Question

Given that democracies frequently go to war, how can the democratic peace theory be valid?

Answer 1

The democratic peace theory posits that democracies are hesitant to engage in armed conflict with other identified democracies. Among proponents of the democratic peace theory, several factors are held as motivating peace between democratic states.Democratic leaders are forced to accept responsibility for war losses to a voting public.Publicly accountable statespeople are inclined to establish diplomatic institutions for resolving international tensions.Democracies are not inclined to view countries with adjacent policy and governing doctrine as hostile;Democracies tend to possess greater public wealth than other states, and therefore eschew war to preserve infrastructure and resources.It has been argued that the absence of war between democratic states ‘comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.Although statistically the probability of war between any two states is considerably low, the absence of war among liberal democracies across a wide range of different historical, economic, and political factors suggests that there is a strong predisposition against the use of military violence between democratic states.This democratic peace proposition not only challenges the validity of other political systems (i.e., fascism, communism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism), but also the prevailing realist account of international relations, which emphasises balance-of-power calculations and common strategic interests in order to explain the peace and stability that characterises relations between liberal democracies.This essay argues, however, that the structural and normative arguments of the democratic peace theory together offer a far more logical and convincing explanation for this seeming anomaly. Furthermore, in line with Immanuel Kant’s theory of perpetual peace, I argue that the global spread of democracy will result in greater international peace if this occurs in parallel with the strengthening of economic interdependence and international organisations. The difficulty lies in the significant risk of instability inherent in the process of democratisation and the uncertainty that remains in an ‘incomplete Kantian world’ where the Hobbesian state of anarchy has not yet entirely disappeared from the international system.The concept of democratic peace must be distinguished from the claim that democracies are in general more peaceful than nondemocratic countries. Whereas the latter claim is controversial, the claim that democratic states do not fight each other is widely regarded as true by scholars and practitioners of international relations. Proponents of the democratic peace hark back to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and, more recently, to U.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson, who declared in his 1917 war message to Congress that the United States aimed to make the world “safe for democracy.Democracies almost never go to war against each another. This simple observation has acquired the status of an empirical law in the social sciences. Yet, while democracies tend to have peaceful relations with one another, this is not to claim that democracies are generally less war-prone than other regime types. To the contrary, many empirical studies find that the overall rate of war involvement does not differ substantially between democracies and non-democracies. This dual finding constitutes the core of the ‘democratic peace’ and it specifies the elements that any theory needs to explain in order to fully account for the observed phenomena: the peaceful relations between democracies on the one hand, and the war involvement of democratic regimes on the other hand. Starting in the 1980s, the first generation of democratic peace research focused on proving the robustness of the observed pattern – whether the democratic peace could be substantiated in empirical terms. Not surprisingly, a debate emerged over the proper definition of the two central concepts: democracy and peace. Most studies on the democratic peace apply minimalist definitions of these terms, referring to electoral democracy and the absence of interstate war, respectively; though democracies are sometimes further distinguished by their degree of consolidation. Given these criteria, studies have pointed to several ‘deviant cases’ that could be considered wars between democracies. However, almost without exception, the observed countries either do not fit the criteria for democracy, which is true for many nineteenth century ‘democracies’ with less than universal suffrage and undemocratic elections, or their conflict did not escalate to full-scale hostilities. Hence, the consensus view is that the existing cases of alleged wars between democracies do not invalidate the democratic peace proposition. The second generation of research concentrated on finding a convincing explanation for the empirical record – why the democratic peace existed. As many observers noted at the time, the robust empirical regularity of the democratic peace phenomenon still lacked a credible theoretical explanation that could account for both elements of the dual finding. Finally, the third generation of studies started to broaden the research program and to investigate alternative explanations. These works have introduced new methodological approaches and investigated substantive questions that had been overlooked in previous work, such as the war involvement of democracies the ‘flipside’ to the democratic peace including the considerable variation in the conflict involvement of contemporary democracies.