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A democratic peace theory or simply democratic peace (often DPT and sometimes democratic pacifism) is a theory in international relations, political science, and Philosophy which holds that democracies—specifically, liberal democracies—never or almost never go to war with one another. A more general version is that all kinds of systematic violence is rare in and by liberal democracies. It can trace its philosophical roots to Immanuel Kant.

History

At least partly because of the low frequency of democratic governments, and of sociologists, before the 19th century, democratic peace theory is a relatively new development. No ancient author seems to have considered it true.

In early modern times, the word democracy usually meant direct democracy, which was treated with suspicion. Even the idea that republics tend to be peaceful is recent; Nicolo Machiavelli believed that republics were by nature excellent war-makers and empire-builders, citing Rome as the prime example. Interesingly, Islamic tradition holds that peace will prevail within the dar al-Islam or "house of submission" to the faith, but war, including jihad, beyond that zone.

Immanuel Kant, in his essay Perpetual Peace (1795), affirmed that responsible governments would not lightly go to war with each other, although he thought that this was only one of several necessary conditions for a perpetual peace. The hope of a democratic peace was the content of the First World War slogan: "a war to end all war" (originated by H.G. Wells). Woodrow Wilson's policy for the Versailles settlement was largely based on all three planks of Kant's program.

In 1964, Dean Babst, a Wisconsin criminologist, published the first theory of democratic peace; he published two papers in obscure journals and were ognored. The first prominent DPT was stated by R. J. Rummel, of the University of Hawaii, beginning in the middle seventies. Thereafter, an increasing amount of research has been done on the theory and related subjects. (For the numerous researchers on the subject, see Rummel's bibliography, under External links.)

Presidents of both the major American parties have expressed support for the theory. Former President Bill Clinton of the Democratic Party: "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." Current President George W. Bush of the Republican Party: "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." However, such use of democratic peace theory to justify a foreign policy that includes military action, such as the 2003 Iraq War, has proved controversial.

Kant:Perpetual peace 1795

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Owen 2005

Types of Theories

Monadic theories claim that democracies tend to conduct their affairs more peaceably, whether with other democracies or not. More general theories developed from the monadic version claim that two democracies are less likely to make war on each other than other pairs of states. A recent paper claims that democracies fight fewer wars, start fewer wars and lesser conflcts, and reach more negotiated settlements.

Dyadic theories claim that democracies are more peaceable with each other; but make various assertions about their relations to other states. Separate peace theories claim that democracies are more likely to go to war with non-democracies. The militant democracy theory divides democracies into militant and pacifist types. Militant democracies have a tendency to distrust and use confrontational policies against dictatorships, which could actually make war more likely between a democracy and a non-democracy than in the case of relations between two non-democracies. Moreover, a democratic crusade corollary suggests that the belief in the validity DPT itself could become a cause of war. In the case of the United States intervention in World War I and recent invasion of Iraq, the promise of democratization bringing an end to war was used as a justification for war.

Some dyadic theories, such as those forwarded by Babst, Singer, Rummel and Doyle claim that democracies, properly defined, have never made war on each other. (Rummel also classifies 155 of the wars since Waterloo as between democracies and non-democracies, 198 as between non-democracies. Given the limited number of democracies he acknowledges, democracies have, in his view, gone to war more often than other states, but not with each other.) These theorists then argue that there are special reasons why wars between democracies do not occur.

Some democratic peace theorists also hold that violence, especially mass violence, is less common within democracies. The most democratic and the most authoritarian states have few civil wars, and intermediate regimes the most. In the long run, since intermediate regimes are less stable than autocracies, which in turn are less stable than democracies, durable democracy is the most probable end-point of the process of democratization.

Müller and Wulf 2004

Hegre et al. 2001

Claims

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.

Democracy

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 usually require not only that the government and legislature be chosen by free and actually contested elections, but more. The studies claiming absolute democratic peace often require that half or two-thirds of adult males be able to vote (requiring universal suffrage would mean no war between democracies was even possible before 1894); also secret ballot (Babst), or a waiting time for the democracy to stabilize.

