GW Discourse

Jack has a good overview of the most resilient (and for IR scholars, vexing) theories in international politics today, democratic peace theory (DPT). I am hesitant to endorse DPT. As description, DPT seems at first glance self-evident. As prescription, however, even DPT advocates disagree on why democracies go to war. It is certainly not because democracies are inherently pacifistic. All it takes to disprove this notion is examination of American policy. Arguments that, whether for financial or moral reasons, democracies do not start wars do not bear out in American history. Congress is loath to deny funding for wars, and Presidents Clinton and Bush dispel notions of a democratic moral imperative against wars of choice. This does not disprove DPT, simply that early theorists were wrong about why DPT works. Now, some attribute DPT to trust between democracies, which allows application of non-violent arbitration on an international level. Others believe democratic electorates do not recognize other democracies as threats, but remain belligerent against autocracy, explaining US policy and other democratic wars of choice (some researchers argue democracies start more wars against autocracies than autocracies start against each other) . The exact mechanism remains subject of debate even among DPT’s proponents.  Our difficulties articulating DPT’s causes do not automatically condemn its validity, they simply complicate our policies to promote it.

However, how firm of a basis does DPT stand on? Jack rightly notes the corruption and authoritarianism of new democracies such as Russia and Pakistan disqualify them as evidence against DPT. But to apply such rigorous standards to “democracy” questions DPT’s claims to a long historical foundation. When did America become a “true” democracy? Before the Emancipation Proclamation? The Compromise of 1877? The Voting Rights Act? Did Britain become one before the Great Famine? The Sepoy Mutiny? The Scramble for Africa? The Tan War? Did France become one before the Algerian War? My point is not to denigrate the West or praise Putin and Nawaz Sharif. It is to emphasize the time which today’s democracies reached the stringent standards for consideration in DPT is relatively recent, no more than a century old, taking into account decolonization and desegregation, half that. How far we can generalize the last fifty or sixty years to our future?

For the past half century, there are many other factors which have contributed greatly to peace among democracies – the geopolitical alignment of democratic states against communism and now, perhaps, terrorism, the rise and supremacy of the democratic American “hyperpower,” the proliferation of nuclear arms, and a general decrease in warfare among all regime types. The evidence for DPT grows in the shadow of these equally important trends. Could DPT survive without the global American sheriff? Energy and resource scarcity? Democracies which vote for ethnic chauvinists or religious radicals? We may find that democratic peace theory is better labeled “Western Democratic Peace Theory,” “Democratic Superpower Peace Theory,” or perhaps most pessimistically, history will simply remember it as “The Period of Democratic Peace,” an interesting topic for future political science students’ senior theses. For now, at least, we should be thankful that as far as DPT is concerned, morality and history seem to march in step.

It has been nearly twenty years since Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the ‘End of History’ in reaction to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the unstoppable rise of what many believed to be a new, democratic first world order. With these reactionary movements in political theory widely popularized, so too was the Democratic Peace Theory: a notion that had gradually evolved from Immanuel Kant’s early chrysalis in the essay Perpetual Peace, which called for the eventual abolishment of standing armies with the advent of a “republican civil constitution” for every state and an international order that mirrored those unbreakable domestic democratic elements.

Liberal democracies did not go to war, and Fukuyama argued that this was the final level of self-perfection that international governments would ever have to endure. A massive, in collapsible economic trade network (which has failed to truly catch on in many developing countries) would, over time, ultimately unite the disparate ideological frontiers of the modern world into a cohesive whole.

Fukuyama’s theories have been largely disproven by the West’s (particularly America’s) export of democracy into seemingly infertile terrain. As Churchill acknowledged, democracy is the worst system besides everything that has already been tried, and in the Middle East and elsewhere, liberal political systems are not culturally tolerable or feasible given the massive challenge of establishing a functioning, competent bureaucracy (especially when facing grave security threats).

While today’s political climate does not constitute the end that Fukuyama probably envisioned, the Democratic peace theory has not been completely disarmed. The advent of effective IGO and NGO networks around the world has bolstered democratic ideals and strengthened the peace between many allied nations (especially in Europe and Latin America).

