Democratic peace theory

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The democratic peace theory or simply democratic peace (often DPT and sometimes democratic pacifism) is a theory in politics and political science which holds that democracies—specifically, liberal democracies—never or almost never go to war with one another. Despite criticism, the democratic peace theory has grown in prominence among political scientists in the last two decades and has become influential in the policy world in Western countries. Jack Levy remarked that the democratic peace is "the closest thing we have to a law in international politics."

The theory is also referred to as the "liberal peace" or the "Kantian peace" in honor of Immanuel Kant, who proposed an early version of the theory.

The idea that democracy is a source of world peace came relatively late in political theory, one contributing factor being that democracies were very rare before the late nineteenth century. No ancient author seems to have thought so. Early authors referred to republics rather than democracies, since the word democracy had acquired a bad name until early modern times. Nicolo Machiavelli believed that republics were by nature excellent war-makers and empire-builders, citing Rome as the prime example. It was Immanuel Kant who first foreshadowed the theory in his essay "Perpetual Peace" written in 1795, although he thought that democracy was only one of several necessary conditions for a perpetual peace.

The idea of a democratic peace theory began to emerge in the politics of George Canning and the foreign policy of Palmerston. It was also represented in the liberal internationalism of Woodrow Wilson, George Creel, and H.G. Wells, who some claim was the first true proponent of the idea

In 1964, Dean Babst, then a Wisconsin criminologist, was the first to claim that statistical evidence supported the theory. He published a paper that no two liberal democracies had ever been at war with each other. Statistical debates continue, however. This was also claimed at greater length in 1979 by R.J. Rummel, professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, and much of this research is available on his web-site. The following propositions formed the basis of Rummel's original theory:

• Democracies do not make war on each other.
• The more democratic two nations are, the less the violence between them.
• Democracies engage in the least amounts of foreign violence.
• Democracies display, by far, the least amounts of internal violence.
• Modern democracies have virtually no "democide" (i.e. genocide and mass murder)

A related but slightly different concept is Rummel's Law, which states that the less freedom a people have, the more likely their rulers are to murder them.

Theorists such as Michael Doyle and Bruce Russett were vital in developing the theory, noticing some of the links to Kant. The strong form of the theory (that democracies tend to be peaceful in general) was distinguished from the weak form (that they tend to be peaceful with each other).

Belief in this theory is shown by President Bill Clinton's State of the Union Address, Jan 25, 1994 "Ultimately, the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere. Democracies don't attack each other." [1]

A democratic peace theory has to define what it means by "democracy" and what it means by "peace" (or, more often, "war"), and what it claims as the link between the two.

Democratic peace theorists have used different terms for the class of states they consider peaceable; Babst called them elective, Rummell liberal democracies, Doyle liberal regimes. In general, these require not only that the government and legislature be chosen by free and genuinely contested elections, but more besides. Debates continue over what factors are required for a recognisable democracy.

Many theorists have used the convenient list at the Correlates of War Project at the University of Michigan, which compiled the wars from 1816 to 1991 with at least a thousand battlefield casualties. This data is particularly convenient for statistical analysis, and the large-scale statistical studies cited below have used this definition.

"Correlation does not prove causation," is a bedrock standard of statistical analysis. It concludes that we need to prove the link between two statistically related proporties is not caused by other outside factors. Several theoretical explanations have been put forward as explanations for the democratic peace theories.

Democracies, for example, are 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.

Some critics have argued that few democracies mean that they are geographically isolated and thus unable to make war with each other. However, Maoz & Russet studied the period from 1945 and 1986 and discounted all pairs of nations that did not involve a major power or nations that were not geographically continuous. The DPT was still validated. Supporters also note that today more than 50% of all nations are democratic [2].

Kant made the straightforward point that, since a prince can order war "without the least sacrifice of the pleasures of his table, the chase, his country houses, his court functions, and the like", he will be likely to do so for light or trivial causes that the citizenry would never find sufficient. This, however, would commit democracies to be peaceful with all states, not just with each other. The wars of democracies with non-democracies must therefore be explained by other motives, such as provocations from reckless non-democratic states, or a belief that the two systems cannot peacefully co-exist.

Other scholars suggest a theory of common culture: the citizens of democratic societies tend not to view the citizens of other democracies as enemies, and wars against other democracies are unlikely to get the necessary support.

Babst (1972) concluded that no wars had been fought between democracies between 1789 and 1941. Singer (1976) supported this. Doyle (1983) found that "constitutionally secure liberal states have yet to engage in wars with one another".

Rummel studied all wars between 1816 and 1991 and found 198 wars between non-democracies, 155 wars between democracies and non-democracies, and 0 wars between democracies. Maoz & Abdolai (1989) analyzed all wars between 1816 and 1976 and found no wars between democracies and that this is statistically significant. They also found less lower-level conflicts between democracies. Breemer (1992) reported similar findings for the years between 1816 and 1965. Ray (1993, 1995) found no wars between democracies.

