Democratic peace theory

From RationalWiki
(Redirected from Democratic Peace Theory)
Jump to: navigation, search
What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!

War

Icon war2.svg
Don't believe us?

Democratic peace theory is the theory that liberal democracies don't go to war with one another. This is predicated on the theory that a large group of voters, many of whom are eligible for conscription, are less keen to go to war than one monarch or dictator who is likely to stay in the capital city ordering troops to the front, an effect that, with two democracies involved, is thought to be cumulative. Moreover, democracies have a tendency to bureaucracy, and when forms must be signed in triplicates, declaring war seems a little less heroic. Another contributing factor is that democracies tend to ally against non-democracies, and even democracies with no official ties beyond basic diplomatic relations are more likely to think of one another as friendly.

The theory is used by neoconservatives to justify war (ironically enough), as long as that war is "spreading democracy," like the 2003 Iraq War.[1][2][3]

The theory seems to have been borne out by the fact that since they became representative democracies, the nations of Europe have refrained from war with one another, a marked contrast with the era of monarchy, in which just two nations, England and France, managed to go to war 20 times over a 900-year period, averaging once every 45 years, or about once a generation. It is possible, however, that these observations are more of a coincidence, as most the world's liberal democracies were allied during the Cold War against the Eastern Bloc, which was composed of more autocratic regimes. Since it has remained a relatively short amount of time since the Cold War ended, many of the same alliances remain; hence, the lack of conflict between the world's liberal democracies.

Contents

[edit] Things to consider

This theory does not preclude democracies from going to war with states with other systems of government. In fact, there has been some evidence that democracies are more likely to go to war with non-democracies than other non-democracies are.[citation needed] Which is more than just a little contradictory with the usual reasons given for the supposedly inherent peacefulness of democracies - if these mechanisms were indeed major factors in precluding offensive warfare in general, they'd work in much the same way when the opponent is an autocracy. A possible explanation for the fact that democracies are at least much less likely to wage war against another would be a sense of "kinship" and shared norms among democracies, and a higher tendency to mutually assume peaceful intentions on the other's part, which could serve to preclude security dilemmas and arms races, both of which are potential sources of conflict.

When presented with exceptions, proponents of the theory move the goalposts, changing the definitions of "democracy" or "war" so that the claim remains true (No True Scotsman). Matthew White writes:

I've witnessed this debate on Usenet several times, and it always follows the same pattern:
  1. Somebody casually brings up the old factoid about how no two democracies have ever gone to war with one another.
  2. Somebody jumps in and lists a dozen or so wars which have been fought between democracies.
  3. Somebody else points out that those countries weren't democratic, not really.
  4. Everybody gets into arguments over who was or was not democratic.
  5. The argument fizzles out except for two guys continuing to argue over whether the American Civil War was about slavery.

James Lee Ray points out that with a sufficiently restrictive definition of democracy, the claim becomes trivially true: Define democracy as true universal suffrage, the right of all - including children - to vote, and there have been no democracies, and therefore no wars between them.[4]

[edit] Counterexamples

In her 1999 book Ballots and Bullets, Joanne Gowa finds strong empirical support for the democratic peace only in the period after World War II, which presented a bipolar rather than multipolar world system. The claim could be made by a supporter of the democratic peace theory is that while it isn't perfect in preventing wars between democracies, it does seem to drastically reduce the frequency of wars between democratic states. This can be seen as something of a weak-form of the theory.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Ish-Shalom, Piki. "The Civilization of Clashes: Neoconservative Reading of the Theory of the Democratic Peace." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Town & Country Resort and Convention Center, San Diego, California, USA, Mar 22, 2006. [1]
  2. Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq War: realism versus neo-conservatism, 18 May 2005
  3. An Evaluation of Neoconservative Foreign Policy, by David Sykes on April 1, 2012
  4. James Lee Ray: "Wars between democracies: Rare, or nonexistent?" International Interactions, Volume 18, Issue 3. February 1993, pages 251-276
Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Community
Tools
support