Talk:Democratic peace theory

The point of my edit is that the original idea is that democracies don't go to war, due to the pressures of a voting public. This obviously isn't true, so instead they are looking for other explanations. Researcher 07:21, 9 December 2008 (EST)
 * It's just one of a range of explanations given in the article. You've lived through things. Most of them were sold as police actions against dictators. Could you sell the same idea about a democracy to the public? Maybe about Chavez Venezuela... but not about, say, France. WazzaHello? Is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me... 09:37, 9 December 2008 (EST)

Say wha?
The entire counterfactuals section is bunk. At the time of the Spanish-American War, Spain was not a democracy but a monarchy with a weak parliamentary government rotated regularly between political factions to avoid civil war. (The instability of this system lead to the founding of the Second Republic). Though Finland allied with Nazi Germany for most of WWII, it only engaged one of the Allies, the Soviet Union, and turned on the Nazis later on. In 2006 the democratic-ish Lebanese government had no control over its own southern border where the fighting took place; all of the fighting was between Hezbollah and Israel. When Lebanese troops reasserted authority, the IDF pulled out. And the Gaza war of 07-08 was fought by Hamas militants in their position as the nondemocratic occupiers of Gaza, not as forces of the PA. Even if Hamas was the legitimate governing party of the PA, it fought the war independently of that position. In fact, there is just one good example, the Kargil War, and even then it is rather hard to argue that Pakistan is a liberal democracy.

The upper part of the page a bit more accurate, but I'm still not sure if it is needed. I'd delete the page or rewrite it, but that'd be a bit unilateral.-- cm 2 19:50, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

controversy
I would just like to point out that a big controversy with this theory is what exactly constitutes a war and a democracy. while many exceptions do exist, issues exist for every one of the. for instance the allies declared war on Finland in WWII but they didn't actually do enough fighting to be considered a war (political science generally calls a war a armed conflict with at least 1000 battle deaths a year to count police actions and excluded wars extended by diplomatic irregularities) others are what exactly makes a democracy, and how much control it has over the military. The Later can be very hard to answer especially with early cases and the former is big for countries that are newly democratizing. its also important to mention that many of the wars between democracies involve a new democracy which is considered unstable and pron to conflict, especially in areas of the world where it is surrounded by non-democratic states (Israel fighting Lebanon in 1948 comes to mind) not only that they have yet to have gone though a transition of power, or even have an election, both are core to the existance of a democracy --108.5.230.165 (talk) 22:31, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

More counterexamples
I added some more (possible) counterexamples: 1923 French invasion of the Ruhr, Western Sahara conflict, Russia-Ukraine, Russia-Georgia, Second Congo War. Obviously depending on your definition of democracy, since some of the states in the Second Congo War were very much pretend-democracies.

Others that could be added: War of 1812 (though neither UK nor US had anything like universal suffrage; it depends how far back you want to go, to Renaissance Italy or ancient Greece?). Iran has some characteristics of a democracy, but has been involved in a lot of proxy wars, some against other semi-democracies. Various conflicts in former Soviet republics e.g. between Armenia and Azerbaijan (both of which were sort-of democratic. The US's more covert actions such as against Allende's democratically-elected regime in Chile.

Equally I'm impressed that India and Pakistan seem to have kept to this, both with their conflicts with each other and things like the Indian invasion of Goa (against Salazar's Portugal). Russia seems to be a problem for the theory; although it's corrupt it's hard to argue Russia is not a democracy. Perhaps a better phrasing is that democracies don't attack other democracies unless they're very sure they'll win. Though possibly modern democracies don't start any war unless they think it'll be easy. Feel free to add, delete, edit war, etc. Annquin (talk) 20:55, 13 August 2016 (UTC)