Some democracies do not lock horns. But then again, some do. India and Pakistan have been locked in a Cold War-esque stalemate since partition that seems to have no end in sight. Many International Affairs experts think Russian meddling in Ukraine is bound to lead to violence sooner or later, not to mention their brief occupation of Georgia in the summer of 2008.

Do these examples of conflict between “democratic” nations represent fundamental contradictions to the democratic peace theory?

Russia and Pakistan are often the subject of corruption scandals and allegations of non-democratic practices. Russia’s political system is essentially a centralized one-party democracy: a closed system with no tolerance for outsider candidates, and Putin seems to enjoy exercising power over bloc rivals at will. Georgia’s last election was plagued by ballot irregularities and there is still wide suspicion that President Mikhail Saakashvili and his allies tampered with results. While India’s bureaucracy is often overwhelmed by challenges of dire poverty and overpopulation, elections are conducted with relative stability and its stance toward Pakistan has cooled slightly.

In examining the actions of these democratic states (technically speaking), there is a direct connection between the level of freedom at home, and aggressiveness in foreign policy. Still, most interactions between democracies remain peaceful, leaving the democratic peace theory’s value intact.

Answer: Nobody really knows, least of all the very activists who identify with the “tea-party” movement that has become a fixture in American politics over the past year. A recent article in the New York Times describes how its members have arrived at a sort of torch-and-pitchfork consensus that the best way to stop the establishment is to change it from the “ground up”, by becoming active as party precinct captains, committee members and other local functionaries with leverage over the Republican primary process.

The original Tea Partiers dressed as Indians and fooled nobody; today's "tea partiers" manage to fool themselves without costumes

If the rebels can take the precinct, the thinking goes, then the state and the national GOP (with its highbrow socialist “enablers”) are sure to follow.

Yet these people are still very much rebels without a cause. The Times article describes a movement that ranges from Ted Kaczynski-esque militiamen to desperate housewives looking for an outlet, but none have anything resembling a policy position. The Teapublican knows, more or less, what he’s against (“big government”, liberals, gays, Obama, Wall Street bailouts, taxes, abortion, the Mexicans, the Chinese, science, “world government”) and thanks to the power of the internet, he knows he’s not alone. But as of yet he doesn’t seem to know much else. Populist range and reactionary anger, feelings of economic anxiety and government betrayal are emotions, not ideas. The greatest irony in all this is that the tea partiers’ polar opposites in the Democratic Party are horrified by the unlettered hordes of right-wingers, but fall for much of the same hysteria themselves (picked up a Rolling Stone lately?). Of course, the bottom line is that zealots don’t win elections because they are by definition outside the mainstream. Tea Party poster child Doug Hoffman couldn’t win last November in a rural district with Leave it to Beaver demographics, and I would bet Michael Moore couldn’t command a majority in San Francisco. But it is the Republicans who have been far more explicit in pandering to their fringe set as part of a loyal “base,” and they seem sure to suffer the consequences.

Apropos of some much appreciated thoughts and responses from my fellow writers, I would like to elaborate on the Green Revolution. As Andrew rightly notes, this is not a conventional political revolution. It coincides with long-running frustrations with economic imbalances and disparities between the liberties promised in 1979 and the realities of the Islamic Republic’s chimerical politics. However, these conditions hardly guarantee major change in foreign policy. Many Iranians believe in the Islamic Republic, or else the rigging of the results would not so inflame them. The blatant illegitimacy of uncompetitive elections in which the majority supposedly delivers power to a dictator rarely elicits mass protests. Though the Guardian Council and Supreme Leader keep truly radical candidates out of the races, Iranians who vote often have expectations that their votes will matter. The Greens are hostile to the Supreme Leader, but those among him who would sack him along with Ahmadinejad are few and hold little political clout. The elections and actions of the Islamic Republic may catalyze sociopolitical change, but this may not heraldregime change. Broader sociopolitical movements do arouse popular discontent, but they can become so diffuse as to require only political adjustments, not regime change. Not to imply moral equivalency between 2010 Tehran and 1960 Washington, but the Green Revolution seems more like the Civil Rights movement and radical ’60s left rather than an ideological or constitutional revolution. Khamenei can likely satisfy the Greens, and the demands of its leaders and advocates in the political and religious establishment, with adjustment of the existing constitutional arrangement, instead of actual regime change.

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