Democracies do sometimes initiate wars against authoritarian states. Some argue that democracies usually enter these wars because they are provoked by authoritarian states. Several papers show that democracies are slightly, but significantly less involved in wars in general than others states, and that they also initiate wars less frequently than non-democratic states [3].

There are four logically distinguishable classes of criticism of any DPT:

• That its creator was not accurate in applying his criteria to the historical record.
• That the criteria are not appropriate in discussing the record.
• That the peace theory does not actually mean very much. For example, that it applies to few states (very few before the twentieth century), and doesn't actually limit their behavior to each other very much.
• That such peace as there has been between democracies is at least in part due to external causes.

These tend to overlap, being in fact complementary criticisms, and many critics make more than one of them.

For the First World War critics have argued that supporters of the DPT are mistaken, either in denying that Germany was a democracy (the Reichstag was elected by universal male suffrage, its votes of no confidence did cause governments to fall, and it did vote on whether to fund the war - which passed overwhelmingly) or that the supporter are wrong in affirming Britain to be one (the 1911 elections enfranchised only 60% of the British electorate, to say nothing of the Empire beyond the Seas, the majority of which had no say in the decision at all). Supporters respond that at the time of World War I the German Kaiser still had much power, he had direct control over the army, appointed and could dismiss the chancellor, and played a key role in foreign affairs. In effect, therefore, in foreign and military affairs, there was little democratic control. They also note that the Kaiser was also the King in the very large state of Prussia which had much influence over national politics, that Prussian government was not responsible to the Prussian Landtag (lower chamber), that the Landstag members were elected by a suffrage system based on tax-paying ability favoring the rich, and that the landed aristocracy of the junkers dominated all the higher civil offices and officer corps of the Army and Navy [4]. If Britain was not a liberal democracy, then this is another reason why WWI was not a war between democracies. The last argument may however weaken the statistical support for the DPT, because fewer democracies means fewer possible wars.

The chief external cause, cited (with many other criticisms) in Joanne Gowa's Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace, is that the structure of the international political system during the Cold War was responsible for creating the illusion of a democratic peace. At about the same time many of today's democracies came into existence, the Cold War divided much of the world into two systems of permanent institutionalized alliances. (Many states belonged to neither; chief among these was the People's Republic of China after 1961.)

Democratic peace theory exists in three forms:

• It can state that democracies will not war with other states
• It can state that democracies will not war with other democracies
• It can state that democracies will be less liekly to war with other states

Although many politicians and academics have followed this theory, there are key areas of debate:

• That peace between democracies so far has been caused by factors other than their democratic nature
• That definitions of 'democracy' and 'war' are too vague to allow a law to be based upon them

However, accurate or not, the law remains important due to its support by prominent politicians: "And the reason why I'm so strong on democracy is democracies don't go to war with each other. And the reason why is the people of most societies don't like war, and they understand what war means.... I've got great faith in democracies to promote peace. And that's why I'm such a strong believer that the way forward in the Middle East, the broader Middle East, is to promote democracy." George W. Bush at the White House Press Conference, 12 November 2004.

Most of the following are from Rummel's extensive bibliography:

• Beck, Nathaniel, and Richard Tucker. Democracy and Peace: General Law or Limited Phenomenon? Midwest Political Science Association: April 1998.
• Correlates of War Project
• Brown, Michael E., Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller. Debating the Democratic Peace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
• Doyle, Michael W. Ways of War and Peace. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
• Gowa, Joanne. Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
• Huth, Paul K., et al. The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press: 2003. ISBN 0521805082.
• Levy, Jack S. “Domestic Politics and War.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 18, No. 4, (Spring, 1988), pp. 653-673.
• Lipson, Charles. Reliable Partners: How Democracies Have Made a Separate Peace. Princeton University Press: 2003. ISBN 0691113904.
• Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2002
• Plourde, Shawn Democide, Democracy and the Man from Hawaii May, 2004
• Ray, James Lee. Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition. University of South Carolina Press: 1998. ISBN 1570032416.
• Ray, James Lee. Does Democracy Cause Peace? Annual Review of Political Science 1998:1, 27-46
• Rummel, R.J. Power Kills: Democracy As a Method of Nonviolence. Transaction Publishers: 2003. ISBN 0765805235.
• Rummel, R.J. The Democratic Peace
• Russett, Bruce. Grasping the Democratic Peace. Princeton University Press: 1994. ISBN 0691001642.
• Schwartz, Thomas, and Kiron Skinner. The Myth of Democratic Pacifism. The Wall Street Journal. January 7, 1999.

• Rummel's website
• A survey paper that sums up in favor of DPT

• The Myth of Democratic Pacifism
• Criticisms of this article

• The End of History
• War
• World peace