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A democratic peace theory or simply democratic peace (often DPT and sometimes democratic pacifism) is a theory in international relations, political science, and philosophy which holds that democracies—specifically, liberal democracies—never or almost never go to war with one another. It can trace its philosophical roots to Immanuel Kant.

Some theories of democratic peace also hold that lesser conflicts are rare between democracies, or that violence is in general less common within democracies, or that there is also peace between oligarchies.

History

Main article: Perpetual peace
Immanuel Kant

Democratic peace theory is a relatively new development. No ancient author seems to have considered it true. Democratic governments, as well as sociologists to study them, were scarce before the 19th century.

Athens usually preferred democracy among its subject allies; conversely, Sparta usually preferred oligarchies (as did the Roman Republic and the Macedonian kings). These were international ramifications of faction, like the Guelphs and Ghibellines of medieval Italy.

Until the late Enlightenment, the word democracy usually meant direct (or pure) democracy, which was treated with suspicion. Even the idea that republics tend to be peaceful is recent; Niccolò Machiavelli believed that republics were by nature excellent war-makers and empire-builders, citing Rome as the prime example.

Immanuel Kant, in his essay Perpetual Peace (1795), affirmed that responsible governments would not lightly go to war with each other, although he thought that this was only one of several necessary conditions for a perpetual peace. The hope of a democratic peace shows in Woodrow Wilson's message asking Congress to declare war and is reflected in his two slogans: "a war to end war" and "a world safe for democracy". His plans for the Peace after that war, which can be traced back to 1894, were strongly similar to Kant's proposal, including both Kant’s cosmopolitan law and pacific union. The third of the Fourteen Points specified the removal of economic barriers between peaceful nations; the fourteenth provided for the League of Nations.

Kant, however, opposes "democracy" since it is "necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty." Instead, Kant favors a constitutional republic where individual liberty is protected from the will of the majority; modern democratic peace theorists have generally confined their claims to liberal democracies.

Dean Babst, a Wisconsin criminologist, wrote the first academic paper on the subject, in 1964, in Wisconsin Sociologist; he published a slightly more popularized version, eight years later, in the trade journal Industrial Research. He asserted that none of the major wars counted in Quincy Wright’s A Study of War (1942; but it had recently been reprinted) were between elected governments; although he does not discuss the wars in detail. His statistical analysis consists of calculating the chance that of the 33 established nations which participated in WWI and four were chosen at random to be the Central Powers, all ten democracies among the 33 would wind up on the same side — and a similar calculation for WWII. These obscure journals did not attract much notice, with two exceptions:

The peace theorists J. David Singer and Melvin Small denied that democracies were in general less war-like than other nations; but they found only two marginal cases of democracies fighting each other. This paper was published in the Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, in 1976, and eventually brought the attention of several political scientists to the underlying contention — partly through Michael Doyle's lengthy discussion of the topic.

File:DP CHART V19.JPG
High resolution PDF
File:DP BACKSIDE V 16.JPG
Democratic Peace Charts by R. J. Rummel and others
High Resolution PDF

Rudolph J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii cited Babst's work in the fourth book of his five-volume work, Understanding Conflict and War (1975-1981). He has since written extensively on the democratic peace, and has also drawn considerable lay attention to the subject.

Most studies of the democratic peace deal with the last two centuries or so; Spencer Weart, the historian of twentieth-century science, has also made claims about "republics", by which he means governments by discussion between equals, in general. He thus extends the subject to the city-states of Greece and the Middle Ages, and the cantons of Switzerland. His treatment of Greek history has been severely criticized; he omits the wars of the Roman Republic altogether.

There have been numerous studies in the field since. Most studies have found some form of democratic peace exists; although neither methodological disputes nor doubtful cases are entirely resolved. . Many of these papers are discussed elsewhere in this article.

Democratic peace theory has been extremely divisive among the students of international relations. It is rooted in the idealist and liberal traditions; and is strongly opposed to the realist idea of the balance of power. However, democratic peace theory has come to be more widely accepted, and some democracies accept it as policy.

Presidents of both the major American parties have expressed support for the theory. Former President Bill Clinton of the Democratic Party: "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." Current President George W. Bush of the Republican Party: "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." However, such use of democratic peace theory to justify a foreign policy that includes military action, such as the 2003 Iraq War, has proved controversial Jack Levy wrote, before the Berlin Wall fell, that the seeming absence of war between democracies is, “as close to anything we have to empirical law in international relations.”

Types of Theories

Babst asserted that democracies fight fewer wars in general; but all his evidence was directed to proving the special case that democracies do not fight each other. The first proposition has become known as the monadic peace, because peace or war depend on the internal affairs of a single state; the second as the dyadic peace, because peace is a function of pairs of states.

Singer and Small discussed both propositions; they found no support for the general, monadic, proposition, and very few peace theorists hold it. Doyle argued that this is only to be expected: the same ideologies that cause liberal states to be at peace with each other inspire idealistic wars with the illiberal, whether to defend oppressed foreign minorities or avenge countrymen settled abroad. If there is a monadic tendency to peace, it is not large.

A democratic crusade corollary suggests that the belief in the validity DPT itself could become a cause of war. In the case of the United States intervention in World War I and recent invasion of Iraq, the promise of democratization bringing an end to war was used as a justification for a war.