Many researchers have used the Polity Data Set which scores states for democracy on a continuous scale for every year from 1800 to 2003; as well as others. Some recent papers have found that proportional representation is associated with less external and internal systematic violence.

Such additional data sources include the "Conflict Data Set". Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. October 3. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help) and "Data". Peter D. Watson Center for Conflict and Cooperation. October 3. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)

Binningsbø 2000; Leblang and Chan 2003

War

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 deaths. This data is particularly convenient for statistical analysis, and the large-scale statistical studies cited below have generally used this definition. (Also the Falklands War, although it killed only 910 (or 936, or 960) soldiers, satisfied most other criteria to be a full-scale war, and a few dozen deaths should not exclude it.)

Kantian peace

Kant's plan for a perpetual peace included more than a government answerable to the people. He proposed a League of Nations to keep the peace; and a right to "hospitality" which should be recognized everywhere. This latter was a freedom of international travel and commerce, in some ways resembling the Schengen Treaty. (He also proposed preliminary confidence-building measures, including disarmament; but these were a means rather than an end.)

Several theorists, led by Bruce Russet and John R. Oneal and have found multiple causes for such general peace as we have seen; quite often three which resemble Kant's. (The last is sometimes world prosperity rather than freedom of trade or travel, which are harder to measure.) Several of these theorists call their result the Kantian peace.

See Russett & Oneal Triangulating Peace and the preliminary papers Russet et al. (1998); Oneal and Russet (1999)

Statistical Studies

There have been numerous statistical studies in the field. Many have claimed support for some theory of democratic peace; many have denied any such support. However, democratic peace theories are highly controversial, and the findings of individual studies are often vigorously disputed.

Studies have also argued that lesser conflicts (Militarized Interstate Disputes in the jargon) have been more violent, but less bloody, and less likely to spread. Most such disputes involving democracies since 1950 have involved only four nations: the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, and India.

The Human Security Report, released in October 2005 by the Human Security Centre, documents the improved peace since the collapse of the Soviet Empire. It chiefly credits the end of the struggles of the Cold War and decolonization; but asserts also the underlying force of all the articles of the Kantian triad, which it calls interdependent. The improvement in the peace of the world since the end of the Cold War has been tabulated here.

There are also extensive difficulties in the application of statistical methods to the problem, especially to question of causation.

Causes

One idea is that liberal democracies have a common culture and that this creates good relations. However, there have been many wars between non-democracies that share a common culture. Democracies are however 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.

Another idea is that democracy gives influence to those most likely to be killed or wounded in wars, and their relatives and friends (and to those who pay the bulk of the war taxes). This was Kant's argument; and it is supported by the example of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in which the Sejm vetoed more than half the royal proposals for war. This monadic theory must, however, explain why democracies do attack non-democratic states. One explanation is that these democracies were threatened or otherwise were provoked by the non-democratic states. This idea would suggest that the relationship in the DPT became stronger when graphic movies and television made wars less romantic.

R. J. Rummel dismisses these as superficial, relying on Kurt Lewin and Andrew Ushenko's proposition that democracy involves a pervasive social mechanism (called a "social field") in which, "The primary mode of power is exchange, political system is democratic, and democratic government is but one of many groups and pyramids of power." In contrast, authoritarian systems involve a "social anti-field", " divides its members into those who command and those who must obey, thus creating a schism separating all members and dividing all issues, a latent conflict front along which violence can break out." Thus, the citizens of a democracy are habituated to compromise, conflict resolution, and to viewing unfavorable outcomes as temporary and/or tolerable.

