonderbund war, the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish civil war which followed, and the 20th century civil wars in Colombia, Spain, Uruguay and Sri Lanka.
Correlation is not causation
A statistical association does not establish causality. Critics have thus argued that the peace may be explained by other factors in democratic states that are not related to democracy. Supporters of the DPT argue that many studies have controlled for such factors and that the DPT is still validated. For example, Bremer (1992, 1993) controlled for contiguity, power status, alliance ties, militarization, economic development, and power ratios. Maoz & Russett (1992, 1993) and Russett (1993) controlled for contiguity, alliance ties, economic wealth and growth, political stability, and power ratios.
Trade
Following Schumpeter, some hypothesize that the phenomenon is explained by the fact that democratic countries tend to be capitalist states, whose trade relations with one another create interdependence among them. This interdependence constrains the ability and willingness of democratic nations to go to war with each other due to the incurred costs in lost trade. However, one problem with this interpretation is the existence of non-democratic capitalist states, who often have made war with each other or with democratic states. However, a recent study shows that economically important trade has a substantively important pacifying effect which is independent of democracy. It also shows that democracy does have a pacifying effect independent of trade. This study also indicates that the DPT is not a significant factor unless both of the democracies have a GDP/capita of at least 1400 USD. Economic development below this may hinder the development of liberal institutions. .
Geographic isolation
Some critics have argued that few democracies mean that they are geographically isolated and thus unable to make war with each other. However, Maoz & Russet studied the period from 1945 and 1986 and discounted all dyads that did not involve a major power or nations that were not geographically continuous. The DPT was still validated. Bremer (1992) and other studies also support this conclusion. Glieditsch (1995) demonstrated that democratic dyads have not been more separated than non-democratic dyads. Supporters also note that today more than 50% of all nations are democratic .
The bloc peace theory
Joanne Gowa argues in Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace, that the structure of the international political system during the Cold War was responsible for creating the illusion of a democratic peace. At about the same time many of today's democracies came into existence, the Cold War divided much of the world into two systems of institutionalized alliances. (Many states belonged to neither; chief among these was the People's Republic of China after 1961.) These critics claim the inter-democratic peace of the period is explained by a larger "bloc peace theory": they ascribe the inter-democratic peace of the period to this structure of blocs: almost all the democracies of the Cold War were members of the Western bloc, and the members of that bloc abstained from attacking one another in a collective effort to contain the bigger threat posed by Communism. Not only was the system of alliances produced by this common interest; also, once it had come into existence, the relations between two members of the bloc were not permitted to decline into full-scale war; the alliance provided their common allies with the interest and the leverage to prevent it.
Supporters of the DPT note that Bremer (1992), Maoz & Russett (1992, 1993), Russett (1993), Oneal et al (1996), Barbieri (1996a), Oneal & Russett (1997), and Oneal & Ray (1997) all have controlled for alliance ties in their statistical studies supporting the DPT, contradicting Gowa's theory.
Specific historic examples
During the Cold War
The bloc peace theory makes, in some ways, broader claims than DPT. For example, some skeptics of DPT argue that the Suex Crisis was suppressed in less than two weeks since Egypt was a marginal member of the Western bloc. This as confirmation that potential attacks on full members would have been stopped before they began. Even though Egypt was not a democracy, the Suez Canal treaties were supposed to bind her closely to Britain. However, it is doubtful that Egypt was an Western ally at all because Egypt had nationalized the canal, the US had stopped foreign aid, and Egypt had bought weapons from the Communist states.
The DPT supporters have argued that while Gowa only applied the theory that external threats stopped internal wars to the democratic Western nations, such a theory also predicts that there should have been no wars at all in the Western bloc, including no wars involving dictatorships, and no wars in the opposing Communist bloc .
There were several wars between Communist nations: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Ogaden War, and the Cambodian-Vietnamese War. However, Ethiopia and Somalia belonged to different blocs, even if both claimed to be socialist. There were also minor conflicts, not meeting the threshold of deaths, particularly the Sino-Soviet border conflict and the Prague spring. Another possible counter example is the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. However, many hold that (despite the Stalinist record of its chief) it was effectively a non-Communist regime and may have ceased to be part of the Warsaw pact bloc, becoming either a neutral or a Western power. However, Nagy was a Communist, had been an agent for the Soviet security apparatus earlier, and was installed by the Hungarian Communist Party.