The earliest theorists of the democratic peace, and some later supporters, have claimed that democracies, properly defined, have never made war on each other. Other supporters admit a few exceptions, which they usually view as doubtful or marginal cases. Almost all democratic peace theorists regard the democratic peace as an empirical or statistical regularity: wars between democracies are rare, or very rare, but not impossible - so this difference amounts to the question of whether something that happens once in a blue moon has happened yet.

Most theories of the democratic peace discuss both wars and lesser conflicts: and hold that full-scale wars between democracies are rare or non-existent, but lesser conflicts are merely less common between democracies than between other pairs of states.

Michael Doyle reintroduced Kant's three articles into democratic peace theory. He argued that a pacific union of liberal states has been growing for the past two centuries. He denies that a pair of states will be peaceful simply because they are both liberal democracies; if that were enough, liberal states would not be aggressive towards weak non-liberal states (as the history of American relations with Mexico shows they are). Rather, liberal democracy is a necessary condition for international organization and hospitality (which are Kant's other two articles) — and all three are sufficient to produce peace.

Several theorists, led by Bruce Russett and John R. Oneal have since found multiple causes for such general peace as we have seen; usually about three, which resemble Kant's. Several of these theorists call their result the Kantian peace. The modern Kantian theory argues that democracy, more trade causing greater economic interdependence, and membership in more intergovernmental organizations are positively related to each other; but that each has an independent pacifying effect. This idea is in keeping with the theory of Institutionalism or Neoliberalism.

Some recent papers have found that proportional representation is associated with less external and internal systematic violence.´

Statistical Studies

Wars

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.

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 usually require not only that the government and legislature be chosen by free and actually contested elections, but more. Studies claiming what we may call an "absolute" democratic peace require variously that two-thirds of adult males, or half the whole adult population, be able to vote (requiring universal suffrage including women would mean no war between democracies was even possible before 1894; also secret ballot (Babst), or a waiting time for the democracy to stabilize.

Researchers often use Ted Gurr's Polity Data Set which scores each state on two scales, one of democracy and one for autocracy, for each year since 1800; as well as others. The use of this has varied. Some researchers have done correlations between the democracy scale and belligerence; others have treated it as a binary classification by (as its maker does) calling all states with a high democracy score and a low autocracy score democracies; yet others have used the difference of the two scores, sometimes again making this into a binary classification.

The straightforward argument for the democratic peace is: given the number of wars over the past two centuries, if democracies fought each other as often as any other pair of states, there should have been dozens of wars between democracies. Instead, depending on the study, we find zero, or one, or two, marginal exceptions..

There are some complications here, and one major problem. One complication is that few states have been democracies continuously for two centuries; which can be handled by weighting each pair of democracies by the number of years they have both been democratic. Another is how do you count wars? If years matter, do you weight a war that lasts ten years ten times as much as a war that lasts one; or do you count onsets of war, and count each of these as one war? If countries A, B, and C, go to war against the alliance of D and E, is that one war or six? Is it still six if C never meets E on the battlefield? There are also some difficulties in the application of statistical methods to the problem, especially to question of causation.

J. David Singer’s Correlates of War Project defines democracy as : (a) free elections with opposition parties, (b) a minimum suffrage (10%), and (c) a parliament either in control of the executive or at least enjoying parity with it. War is defined as any military action resulting in over 1000 deaths. This may well be too high; but it is reasonable to exclude trivial conflicts which democracies have settled without escalation, and no available dataset both has a lower limit, and sets it lower than the Correlates of War..

Doyle’s research observed that "ven though liberal states have become involved in numerous wars with non-liberal states, constitutionally secure liberal states have yet to engage in war with each other". This was a result of a less inclusive definition of what constitutes a liberal democracy. Doyle defined a liberal democracy as a state that was brought to power by a contested election, allowing the voting franchise of a large percentage of its citizens, an executive that was either popularly elected or responsible to the legislature, and having requirements of civil liberties and free speech. Doyle also treats one exceptional case by observing that both sides were under liberal goverments less than three years old, and so democracy had not stabilized; other authors have treated this as a general rule, excluding from consideration any war in which either side has been a democracy for less than three years. Additionally, this allows for other states to actually come to the recognition of the state as a democracy.

Doyle also allows greater power to hereditary monarchs than other theories of a strictly democratic peace; for example, he counts the rule of Louis-Philippe of France - and that of Robespierre - as a liberal regíme. He describes Wilhelmine Germany as "a difficult case....In practice, a liberal state under republican law for domestic affairs...divorced from the control of its citizenry in foreign affairs."

As for wars, these are simply defined as war that has been declared, where a clash or series of clashes occurs, allowing for only one victor, characterized by a highly ritualized beginning and end Doyle excluded one possible exception from his theory on the grounds that both sides had recently been subject to illiberal regimes, and so the culture of liberalism was not yet established. Other peace theorists, especially of an absolute peace, extend this to excluding all wars in which either side has been a democracy for less than three years.

The problem is there really have been few wars, and few democracies, so there isn't enough data to be as sure of the democratic peace as of Boyle's Law "If we rely solely on whether there has been an inter-democratic war, it is going to take many more decades of peace to build our confidence in the stability of the democratic peace", especially with the present small rate of warfare. This is worse if we try to divide our data to look for other factors which might cause peace, or try to control for those factors when found,.


War and liberal democracy can be defined in different ways. Quantitative research on international wars usually define war as a military conflict with more than 1000 killed in battle. This is the definition used in the Correlates of War Project which has also supplied the data for many studies on war.

