The Democratic Peace hypothesis (part two)

Read part one of this fascinating analysis here.

So the point really is to try and explain this observable phenomenon. Obviously, it could just be coincidence, and maybe in a couple of years' time German soldiers will be marching on Paris once more. But that seems a bit unconvincing and an attempt to retreat from systematising world events. Yet the Democratic Peace is not readily explainable in Kantian terms either. Kant reckoned that republics would be pacific because a politically engaged citizenry would not send themselves off to be butchered. That's all very well, but would lead to republics being equally pacific towards both other republics and authoritarian states. However, in real life, the Democratic Peace only seems to extend between liberal democracies, and they remain perfectly willing to lay into other types of country.

One of my Helicopterview correspondents attempts to explain the Democratic Peace by saying that the open media of liberal democracies makes it easy for them to engage in virtual war with each other, undermining each other's hostile regimes through media subversion. This is an interesting proposition, and does at least have some basis in unique features of liberal democracies. However, I don't think it works. If you look at actually existing liberal democracies, it is hard to see cases where liberal democracy A has bent liberal democracy B to its will by subverting B's media. And given the plurality of views on major international issues held among the leaders of liberal democracies, one could not credibly say that they have all had their consent manufactured in one particular direction (see France & Germany's willingness to engage in symbolic resistance to the US invasion of Iraq, or the Western Europeans' willingness to buy Soviet gas in the early 1980s over the vitriolic resistance of the Americans).

So I think the Democratic Peace has to have another explanation. I am developing ideas as to what that explanation might be, but I may cheat and consult the extensive academic literature on the subject. One way or another I think Helicopterview will be back to this.

One side point made on the mailing list was that over how research on the Democratic Peace can be misapplied. The NeoCons, in their muscular über-liberalism have married the Democratic Peace thesis to their quest for US dominance, and produced a wonderfully simplistic idea - that if the USA goes around invading countries and blessing them with pliant democratic regimes then the world will be at peace for ever, and Fukuyama's dream of history's end will finally have arrived. This NeoCon idea is basically a pipe-dream - history is not over-run with examples of countries where democracy was successfully installed at bayonet point.

I am suspicious, though, of the idea that because research into the Democratic Peace can be misused it is therefore dangerous. There is nothing dangerous about the truth, save to those who profit by lies, even if such people are the rulers of this world. Academia should never let itself by dissuaded from lines of inquiry for fear of how the fruits of research could be applied. Gangsterish politicans will always find excuses for doing whatever they want, whether or not there is available research that can be twisted to their purposes. Moreover, any research into anything can be misused by the powerful, so avoiding lines of inquiry that are twistable by the overlords would kill academia.

The Democratic Peace hypothesis (part one)

I mentioned the Democratic Peace hypothesis in my second posting on Liberalism. Some of my pals on the Helicopterview mailing list took issue with the idea, but I think they have got the wrong end of the stick and started talking about whether so-called democratic states are actually democratic, given their elitist nature and the role of the media in manufacturing consent etc. etc.. My own feeling is that for the purposes of the Democratic Peace hypothesis, such ideas are irrelevant. The point of the theory is not to get into a discussion of whether country A is more democratic than country B - anyone who has studied democratic theory knows that democracy is a scalar rather than binary concept, and also that modern liberal democracies are far less democratic than what might be considered an abstract ideal of what a democratic society should be like. The point really starts from an awareness that there are a certain type of country in the world which have been dubbed "liberal democracies". Maybe the name is not fully descriptive, just like the People's Democracies that once flourished in Eastern Europe, so think of it as a label attached to a certain kind of society... basically the countries of Western Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan. The Democratic Peace hypothesis is based on one simple and observable fact - that as the governmental systems of these countries have converged, they have shown less and less inclination to go to war with each other.

And again, in world historical terms, this is very strange. There has never previously been any sense in which countries with similar social systems resolved their difference through non-violent means while reserving war for those countries with different systems. The observation also runs counter to the Realist theory of International Relations which so many people are taken with, that states act in accordance with their interests, and that these interests exist independently of the internal political system of a country. To a Realist, a democratic Germany should have the same interests as a fascist or authoritarian Germany, yet the years after 1945 did not see Adenauer gearing up for a third crack at the French.

(The German-French example is slightly unfair, but only slightly. Realists would talk about erstwhile enemies uniting against a common foe, and arguably that's what West Germany and France did in the face of the USSR. However, with the removal of the USSR's threat, a Realist would assume that Germany and France's conflicting interests would drive them back to hostility)

Join me soon, when I will discuss explanations for the Democratic Peace.