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The democratic peace theory or simply democratic peace (often DPT and sometimes democratic pacifism) is a theory in politics and political science 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. Jack Levy remarked that the democratic peace is "the closest thing we have to a law in international politics."
History of the 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 a bad name until early modern times. Niccolò Machiavelli believed that republics were by nature excellent war-makers and empire-builders, citing Rome as the prime example. Modern theories of democatic peace are a quite recent branch among the descendants of Immanuel Kant's 1795 essay, Project for a Perpetual Peace.
Kant's essay, however, differs radically from the modern theories. He speaks of republican (republikanisch), not democratic, states; which he defines to have representative and constitutional governments. He does not discuss universal suffrage, which is quite important to the modern theorists; his commentators dispute whether it is implied by his language. Most importantly, he does not regard republican governments as sufficient by themselves to produce peace: Not only does he require a preliminary demilitarization (including the abolition of standing armies and of the funding of warfare by state debt, and the repudiation of all claims to interfere with the constitution or government of another state) but republicanism is only one provision of three. He requires
- republicanism
- hospitality, the acknowledgement of the right to freely move and resettle in another state.
- and a league of nations.
On the other hand, he does not claim that republics will be at peace only with each other, but regards them as more pacific in general.
The general idea that popular and responsible governments would be more inclined to promote peace and commerce became one current in the stream of European thought and political practice. It was one element of the American policy of George Canning and the foreign policy of Palmerston. It was also represented in the liberal internationalism of Woodrow Wilson, George Creel, and H.G. Wells, although other planks in Kant's platform had even more influence. In the next generation, Kant's program was represented by the Four Freedoms and the United Nations.
Kant's essay is a three-legged stool (besides the preliminary disarmament). Democratic peace theories variously hold that the first leg is sufficient by itself, or will produce the other two. In 1909, Norman Angell relied only upon the second leg, arguing that modern commerce made war necessarily unprofitable, even for the technically victorious country, and therefore the possibility of successful war was The Great Illusion. James Mill had described the British Empire as outdoor relief for the upper classes; Joseph Schumpeter argued that capitalism made modern states inherently peaceful and opposed to conquest and imperialism, which economically favored the old aristocratic elites.
The third leg, the idea that a confederation of peaceable princes could produce a perpetual peace, is much older than Kant. Henri IV attempted to actually create such a confederation. One was also proposed by the abbé de Saint-Pierre and Rousseau. Kant had distinguished his league from a universal state; Clarence Streit proposed, in Union Now(1938) , a union of the democratic states modelled after the Constitution of the United States. He foretold that trade and the peaceable ways of democracy would keep this Union perpetual, but counted on the combined power of the Union to deter the Axis from war.
Jeremy Bentham proposed that disarmament, arbitration, and the renunciation of colonies would produce perpetual peace, thus relying merely on Kant's preliminary articles and on none of the three main points; contrary to the modern theorists, he relied on public opinion, even against the absolute Monarchy in Sweden. Many have followed him since.
In 1964, Dean Babst, then a Wisconsin criminologist, published a paper asserting that no two democracies had ever been at war with each other, and substantially republished it in an industrial trade journal in 1972. 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.
Michael Doyle was the first democratic peace theorist to observe the similarity to Kant, and published a largely accurate summary of Kant's essay. He, working with Bruce Russett, distinguished between the strong form of the theory (that democracies tend to be peaceful in general; and the weak form, that they tend to be peaceful with each other.) He also studied the even weaker proposition that liberal regimes have less purely internal conflict.
Democratic peace theories
A democratic peace theory has to define what it means by "democracy" and what it means by "peace" (or, more often, "war"), and what it claims as the link between the two.
Democracy
Democratic peace theorists have used different terms for the class of states they consider peaceable; Babst called them elective, Rummell liberal democracies, Doyle liberal regimes. In general, these require not only that the government and legislature be chosen by free and genuinely contested elections, but more besides
There are several lists of democracies. Ted Gurr drew up a list of government types by country and year, the Policy Data Set. This is a ranking on two ten-point scales, one for the degree of democracy, one for the degree of autocracy; but he calls the countries which score above 6 on the first scale simply the democracies; and those which score above 5 on the second, the autocracies. Gurr calls States which do neither anocracies; no state has yet done both. Many theorists simply use the binary version of Gurr's list: democracy/no 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.
More recent theorists have set a numerical limit on suffrage, say, that half or two-thirds of the male population be able to vote. Rummel, for example, also requires that the democracy be stabilized, which he defines as having existed for three years.
War
Many theorists have used the convenient list at the Correlates of War Project at the University of Michigan, which compiled the wars from 1816 to 1991 with at least a thousand battlefield casualties. This data is particularly convenient for statistical analysis, and the large-scale statistical studies cited below have used this definition.
Claims
Democratic peace theorists make two possible connections between democracy and war:
- Some claim that democracies, properly defined, have never made war on each other; these face the difficulty that Ted Gurr classes both Spain and the United States as democracies in 1898, the year of the Spanish-American War.
- Others claim that two democracies are less likely to make war on each other than other pairs of states.
While the following claims are not strictly part of the theory, they have been made by various democratic peace theorists and form an important part of the analysis of causes.
- The more democratic two nations are, the less the violence between them. (This may include violence short of full-scale war, or may be a claim that such wars as do occur between democracies are waged with restraint.)
- Democracies engage in the least amounts of foreign violence.