The early researcher and political scientist R.J. Rummel in the book Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence states that "By democracy is meant liberal democracy, where those who hold power are elected in competitive elections with a secret ballot and wide franchise (loosely understood as including at least 2/3rds of adult males); where there is freedom of speech, religion, and organization; and a constitutional framework of law to which the government is subordinate and that guarantees equal rights." "A well-established democracy is one for which enough time has passed since its inception for peace-sufficient democratic procedures to become accepted and democratic culture to settle in. Around three years seems to be enough for this." Appendix 1.1

The book Never at War by the historian Spencer R. Weart uses somewhat similar definitions. One difference is that Weart defines war as more than 200 battle deaths. This book also proposes a related peace between oligarchies.

In his book Grasping the Democratic Peace, political scientist Bruce Russett also uses somewhat similar definitions for modern wars but has different definitions for Ancient Greece.

Political scientist James Lee Ray, in his book Democracy and International Conflict, requires that at least 50% of the adult population is allowed to vote and that there has been at least one peaceful, constitutional transfer of executive power from one independent political party to another by means of an election.

Exceptions

A well-known critic is political scientist Joanne Gowa and her book Ballots and Bullets. Regarding possible exceptions, she finds two: The Spanish-American War and the Continuation War.

Mansfield and Snyder's book declares, no less robustly, that no mature democracies have ever fought ; but Ray disowns them. Since some of the component articles were published in Foreign Affairs, "they obviously intended to discourage policies inspired by the democratic peace proposition that were designed to bring about such transitions."

Frank Wayman joins them on the "one narrow point", the fact of no wars between democracies, but deplores the rush to a general conclusion.. Zeev Maoz used to agree on the matter of fact, but has refined his criteria, and now counts the Spanish-American War as a war between democracies. Other authors simply describe war between democracies as "rare", "very rare", "rare or non-existent". Nils Petter Gleditsch and Stuart Bremer each discuss one or two marginal exceptions; but neither of them find this an obstacle to supporting the existence and force of the democratic peace; Gleditsch sees the (somewhat technical) state of war between Finland and the Western Allies during World War II, as a special case, which should probably be treated separately: an incidental state of war between democracies during large multi-polar wars, which are fortunately rare. The importance of this exception depends on what forms of hostility you regard as serious; Wayman regards the formal declaration of war by Great Britain and Australia as the "most severe" hostility between democracies, but the actual consequences amounted to a single bombing raid and some destruction of commerce. Correlation studies do not have exceptions, only outliers.

Bremer, in his 1993 MID paper, which strongly supports the democratic peace as a potent and independent force, finds that this is a "stochastic regularity", and holds that "uncertainty reduction (which is not the same thing as explanation)" is the best possible result in analyzing the ultimately indeterminate onset of war, which includes an irreducibly random factor; we should avoid determinism, "'iron laws'", and "'necessary and sufficient conditions'". He also deplores the "religious fervor" which "trumpet to the world that if all states were democratic, war would cease to plague mankind" Since a probability of exactly zero is unprovable, it is "fruitless to debate the question of whether democracies never or only very rarely fight one another"..

Kantians have less trouble with exceptions. Bruce Russett sees the Kantian peace as developing in history; therefore he finds the thirteen certain, and thirty-five possible, wars between Greek democracies as part of the history of this development. A democracy which is not part of international organizations and is not part of the international web of hospitality and commerce is not part of the separate peace. Kant himself held that some wars are to be expected; the resulting suffering is what will convince the nations to actually do the reasonable thing, and establish a lasting peace; and some Kantian theorists agree. Other Kantians do not expect the democratic peace to include undeveloped states; they find that mutual democracy does not have any pacific effect if either of the democracies is poor - in fact the chance of war increases. Naturally, the pacific effect still exists, but is lessened, for countries with less severe poverty. It may well be that the culture of democracy is distorted by the stresses of poverty; the degree required to cancel or reverse the effects of the democratic peace is that of Zimbabwe - a misery unknown among democracies during the period studied.

In March 2006, there are several potential crises between arguable democracies. The Palestinian Authority, for example, have held elections for some years, with universal suffrage; so they satisfy the formal or quantitative requirements of most theories of the democratic peace. The adherence to democratic norms of conduct and civil liberties, however, is far more doubtful.

MIDs

Stuart Bremer reacted to this by studying lesser conflicts (Militarized Interstate Disputes in the jargon; MID's and wars together are "militarized interstate conflicts") instead, since they have been far more common; and this solution has become popular. Lesser conflics between democracies have been more violent; but rarer, less bloody, and less likely to spread. Democracies also reach more negotiated settlements, and military conflicts between any two democracies are rarely repeated. There have been many more MIDs than wars; the Correlates of War Project counts several thousands during the last two centuries . Most such disputes involving democracies since 1950 have involved only four nations: the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, and India.

  • Studies find that the probability that disputes between states will be resolved peacefully is positively affected by the degree of democracy exhibited by the least democratic state involved in that dispute. Disputes between democratic states are significantly shorter than disputes involving at least one undemocratic state. Democratic states are more likely to be amenable to third party mediation when they are involved in disputes with each other.

Internal violence

  • One study finds that the most democratic and the most authoritarian states have few civil wars, and intermediate regimes the most. The probability for a civil war is also increased by political change, regardless whether toward greater democracy or greater autocracy. Intermediate regimes continue to be the most prone to civil war, regardless of the time since the political change. In the long run, since intermediate regimes are less stable than autocracies, which in turn are less stable than democracies, durable democracy is the most probable end-point of the process of democratization.
  • Several studies find that the most democratic nations have the least terrorism.

