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Causes

One idea is that liberal democracies have a common culture and that this creates good relations. However, there have been many wars between non-democracies that share a common culture. Democracies are however characterized by rule of law, and therefore the inhabitants may be used to resolve disputes through arbitration rather than by force. This may reduce the use of force between democracies.

Another idea is that democracy 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 was Kant's argument; and it is supported by the example of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in which the Sejm vetoed more than half the royal proposals for war. 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. This idea would suggest that the relationship in the DPT became stronger when graphic movies and television made wars less romantic.

R. J. Rummel dismisses these as superficial, relying on Kurt Lewin and Andrew Ushenko's proposition 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.

Studies show that democratic states are more likely than autocratic states to win the wars. One explanation is that democracies, for internal political and economic reasons, have greater resources. This might mean that democratic leaders are unlikely to select other democratic states as targets because they perceive them to be particularly formidable opponents. One study finds that interstate wars have important impacts on the fate of political regimes, and that the probability that a political leader will fall from power in the wake of a lost war is particularly high in democratic states.

A game-theoretic explanation is that the participation of the public and the 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.

The book Never at War explains the democratic and also a related oligarchic peace by the human tendency to classify other humans into ingroup and outgroup.

Criticisms

There are at least four 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.
• That the criteria are not reasonable. For example, critics may prefer that liberal democracy should exclude or include both of Germany and the United Kingdom at the time of WWI, rather than count one as democratic and the other non-democratic, when they were quite similar societies.
• 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.
• That it is not democracy itself but some other external factor(s) which happened to be associated with democratic states that explain the peace.

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

Specific historic cases

Any theory of democratic peace must face certain difficult counter-examples. The theories which claim an absolute democratic peace solve the following problems by restricting the definition of democracy (and sometimes of war); the Kantian peace theories generally look for explanations in the absence of international pressure, trade, or prosperity; the other modern theories will observe that any tendency will, in the perversity of human affairs, have exceptions.

Among those which have been mentioned are:

• Athenian Sicilian Expedition, 415-413 BC
• Trail of Tears, 1838
• French Second Republic attack on the Roman Republic, 1849
• American Civil War, 1861-1865
• War of the Pacific, 1879-1884
• Spanish-American War, 1898
• World War I, 1914-1918
• The state of war between Finland and the Western Allies, 1941-1944
• Peru-Ecuador Cenepa War, 1995
• The Kargil War, 1999

Limited claims

This class of criticism is particularly cogent against the theories of absolute democratic peace, which claim that no two democracies have ever gone to war. These theorists accomplish this by arguing 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.

When all these reasons are added up, few democracies remain, and the theory doesn't actually say all that much about them. Rummel's data, for example, consist largely of the following:

• From 1815 until the 1880's, there were at most three democratic states in his sense (the United States, Switzerland and San Marino). It is true they did not go to war, but some would ascribe this to geography.
• From then until 1904, there were several crises among the democratic powers, as among the others. The only war between any two Powers that resulted was the Spanish-American War, between a democracy and a borderline democracy (which side of the border depends on which edition of Ted Gurr's list you read).
• From 1904 on, Great Britain has been allied with France. Most other democracies were either allied with this Entente or benevolently neutral.
• From 1945 to 1991, most of the world's democracies were allied against the Soviet Union; the remainder were few and isolated.
• Since 1991, there have been very few full-scale wars. None of that few have been between democracies.

Is, for example, the Entente to be explained by the democracy of the two Contracting Powers? Even the Third Reform Bill of 1884 fails to meet Rummell's stated criteria for democracy; and fails vastly short if the British Empire as a whole, or even India, is considered.

Even if it were so explained, is this handful of facts sufficient to count on a democratic peace forever?

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 begun under the Tories; and many DPT's would disclaim so undemocratic a state as Melbourne's England in other contexts.)

Many democratic peace theories implicitly or explicitly exclude the first years of democracies; for example, by requiring that the executive derive from genuinely contested elections, which would eliminate both administrations of George Washington. These theories are therefore perfectly compatible with, and not at all falsified by, established democracies preying upon nascent, attempted, proclaimed, or unstable democratic states.

External causes

Strictly speaking, the theory of a Kantian peace contradicts the absolute theories of democratic peace. If three factors are required for a perpetual peace, no one of them can be the only thing needed.

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, either common trade or common prosperity.

Other critics again argue 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. For example, 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. Other critics have ascribed the democratic peace to the relative isolation of democratic states (particularly those not part of the Western alliance). 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.

As often on academic matters, these criticisms are disputed. Papers have been done claiming significant correlation, even after controlling for such variables.

See also

• Peace
• Perpetual peace
• The End of History
• War
• World peace

Notes

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3. Template:Citepaper version
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5. For such critical papers see Template:Citepaper version; Template:Citepaper version; Template:Journal reference url;Template:Journal reference url; Template:Journal reference url
6. For which see the HSR website

References

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• Brown, Michael E., Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller. Debating the Democratic Peace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. ISBN 0262522136.
• Doyle, Michael W. Ways of War and Peace. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. ISBN 0393969479.
• Gowa, Joanne. Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. ISBN 0691070229.
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• Huth, Paul K., et al. The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press: 2003. ISBN 0521805082.
• http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help); Missing or empty |title= (help); Unknown parameter |Author= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |PublishYear= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |Title= ignored (|title= suggested) (help)
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• Lipson, Charles. Reliable Partners: How Democracies Have Made a Separate Peace. Princeton University Press: 2003. ISBN 0691113904.
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• Ray, James Lee. Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition. University of South Carolina Press: 1998. ISBN 1570032416.
• Rummel, R.J. Power Kills: Democracy As a Method of Nonviolence. Transaction Publishers: 2003. ISBN 0765805235.
• Russett, Bruce & Oneal, John R. Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations. W. W. Norton & Company: 2001. ISBN 039397684X.
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• Weart, Spencer R. Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another. Yale University Press: 2000. ISBN 0300082983.

External links

• Summary of common examples and arguments
• Rummell's extensive bibliography

Supportive

• Rummell's website
• Democide, Democracy and the Man from Hawaii
• A summing-up in favor of Rummellism as of 1998
• Spread of Democracy Will Make World Safer, Historian Says a moderated webchat with Victor Davis Hanson hosted by the Department of State, International Information Program.

Critical

• Criticisms of this article
• The Myth of Democratic Pacifism