GW Discourse

In response to the previous two posts discussing the vaunted democratic peace theory, I would say this: “democracy” has to exist in the same basic state, at essentially the same level of development among the countries subject to comparison for any grand “theoretic” pronouncements to be made. Thus proponents of the DPT can indeed point to the alliance of Western “democratic” states during, say, the First World War (when “democracy” was broadly understood in America, Britain and France to mean a “democracy” of white male citizens) or the 1980s (when the international “democratic” consensus had broadened to include women and racial minorities). If such a consensus did not exist, even among Western countries with otherwise similar interests, the feel-good relations between them would deteriorate significantly. In some alternate universe, Barack Obama’s United States would still join Lloyd George’s Britain in the fight against the Kaiser, but it’s hard to imagine that anywhere near as many modern Americans would wax poetic about “democratic unity” while the President’s Kenyan relatives scrubbed the boots of the Prime Minister’s minions for the glory of empire.

Immanuel Kant wrote Perpetual Peace in 1795, but interestingly enough, his thesis can already be called dead on arrival if one applies this “consensus” idea. Kant’s peace was between “republics” in the Enlightenment sense: that is, representative governments with legislative and executive separations of power, while universal suffrage went unmentioned. I would call Kant’s idea broadly representative of the Enlightenment consensus on democracy, which included the views of America’s founding fathers (who, like Kant, were careful to use the word “republic” to avoid the frightening prospect of mob rule they thought “democracy” with universal suffrage implied). During Kant’s lifetime, which societies most closely resembled this vision? Certainly the United States and Britain, whose political systems featured distinct legislative and executive power centers controlled by “voters” among an educated white male property-owning elite, who spoke the same language and were perhaps a few generations removed from picnicking together in Parliament Square. Yet by 1795, these two societies had already fought a bitter war against each other twenty years before and would fight another twenty years later. Anybody talking about a “democratic peace” back then would have been laughed out of the room.