Declining systematic violence

The Human Security Report, released in October 2005 by the Human Security Centre, documents the dramatically decline in warfare and civil wars since the end of the Cold War. It claims that the two main causes are the end of the Cold War itself and decolonization; but claims also the underlying force of all the articles of the Kantian triad, arguing that each has contributed materially. The improvement in the peace of the world since the end of the Cold War has been tabulated here. Rummel argues that democracy is the main explanation and that the continuing increase in democracy worldwide will soon lead to an end to wars and democide, possibly around or even before the middle of this century.

Causes

The democratic peace has been derived both from institutional and cultural constraints on the behavior of democratic societies. The case for institutional constrainsts goes back to Kant, who wrote :

"f the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide that war should be declared (and in this constitution it cannot but be the case), nothing is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decreeing for themselves all the calamities of war. Among the latter would be: having to fight, having to pay the costs of war from their own resources, having painfully to repair the devastation war leaves behind, and, to fill up the measure of evils, load themselves with a heavy national debt that would embitter peace itself and that can never be liquidated on account of constant wars in the future"

Democracy thus gives influence to those most likely to be killed or wounded in wars, and their relatives and friends (and to those who pay the bulk of the war taxes). This mechanism is supported by the example of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in which the Sejm resisted and vetoed most royal proposals for war, like those of Władysław IV Vasa. This monadic theory must, however, explain why democracies do attack non-democratic states. One explanation is that these democracies were threatened or otherwise were provoked by the non-democratic states; Doyle argues that democracies are more likely to be provoked than other powers, since they conduct a more idealistic foreign policy.

The other mechanism is that democratic states are culturally inclined to settle their foreign disputes by discussion and conciliation, as they do domestically., Spencer Weart extends this preference for arbitration to "republics" in general; but adds that, unfortunately, republics have always been divided into democrats and oligarchs, which view each other with feat and hatred, as less-than-human outgroups, at home and abroad. Democracies, he asserts, have never had a full-scale war; his account of wars between oligarchies is confused: at one point, the only battles between oligarchies are in trecento Italy, at another this is retracted; at yet other points he so identifies two other wars. <;ref>Weart, p.42; exception retracted p. 49</ref> He makes another exception for democracies that perceive each other as non-democracies.

Several reviews, including a generally friendly one, question Weart's conclusion that universal democracy will mean lasting peace. If peace depends on perception, democratic leaders may misperceive each other as authoritarian. More seriously, if the outgroup of oligarchs disappears, what will prevent the democracies from dividing into a new ingroup and outgroup?

Bruce Russett holds that a social norm emerged in the later nineteenth century, that democracies should not fight each other, which has since been fostered by the horrible warnings of the two World Wars and the Cold War. He sees ineffective traces of this norm in Greek antiquity.

David E. Spiro points out at some length that much of the democratic peace is in fact peace between allied democratic states, which have (unlike other alliances), not broken down into war between the allies. He regards this effect as the reality of the demcratic peace; ascribing the rest of it to chance. Conversely, Christopher Layne analysed the crises and brinkmanship that took place between non-allied democratic great powers, during the relatively brief period when such existed. He found no evidence either of institutional or cultural constraints against war; indeed, there was popular sentiment in favor of war on both sides. Instead, in all cases, one side concluded that it could not afford to risk that war at that time, and made the necessary concessions. As he observes, most crises do not result in war. Layne does not discuss the second Venezuela crisis of 1902, or the Siamese crisis of 1893. (If this pattern were true of all democracies, the results of military crises between them would largely depend on their relative strength. A more recent study denies this ; lesser powers, however, tend to avoid war altogether)

  • Studies also find that democracies are more likely to ally with one another than with other states. Such alliances are likely to last longer than alliances involving nondemocracies.

On the other hand, Mansfield and Snyder argue that democratizing leaders are more likely to fight wars, whether or not they win, as a means of handling internal tension. They find that all wars between democracies involve one less than five years old; Hensel found the same of almost all lesser conflicts,

Two of the militant democracies listed above were dominant naval powers, and therefore had greater choice whether and where to fight.

A game-theoretic explanation is that the participation of the public and open debate send clear and reliable information regarding the intentions of democracies to other states. In contrast, it is difficult to know the intentions of nondemocratic leaders, what effect concessions will have, and if promises will be kept. Thus there will be mistrust and unwillingness to make concessions if at least one of the parties in a dispute is a nondemocracy.

Criticisms

Note that most of these criticisms are against the claim of no wars and fewer MIDs between democracies, not the other claims like few civil wars.

There are at least five logically distinguishable classes of criticism of any theory of democratic peace.

