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.