Supporters of the DPT also argue that the critics thus seem to define "bloc" arbitrarily in order to avoid some exceptions for the Communist states, arguing that the Western world similarly had many different "blocs" but without having wars between democracies. For instance, France was antagonistic with the United States and expelled the NATO headquarters and all NATO forces from its territory; France, however, did not withdrew formally from NATO, and retained or even increased its ties to the other nations in the European Union. Supporters also note that the neutral democratic Western nations Sweden, Ireland, Austria, and Schwitzerland were not involved in wars with other democratic nations. If all capitalist democracies were to be considered part of a common bloc, then it may also be argued that China was still part of a common Communist bloc, and thus that the Sino-Vietnamese War is another counter example to the bloc peace theory.
There were many large scale wars involving dictatorships and the absence of wars between democracies in the Third World during the same period, which supports the DPT. However, there were few democracies there and then. On the other hand,many of the Western nations had or could easily develop the military capability to attack democracies in the Third World but did not.
There were wars in the Western bloc between democracies and dictatorships, arguably disproving the bloc peace theory. One example is the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, at a time when Cyprus had British military bases and close ties to Turkey's NATO partner Greece. Another is the Football War. However, the U.S. put pressure on the combatants to stop the Football War which fits the bloc peace theory. A third is the 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic. The 1967 Six Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War may also be wars within the Western bloc, because Iraq belonged to CENTO and Israel received extensive aid from the U.S. Bloc peace theory supporters claim that CENTO was not a functioning organization and note that The Soviet-Iraqi Treaty of Friendship was signed in 1972. Still another examples are the two Gulf Wars, in which Arabic nations fought each other despite belonging to the Arab League and OPEC. All of these wars had more than 1000 military casualties . The Falklands War almost qualify (936 causalities).
Before the Cold War
Critics of the DPT argue that before the Cold War, the limited period during which there was more than one non-allied democratic Great Power includes several crises between them, including the Fashoda crisis, between the United Kingdom and France, and the Venezuela crisis between the United Kingdom and the United States. These were conducted as fiercely as many diplomatic conflicts involving a non-democratic state; and war was popular on both sides.
On the other hand, even when there were conflicts, democracies did not make war with each other. Also, in the nineteenth century, much of the world was divided into blocs by the imperialist powers. This was often strictly regulated as when England and Russia divided Persia into two spheres of influence. Numerous wars occurred in these blocs, arguably contradicting the bloc peace theory, both by the imperialist powers when they extended direct rule and also between minor states in these blocs. For example, an incomplete list of wars in India after England had become the dominant European power includes three Anglo-Maratha Wars, four Anglo-Mysore Wars, two Anglo-Sikh Wars, three Anglo-Afghan Wars, the Anglo-Nepalese War, the Anglo-Bhutanese War, and three Anglo-Burmese Wars.
There were numerous wars in Latin America, despite belonging to an U.S. dominated bloc after the Monroe doctrine. This bloc was frequently threatened by the other imperialist blocs and sometimes direct military action occurred, like the French military invasion of Mexico. Examples of large scale wars in Latin America in this period include the War of the Triple Alliance, the War of the Pacific, the War of the Peruvian-Bolivian Confederation, the Mexican-American War, and the Chaco War. There werr also several betrayls of formal treaties within blocs during WWII. Examples include the wars of Finland, Italy, Bulgaria, Roumania, and Hungary on their German ally in WWII and the German invasion of the Soviet Union despite the Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact and its secret extensions.
After the Cold War
Supporters also argue that external causes cannot explain the continued peace between democracies after the end of the Cold War. Critics respond that the European Union contains some of those democracies capable of maintaining a major war, and is also an institutionalized alliance. However, even those European states still have separate militaries and to a large degree separate foreign policy. There are also many democracies outside Europe .
References
- Beck, Nathaniel, and Richard Tucker. Democracy and Peace: General Law or Limited Phenomenon? Midwest Political Science Association: April 1998.
- Correlates of War Project
- Brown, Michael E., Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller. Debating the Democratic Peace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
- Doyle, Michael W. Ways of War and Peace. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
- Gowa, Joanne. Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
- Huth, Paul K., et al. The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press: 2003. ISBN 0521805082.
- Levy, Jack S. “Domestic Politics and War.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 18, No. 4, (Spring, 1988), pp. 653-673.
- Lipson, Charles. Reliable Partners: How Democracies Have Made a Separate Peace. Princeton University Press: 2003. ISBN 0691113904.
- Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2002
- Ray, James Lee. Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition. University of South Carolina Press: 1998. ISBN 1570032416.
- Ray, James Lee. Does Democracy Cause Peace? Annual Review of Political Science 1998:1, 27-46
- Rummel, R.J. Power Kills: Democracy As a Method of Nonviolence. Transaction Publishers: 2003. ISBN 0765805235.
- Russett, Bruce. Grasping the Democratic Peace. Princeton University Press: 1994. ISBN 0691001642.
External links
Supportive
- A scholarly review of published studies
- Democide, Democracy and the Man from Hawaii
- Rummel's website