  • That the theorist has not applied his criteria, for democracy or war or both, accurately to the historical record. Democracy has meant different things at different times, to establishing a unilinear or ahistorical understanding of democracy as the basis of any such theory will always be ontologically flawed.
  • That the criteria are not reasonable. For example, critics may prefer that liberal democracy should exclude or include both Germany and the United Kingdom at the time of World War I, rather than count one as democratic and the other non-democratic, when they were quite similar societies. One should also recall that, before World War II, Adolf Hitler was democratically elected (a view rejected by William Allen), and so we cannot rely on democracy in itself to result in peace with other democracies.
  • That the theory may not actually mean very much, because it has limited its data below the level of significance, or because it promises only a limited peace, involving only a small class of states; for example, democracies have fought many offensive colonial and imperialistic wars (c.f., above, that the idea of democracy has also changed over time). Setting aside the question of whether the democratic peace applies to these cases at all, the predictions of democratic peace theory are still limited. No theorist denies that democracies have acted against one another by covert or non-military means. Even small military confrontations between democracies have happened.
  • That it is not democracy itself but some other external factor(s) which happened to be associated with democratic states that explain the peace. One of the more obvious instances of such relationships includes mutual material interests; that is, liberal democracies tend to be situated in the so-termed Global North, and so inter-democratic war would hamper both sides' economic interests, as well as causing worldwide financial insecurity. As such, democratic peace theory reflects dated ontological premises that take no account of the effects of globalisation or (to cite another example) the arguments of dependency theorists such as Immanuel Wallerstein. Moreover, if we stick to Clausewitzian terms (that war is simply "the continuation of policy by other means" (see On War)), liberal democracies have less to fight over as most of their interests are secured by the economic system that favours them. Other postmodern theorists observe that the 'special relationship' between the US and the UK may also reflect a shared language as well as interests. This last argument is, however, very new and has thus far not been fully exposited.
  • Lastly, it has been argued that democratic peace theory is not really a theory but more of an observation that, historically speaking, democracies have been less likely to wage war amongst themselves. As such, this 'observation' does little to establish democratic peace as a stable referent within international relations. This criticism's more stark exponents take Doyle's theory to be little more than an apologia for a self-serving interventionist American foreign policy.

Often, the same theory will be seen as vulnerable to several of these criticisms at the same time.

Errors

Spiro (and others) have criticized the democratic peace theorists for errors of fact and method. His most serious crticism applies to the statistical methods which calculate an expected number of wars between pairs of democracies by calculating the whole number of pairs of states at war and then multiplying by the proportion of pairs of states which are both democracies.

He argues that the whole number of belligerent pairs is inflated by counting relatively formal states of war: In the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, several lesser German principalities took part on both sides. The number of pairs here is vastly increased by counting all of these as at war with each other, even when their forces never met. Again, Belgium was formally at war with North Korea and China during the Korean War, although fewer Belgians were killed than by falling off ladders.

Some democratic peace theorists make this situation worse by removing weak instances of democracies at war without pruning the whole list of formal wars – which pruning has never been tried. Supporters and opponents of the democratic peace agree that this is bad statistics.

Spiro also shows that both wars and democracies are so rare that a war between democracies is unlikely in most years, even before making these corrections. However, just as a pair of dice should roll seven every so often, this unlikehood should have come up over the last two centuries much more frequently than it has, other things being equal.

Limited claims

A persistent class of criticism by realist critics has been that "democracies have been few in number over the past two centuries, and thus there have few opportunities where democracies were in a position to fight one another." This is particularly cogent against the theories which claim that no two democracies have ever gone to war (which this article may call an "absolute" democratic peace), and argue that the Confederate States of America, the Boer republics, the Second French Republic, and so on, were not real democracies for one or another reason; and also with respect to the nineteenth century data. Only half a dozen republics or crowned republics achieved 2/3 male suffrage before the late nineteenth century, and several of those only for a few years.

Jeanne Gowa analyzed the claims of these theorists. She finds that there were so few democracies before 1939 that the claims of the theory are not significant.

She also finds that there were only independent, non-allied, Great Powers for a relatively short time before the Entente Cordiale of 1904; and that there were several crises and minor conflicts, between them, in several of which war was popular on both sides. While war was averted in these cases, there was only one war between Powers in that period, and the Spanish-American War was between a democracy and a borderline democracy. The democratic peace since 1945 she finds significant, but largely explained by the external cause of the Cold War (see below).

Doyle expressly acknowledges that liberal states do conduct covert operations against each other; but argues that the same ideology that produces the liberal peace makes them ashamed of these actions. Most other papers on the democratic peace do not discuss the matter, being more narrowly focused on war or lesser, but military, conflicts.

Some democratic peace theorists implicitly or explicitly exclude the first years of democracies; either explicitly, or, for example, by requiring that the executive result from a substantively contested election. ("For all intents and purposes, George Washington was unopposed for election as President, both in 1789 and 1792"; therefore any theory that has this requirement would exclude the entire Washington Administration from the category of democracy. Theories that require an actual transfer of power between parties would also exclude the administration of John Adams.) Such theories do not forbid, and are not violated by, aggression by an established democracy against a new, nascent or incipient democracy.

Many democratic peace theories do not count conflicts as wars which do not kill a thousand on the battlefield; thus neither the bloodless Cod Wars nor wars which kill large numbers of civilians (such as the Partition of 1947 or the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s) violate them. In some such cases, the democracy of one or both belligerents is also disputable.

Colonial wars and imperialism

One criticism against a general peacefulness for liberal democracies is that they were involved in more colonial and imperialistic wars than other states during the 1816-1945 period. On the other hand, this relation disappears if controlling for factors like power and number of colonies. Liberal democracies have less of these wars than other states after 1945. This might be related to changes in the perception of non-European peoples, as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Related to this is the human rights violations committed against native people, sometimes by liberal democracies. One response is that many of the worst crimes were committed by nondemocracies, like in the European colonies before the nineteenth century, in King Leopold II of Belgium's privately owned Congo Free State, and in Stalin's Soviet Union. England abolished slavery in British territory in 1833, immediately after the First Reform Bill had significantly increased democracy. (Of course, the abolition of the slave trade had been enacted under the Tories; and many DPTs would disclaim so undemocratic a state as Melbourne's England in other contexts.)