- Democracies use less violence in their internal affairs. In particular, modern democracies do not murder their citizens.
Causes
"Correlation does not prove causation," is a bedrock standard of statistical analysis. In order to bridge the gap from a statistical curiosity to a meaningful theory, the researcher must first identify a mechanism, and (ideally) make falsifiable predictions based on that mechanism. Various suggestions have been made for the causes of the democratic peace. These do not, in general, depend on which version of the theory is being asserted. Most, if not all, such explanations focus on the fact that the consent of the citizenry is necessary for a democracy to initiate and sustain a war. Even where emergency powers allow the executive to act without legislative approval, public acceptance, at the least, is needed to avoid an electoral backlash.
Kant made the straightforward point that, since an absolute prince can order war "without the least sacrifice of the pleasures of his table, the chase, his country houses, his court functions, and the like", he will be likely to do so for light or trivial causes that the citizenry would never find sufficient. This, however, would explain why democracies prefer peace with all states, not just with each other. The wars of democracies with non-democracies must therefore be explained by other motives, such as provocations from reckless non-democratic states, or a belief that the two systems cannot peacefully co-exist.
Other scholars suggest a theory of common culture: the citizens of democratic societies tend not to view the citizens of other democracies as enemies, and wars against other democracies are unlikely to get the necessary support. This resembles Kant's article of "hospitality", as do the economic arguments of Angell and Schumpeter.
A recent paper by Mousseau suggests that the democratic peace is real, and results from economic causes, but that these effects only apply to relatively wealthy countries. This conclusion is consistent with earlier theories as well: the destruction caused by war should be less daunting to those with nothing to lose.
Rummel dismisses all of these as superficial. Kurt Lewin and Andrew Ushenko propose that democracy involves a pervasive social mechanism (called a "social field") in which, "The primary mode of power is exchange, political system is democratic, and democratic government is but one of many groups and pyramids of power." In contrast, authoritarian systems involve a "social anti-field", " divides its members into those who command and those who must obey, thus creating a schism separating all members and dividing all issues, a latent conflict front along which violence can break out." Thus, the citizens of a democracy are habituated to compromise, conflict resolution, and to viewing unfavorable outcomes as temporary and/or tolerable.
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. 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.
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 show 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 .
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.
- That the criteria are not appropriate in discussing the record.
- 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.
- That such peace as there has been between democracies is at least in part due to external causes.
For example, the First World War is a difficult case for all DPT's, which deal with it by deciding that the Central Powers were not democracies on the grounds that the Kaiser had the power to appoint his ministers, that he and the General Staff made the decision for war, as did Franz Josef in Austria-Hungary, and that many structural features of the Reich made democratic institutions ineffective. The status of Ottoman Turkey raises very complex questions of how much power the Sultan had by 1914, and how much the Young Turks were answerable to the parliament they had called.
The first class of critics argue that DPT is mistaken, either in denying that Germany was a democracy (the Reichstag was elected by universal 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 in claiming it to be less democratic than Britain (the 1911 elections enfranchised only 60% of the British male population, to say nothing of the Empire beyond the Seas, the majority of which had no say in the decision at all).
Whether or not it is possible to thread a line between Germany and England, the second class prefers a border of 'democracy' that lies in the interval between both Germany and England, on the one end, and perfect democracy on the other; or between both of them and totalitarianism. (The DPT theorist Rummel has said that the word 'democracy' was not important to his argument; but his use of it has made his claim far more interesting.) The third class of critics observe that any reasonable border which excludes Wilhelmine Germany also excludes almost all states before the Cold War. The fourth class explains the Cold War democratic peace as a special case.
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.
External causes
In addition to the external cause of the Cold War, the democratic peace has been attributed to wealth, as above, and to geographic isolation. How likely was nineteenth-century Switzerland to go to war with the United States? Or (in the Cold War Third World) India with Costa Rica?
Some democratic peace theorists have controlled for these variables. 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. They also studied the period from 1945 and 1986 and discounted all pairs that did not involve a major power or nations that were not geographically continuous. .
The Cold War peace
The chief external cause, cited (with many other criticisms) in Joanne Gowa's Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace, is 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 permanent institutionalized alliances. (Many states belonged to neither; chief among these was the People's Republic of China after 1961.)
These critics 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.
There have been wars between members of other alliances, although one study finds that 88% of the treaties made in the last two centuries have been kept. This line of criticism need not claim that alliances prevent all wars; just that the NATO alliance, and the common interest it represented, caused enough peace that the rest may be the result of other causes or of chance.
Before the Cold War
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 Siamese question of 1893 and 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.
DPT and International Policy
"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." William Clinton's 1994 State of the Union Address, Jan 25, 1994
"And the reason why I'm so strong on democracy is democracies don't go to war with each other. And the reason why is the people of most societies don't like war, and they understand what war means.... I've got great faith in democracies to promote peace. And that's why I'm such a strong believer that the way forward in the Middle East, the broader Middle East, is to promote democracy." George W. Bush at the White House Press Conference, 12 November 2004.
References
Most of the following are from Rummel's extensive bibliography:
- 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
- Plourde, Shawn Democide, Democracy and the Man from Hawaii May, 2004
- 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.
- Rummel, R.J. The Democratic Peace
- Russett, Bruce. Grasping the Democratic Peace. Princeton University Press: 1994. ISBN 0691001642.
- Schwartz, Thomas, and Kiron Skinner. The Myth of Democratic Pacifism. The Wall Street Journal. January 7, 1999.