Democratic Peace

Will wonders, apropos of the democratic peace:

I always that the answer was that people, when not inflamed by propaganda, as they tend not to be in democratic nations with a free press, don't like war. It's expensive and nice boys get killed. So leaders of democratic nations, who don't like getting kicked out of office, generally avoid war. Is it really more complicated than that? Justin?

The first important thing to point out here is that most DP theorists don't argue what Will is postulating above.  They argue not that democracies are less likely to go to war, per se, but that democracies don't go to war with other democracies.  Ever.  As Will's framed things above, the last 15 years have seen 9 (I think) military interventions on the part of the world's leading democracy alone.  America, a leading democracy, seems to like war quite a lot.  So there's that.

But to the argument that DP theorists do offer, the methodology has always been a little sketchy.  They waffle on World War I, generally concluding that Wilhelmine Germany doesn't get to play, because the Reichstag didn't have enough control over foreign policy (as I noted below, and as one of my bosses noted here).  The House of Commons has precious little control over British foreign policy -- why should it count when Germany did not?

I think the most compelling point, though, was the nature of the world during the period DP theorists generally focus on: the Cold War.  It was exceedingly unlikely that the democratic world, largely united against the Soviet enemy, would have put aside that grave threat in order to fight on peripheral matters that did not include "total annihilation or takeover by the Soviet Union."  Territorial squabbles, arms races, et cetera, were largely ceded to the two centers of power in the world.

All this said, though, I should add that I do not believe that regime type means nothing about the likelihood whether a state will go to war or not.  When the world was organized into autocratic fiefdoms, wars broke out frequently, although often with lesser consequences than modern wars in terms of the manner in which they affected members of the populace.  I do imagine that a free press is a counterweight to rash rushes to war in some way; I think that intuitively, but the nature of the world since the end of the Cold War doesn't provide me much empirical evidence to that end.

Update: See Julian's article here for more.  I've not read the Gowa book, but Julian notes that it argues much the same.

Comments

[wml]

quote:
"I do imagine that a free press is a counterweight to rash rushes to war in some way"

*cough* Spanish American War *cough*

[Justin]

Like I said, I don't have a whole hell of a lot of EVIDENCE for that intuition...

Not everybody agrees that it was a rash rush to war, but if you look at what the free press did in the run-up to WWI, your hair will stand on end.

[Gareth]

Even in the Cold War, a non-trivial democracy, India, was aligned with the Soviets (Finland was too, but would probably have stayed out of any shooting war). If there had been a shooting war in the region involving the superpowers, India and the US would surely have been at war with each other.

Lebanon-Israel in 1948.

What would you call the CIA coups against Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran? How about Allende? More recently, Aristide and Chavez? I'm not saying they were all wonderful folks, but they were all democratically elected.

The democratic peace theory also has to rule out all those colonial wars by countries that were democratic at home. I suppose it's true that the Mahdi wasn't democratic, but so what? Victorian Britain, Third Republic France or Leopold's Belgium were as aggressive as Mussolini in Ethiopia.

Still, I'm glad you aren't committed to the idea that regime type doesn't matter at all. I suspect that in a world in which the Weimar order had survived, there would not have been a European war in 1939.

[Justin]

Jeez, lot of examples. I'm quite certain that DP types could find a myriad of ways out of Lebanon-Israel, probably relating to suffrage.

They argue that overthrowing regimes, if you don't call it "war," doesn't count. So no Guatemala, and certainly no Chile. So, umm...

Interesting thought experiment on Weimar. Apropos of that point, I just watched "Berlin: Symphony of a Great City" again last night. Wow did they turn the corner quick from '19-'27. Really quite impressive.

[cf]

The usual reason given why Wilhelmine Germany doesn't count as a Democracy, but the UK does is that in Germany, the Kaiser could choose the chancellor, but in the UK, the monarch could not choose the Prime Minister.

[Gareth]

cf,

In theory, Edward VII chose Herbet Asquith to head his government. Of course, in reality, the fact that Asquith had a majority in the House of Commons helped. But the Tories were still able to use their majority in the Lords to frustrate the Liberals. And just before war broke out, Asquith was facing the possibility that the Unionist armed forces would back Carson against the wishes of the democratically elected government. The Reichstag's power, on the other hand, was more like Congress' in the US system today.

But, why on earth does this matter? Wilhelm II could not have gone to war if the Reichstag had opposed him, but the Reichstag, like the House of Commons, was almost unanimous in its bellicosity (although opposition grew in Germany faster than in Britain). They were both elected in competitive elections with adult male suffrage.

Both countries, and the US and France, became pretty illiberal and undemocratic during the war. The Germans locked up Liebknecht; the British Russell; the Americans Debs. War is bad for democracy, but it doesn't necessarily follow that democracy is bad for war.

[y81]

What cf said. And I think Lebanon/Israel in 1948 is usually excluded on the grounds that Israel was not a country until the war was over, just an indigenous rebellion.

[Der Steppenwolf]

I also believe the regime type doesn`t mean MUCH about whether a state would or would not go to war.
However Kant(The Perpetual Peace),who first made the argument discussed above never seeked to state that republics NEVER made war on each other, just that they usually don't. Also, he obviously wasn't inspired by the Cold War scenario, as XIX century and post WWI idealists weren't either.

PD: pardon my poor english....

[Peter]

In fairness to the DP theorists, they are not claiming that democracies never go to war with each other, just that they are much less likely to go to war with each other. But I agree with you that World War I is an instructive example of the limits of DP. The point is that by conforming to a very stringent definition of democracy, they end exluding a lot of countries that could not satisfy the contempoary definition of democracy, but were democratic by the standards of the day. That ends up leaving a very small sample size, e.g. Western European democracies, in which the absence violent conflict can be attributed to many explanations besides their political regime.

I think the important question in regards to DP is to examine how democraticization would affect current conflicts. Would, for example, a more democratic Pakistan make a peaceful resolution of the India-Pakistan conflict more likely? You could argue that a democratic Pakistani leader would have less flexibility in cutting off support for the jihadis in Kashmir, or for agreeing to what Pakistanis views as unfair terms of negotiation. On the other hand, Indians might feel more at ease about negotiating with a democratic Pakistani government.