External causes

Doyle argued in 1983 that the theory of a Kantian peace contradicts the theories of democratic peace which claim that mutual democracy, even mutual liberal democracy, will create a lasting peace without the other two Kantian articles. Other Kantians have not repeated this claim. There has also been a confluence of the old theory (dating back to Richard Cobden and Benjamin Constant) that Free Trade will produce and ensure peace, with the modern theory that trade will produce democracy, or at least spread it to the non-democratic trading partner, as argued by Houshang Amiramahdi and others. According to this, democracy and peace are indeed correlated, because they arise from a common cause.

Alternatively, one may claim that any apparent association between democracy and peace is an illusion, due in part to chance, and in part to peace being induced by other and transient causes. In particular, the presence of a common foe has frequently induced states, which happen to be democracies, to ally. Joanne Gowa observes that much of the data used to infer an absolute democratic peace consists of Western democracies not going to war with each other while allied against the Soviet Union, and argues that this offers limited hope that non-allied democracies will remain at peace. This again overlaps with the third category above, since there is also an argument that the relative peace of the twenty-first century (so far), is due to the completion of decolonization. (John Mearsheimer offers a similar analysis of the Anglo-American peace before 1945, caused by the German threat.) David Spiro would reply that these stable alliances are the democratic peace; although Gowa denies that the Western powers are in any sense "natural" allies. Gowa explains the Cold War peace between the Western powers as arising from their natural interests, in the traditional realist mode; this does not explain, nor is it intended to, the low domestic violence in democracies.

Countercriticisms

Gowa's use of statistics has been criticized, with several other studies finding opposing results. Ray objects that the same arguments should show that the Communist bloc would be at peace within itself; and it was not. Again, there were several wars and conflicts within the Western Alliance, but in each case involving a non-democratic member of the Free World.

Singer and Small explained Babst's original observation by observing that many democracies are not adjacent, and that wars tend very strongly to be between neighboring states. Gleditsch has partly answered this by showing that the average distance between democracies is about 8000 miles, the same as the average distance between all states. As he observes, few states can project power anywhere near that distance; Vanuatu and Iceland may be expected to be at peace, whatever their regimes.

It has also been suggested that democracies rarely fight wars because war, or impending war, tends to destroy democracy. (Such an effect should mean that surviving democracies fight nobody; which would be a monadic theory.) Mousseau and Shi studied all states, inquiring whether the onset of war decreased democracy, either temporarily or permanently, and found most wars had no significant effect, but some did.

Many papers have studied the multiple correlations involving peace or war. For example, Stuart Bremer did a sutdy of seven variables traditionally expected to produce peace or war. He found that six of them had a genuine effect, independent of all the others, in predicting whether a given pair of states were likely to go to war or not. Mutual democracy was fourth of these, behind the existence of a common boundary (which predicts war), an alliance between the two states, and higher than average wealth per head (both of which predict peace).

Ray collected a dozen such studies showing that democracy has some statistically significant correlation with peace, "even after controlling for a large number of factors" (not, of course, all controlled simultaneously); including economic interdependence, membership in international organizations, contiguity, power status, alliance ties, militarization, economic wealth and economic growth, power ratio, and political stability.

Progressive research program?

Imre Lakatos suggested that what he called a "progressive research program" is better than a "degenerative" when it is can explain the same phenomena as the "degenerative" one, but is also marked by growth and the discovery of important novel facts. In contrast, the supporters of the "degenerative" program do not make important new empirical discoveries, but instead mostly adjustments to their theory in order to defend it from competitors. On study argues that the democratic peace theory is now the "progressive" program in international relations. The theory can explain the empirical phenomena previously explained by the earlier dominant research program, realism in international relations. In addition, the initial discovery, that democracies do not make war on one another, has created a rapidly growing literature and a constantly growing list of novel empirical regularities, as noted below.

See also

Notes

  1. Rome may well have been less pro-oligarchic before the Punic Wars; on the other hand, Rome herself may have been less oligarchic then. Cambridge Ancient History. (second edition;1970-2005) Vol. V pp. 74, 91; Vol VI, pp. 532,848; Vol. VII p. 231. Vol VIII, p. 211; Vol IX, pp. 31-33
  2. Kant:Perpetual peace 1795
  3. Wilson, T. Woodrow: Message to Congress April 2, 1917
  4. Nixon, Richard M.: Televised speech, November 3, 1969
  5. Russett, Bruce M. Grasping the Democratic Peace : Principles for a Post-Cold War World. . p 4.
  6. His account of Greek history relies largely on conjecture. He omits several wars between oligarchic republics, including the recurrent ones between Sparta and Argos, and the Lelantine War. He excludes the earlier wars of Rome, including the Punic Wars, on the grounds that the sources are dubious; yet he uses Xenophon, who has also been doubted. Also, modern classicists agree (and we have non-Roman evidence in Aristotle) that Rome and Carthage were oligarchic republics, "which suggests that excluding them was a largely arbitrary judgment that just happened to leave Weart's central claim intact." Stephen M. Walt. "Never Say Never: Wishful Thinking on Democracy and War". Foreign Affairs (January/February 1999). Cross-reference: .
  7. See the bibliography of Rummel's website. Rummel is partisan, and the bibliography lacks some recent papers; but still one of the better introductions to the subject.
  8. See Kinsella 2005
  9. Clinton, Bill. "1994 State Of The Union Address". Retrieved 2006-01-22.
  10. "President and Prime Minister Blair Discussed Iraq, Middle East". Retrieved October 3. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  11. Owen 2005
  12. Levy, Jack S. 1989. "The Causes of War: A Review of Theories and Evidence" in Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War, Volume 1, edited by P. E. Tetlock, J. L. Husbands, R. Jervis, P. C. Stern and C. Tilly. New York: Oxford University Press.
  13. Singer and Small 1976; Rummel is "virtually alone" in doing so; Rummel's evidence is drawn only from 1976-1980; and the post-Vietnam years may be exceptional. See Russett 2003, p. 139 n. 3, and Gelditsch 1992. There are also some more recent monadic papers, as cited in Müller and Wolff 2004, which regards monadic theories as "neither necessary nor convincing".
  14. Doyle 1983, part 2
  15. Rummel classified almost half the wars between Waterloo and the fall of the Berlin wall as including a democracy (155 to 198); and yet democracies were rarely as many as a quarter of all states; if the non-democracies were three-quarters of the states, and there were no monadic peace, they should have fought nine-sixteenth of the wars. See also Mueller and Wolff for the slight monadic effect found by the other papers.
  16. Chan 1997p.59 and papers there cited.
  17. Again, Rummel, who argues for a necessary and mechanical connexion, is an exception. Gleditsch 1992
  18. Some DPTs do not discuss lesser conflicts; Doyle 1983 denies that they are less common.
  19. This paragraph is entirely from Doyle 1983.
  20. See, among others, Russett & Oneal Triangulating Peace and the preliminary papers Russett et al. (1998); Oneal and Russett (1999)
  21. Alexander Wendt,Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1999), 68 and chapter 5 passim.
  22. Binningsbø 2000; Leblang and Chan 2003
  23. Such additional data sources include the "Conflict Data Set". Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Retrieved October 3. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help) and "Data". Peter D. Watson Center for Conflict and Cooperation. Retrieved October 3. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  24. Gleditsch 1992
  25. See for example Maoz 1997, p.164-5, which finds that there should have been 57 pair-years of democracies at war on expectation if there were no democratic peace; and in fact there was one
  26. compare Spiro 1994
  27. The difficulties and disputes involved are discussed at some length in Case studies and theory development in the social sciences by Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett.
  28. See the Correlates of War site. Click on Available Data Sets for particular databases.
  29. Gleditsch, Nils P. 1992. Democracy and Peace. "Journal of Peace Research" 29 (4):369-376; Small, Melvin, and J. David Singer. 1976. The War Proneness of Democratic Regimes, 1816-1965. "Jerusalem Journal of International Relations" 1:50-69.
  30. Gleditsch, Nils P. 1992.
  31. Gleditsch 1995
  32. Doyle, Michael W. 1983a. Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs. Philosophy & Public Affairs 12 (3):205-235; continued in Doyle, Michael W. 1983b. Kant. Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs, Part 2. "Philosophy & Public Affairs" 12 (4):323-354
  33. Doyle 1983a, p. 213, emphasis in original quote
  34. Doyle has a much looser standard for suffrage: either 30% of the adult males were able to vote or it was possible for every man to acquire voting rights, as by buying a freehold. He requires that women's suffrage be granted within a generation of it being demanded. Nevertheless, Doyle counts the northern United States as liberal throughout its history, despite the 72 years from the Seneca Convention to the Nineteenth amendment.
  35. Doyle 1983a; cf. Russett 1993
  36. Doyle 1983. Quote from footnote 8, pp.216-7.
  37. Russett, Bruce. 1993. "Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World". Princeton: Princeton University Press; 50-51.
  38. Manicas, Peter. 1989. "War and Democracy". London: Basil Blackwell; 27.
  39. Doyle 1983a; Rummel 2003
  40. Wayman 1998
  41. Rummel, Rudolph J. (1997). Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0765805235.
  42. Mansfield and Snyder 2005, p.39
  43. Ray 2003 ftnote. 48.
  44. Wayman 2002
  45. Naoz 1997, p.165
  46. Gleditsch 1995 and others
  47. Chan 1997
  48. Gleditsch 1995, Bremer 1992. The data set Bremer happened to be using showed one exception, the French-Thai War of 1940, which is spurious; it happened after the setting up of the Vichy régime. But he notes that other data sets show other isolated exceptions; and objects to changing just "deviant" false positives, rather than a systematic re-examination of all cases, which might find false negatives.
  49. Wayman 2002. Canada may also have declared war; the United States did not.
  50. Bremer 1993, Pp.231-2, 246
  51. Bremer 1992, p.330
  52. Doyle (1983); but his only exceptions are the Paquisha War and the Lebanese air force's intervention in the Six Day War, both of which he dismisses as technical. Cross reference to this note:
  53. Cederman 2001, p. 18-19, quoting Kant's Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784)
  54. Less than $1400/head; see Mousseau et al. 2003, other papers by Mousseau, and Hegre 2003
  55. Bremer 1993
  56. Wayman 2002
  57. See Wayman 2002; Russet and Oneal 2004; Beck et al. 2004. MIDs are conflicts short of war but include the conflicts that precede a war.
  58. Müller and Wulf 2004
  59. Hensel et al. 2000.
  60. Müller 2004; Müller and Wolff 2004
  61. Ray, James Lee (2003). A Lakatosian View of the Democratic Peace Research Program From Progress in International Relations Theory, edited by Colin and Miriam Fendius Elman. MIT Press. {{cite book}}: External link in |title= (help)
  62. Hegre, Håvard, Tanja Ellington, Scott Gates, and Nils Petter Gleditsch (2001). "Towards A Democratic Civil Peace? Opportunity, Grievance, and Civil War 1816-1992". American Political Science Review. 95: 33–48.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  63. "Freedom squelches terrorist violence". Harvard University Gazette. Retrieved 2006-04-01. Scholarly here:
    Template:Citepaper version
  64. Barabara Harff (Feb 2003). "No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder since 1955". American Political Science Review. 97.1: 57–73.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: year (link)
    Rummel, R.J. "The Democratic Peace". Freedom, Democracy, Peace; Power, Democide, and War. Retrieved October 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  65. Human Security Report 2005 p.148-150. Fuller evidence of these claims is promised in the 2006 Report, and can be found in the papers cited in the present version.
  66. See the Global Confilict Trends page of the Center for Systematic Peace.
  67. Rummel's Power Kills website, viewed February 10, 2006
  68. Kant, 1795, Cf. Reiss 1970:100
  69. For a description, see Frost, Robert I. The northern wars : war, state and society in northeastern Europe, 1558-1721. Harlow, England;New York: Longman's. 2000. Especially Pp. 9-11, 114, 181, 323.
  70. Doyle 1983
  71. Müller and Wolff 1004
  72. Weart, Never at War, pp. 11-12, 28
  73. Democrats view oligarchs as oppressive; oligarchs view democracy as government by the "bad men", as the Greek oligarchs put it. See extracts from Theognis, and the Constitution of the Athenians by Pseudo-Xenophon (translation)
  74. Weart, pp. 33-34
  75. "The possibility that the Athenians were wrong suggests a qualification to our rule. Instead of saying that well-established democracies do not make war on their own kind, perhaps we should say that they do not make war on other states they perceive to be democracies. This is an important point, to which we shall return." Weart Pp. 33-34. There is no ancient evidence for this perception, and our major source on Syracusan democracy is Thucydides, the Athenian. Eric Robinson. "Response to Spencer Weart". Journal of Peace Research (Vol. 38, No. 5. (Sep., 2001)): 615–617. {{cite journal}}: |issue= has extra text (help) The chief passage from Thucydides is 6.32-41, particularly 6.39, in which Thucydides has the Syracusan democrat Athenagoras praising the constitution of his country. Crossreference;
  76. John M Owen IV. "Never at War (review)". Political Science Quarterly, issue= Volume 114, Number 2, 1 July 1999: 335–336. {{cite journal}}: Missing pipe in: |journal= (help). Walt's review also asks the second question.
  77. Russett 2003, p. 5-8, 59-62, 73-4
  78. Spiro 1994; Layne 1994.
  79. Gelpi and Griesdorf 2001
  80. Bremer 1992 and papers there referenced
  81. Ray 2003
  82. Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder. : MIT Press, 2005, as reviewed in Owen 2005
  83. Hensel et al. 2000
  84. Compare Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Influence of Sea Power on History, ad init..
  85. Levy and Razin 2004
  86. Spiro 1994; for other criticisms, see Rossami 2003
  87. Bremer 1992, Gleditsch 1995; Gowa Ballots and Bullets.
  88. Spiro 1994; answer recast from Maoz 1997
  89. Quote from Mearshimer 1990, p.50; the argument is supported at length by Spiro 1994, Layne 1994.
  90. See Jeanne Gowa, Bullets and Ballots, p.61 ff. For the greater tendency of the Powers to be involved in war, see Bremer 1992; the converse of this is that small-poweer status is an external cause of peace. Which side of the borderline Spain falls on depends on which edition of Ted Gurr's list you read. She finds similar, although more significant, results if lesser conflicts are included.
  91. Doyle 1983.
  92. Quote from the National Archives of the United States.
  93. Ravlo and Glieditsch 2000
  94. Doyle 1983
  95. See John Morley:Life of Richard Cobden and Francois Furet: Passing of an Illusion.
  96. Gowa: Bullets and Ballots chapter VI; "A democratic peace does not exist in the pre-1914 world, and it cannot be extrapolated to the post-Cold War era", p.113. Mearsheimer 1990. For the other side, Spiro 1990 .
  97. Ray 1998 Several of the conflicts Ray cites are nowhere near a thousand battlefield deaths.
  98. Gleditsch 1995; Gleditsch believes that the effect of distance in preventing war, modified by the democratic peace, explains the incidence of war as fully as it can be explained.
  99. Mousseau and Shi 1999
  100. Bremer 1992
  101. The collection is in Ray 1998; quote from Bremer 1993; more recent multivariate studies are Russet and Oneal 2004, Reiter 2001, Reuveny and Li 2003, and Ray 2003.
  102. Ray, James Lee (2003). A Lakatosian View of the Democratic Peace Research Program From Progress in International Relations Theory, edited by Colin and Miriam Fendius Elman. MIT Press. {{cite book}}: External link in |title= (help)
  103. Template:Citepaper version

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