A study argues that democratic states are more likely than autocratic states to win the wars. One explanation is that democracies, for internal political and economic reasons, have greater resources. This might mean that democratic leaders are unlikely to select other democratic states as targets because they perceive them to be particularly formidable opponents. One study finds that interstate wars have important impacts on the fate of political regimes, and that the probability that a political leader will fall from power in the wake of a lost war is particularly high in democratic states. Two of the militant democracies have been dominant naval powers, and have also had greater choice as to which wars to fight.

On the other hand, Mansfield and Snyder argue that democratizing leaders are more likely to fight wars, whether or not they win, as a means of handling internal tension

A game-theoretic explanation is that the participation of the public and the open debate send clear and reliable information regarding the intentions of democracies to other states. In contrast, it is difficult to know the intentions of nondemocratic leaders, what effect concessions will have, and if promises will be kept. Thus there will be mistrust and unwillingness to make concessions if at least one of the parties in a dispute is a nondemocracy.

The book Never at War explains the democratic and also a related oligarchic peace by the human tendency to classify other humans into ingroup and outgroup.

Criticisms

There are at least four logically distinguishable classes of criticism of any theory of democratic peace.

• That the theorist has not applied his criteria, for democracy or war or both, accurately to the historical record.
• That the criteria are not reasonable. For example, critics may prefer that liberal democracy should exclude or include both of Germany and the United Kingdom at the time of WWI, rather than count one as democratic and the other non-democratic, when they were quite similar societies.
• That the theory may not actually mean very much, because it has limited its data below the level of significance, or because it promises only a limited peace, involving only a small class of states; for example, democracies have fought many offensive colonial and imperialistic wars.
• That it is not democracy itself but some other external factor(s) which happened to be associated with democratic states that explain the peace.

Often, the same theory will be seen as vulnerable to several of these criticisms at the same time.

Specific historic cases

Any theory of democratic peace must face certain difficult counter-examples. The theories which claim an absolute democratic peace solve the following problems by restricting the definition of democracy (and sometimes of war); the Kantian peace theories generally look for explanations in the absence of international pressure, trade, or prosperity; the other modern theories will observe that any tendency will, in the perversity of human affairs, have exceptions.

Among those which have been mentioned are:

• Athenian Sicilian Expedition, 415-413 BC
• Trail of Tears, 1838
• French Second Republic attack on the Roman Republic, 1849
• American Civil War, 1861-1865
• War of the Pacific, 1879-1884
• Spanish-American War, 1898
• World War I, 1914-1918
• The state of war between Finland and the Western Allies, 1941-1944
• Peru-Ecuador Cenepa War, 1995
• The Kargil War, 1999

Limited claims

This class of criticism is particularly cogent against the theories of absolute democratic peace, which claim that no two democracies have ever gone to war. These theorists accomplish this by arguing that the Confederate States of America, the Boer republics, the Second French Republic, and so on, were not real democracies for one or another reason.

When all these reasons are added up, few democracies remain, and the theory doesn't actually say all that much about them. Rummel's data, for example, consist largely of the following:

• From 1815 until the 1880's, there were at most three democratic states in his sense (the United States, Switzerland and San Marino). It is true they did not go to war, but some would ascribe this to geography.
• From then until 1904, there were several crises among the democratic powers, as among the others. The only war between any two Powers that resulted was the Spanish-American War, between a democracy and a borderline democracy (which side of the border depends on which edition of Ted Gurr's list you read).
• From 1904 on, Great Britain has been allied with France. Most other democracies were either allied with this Entente or benevolently neutral.
• From 1945 to 1991, most of the world's democracies were allied against the Soviet Union; the remainder were few and isolated.
• Since 1991, there have been very few full-scale wars. None of that few have been between democracies.

Is, for example, the Entente to be explained by the democracy of the two Contracting Powers? Even the Third Reform Bill of 1884 fails to meet Rummell's stated criteria for democracy; and fails vastly short if the British Empire as a whole, or even India, is considered.

Even if it were so explained, is this handful of facts sufficient to count on a democratic peace forever?

Colonial wars and imperialism

One criticism against a general peacefulness for liberal democracies is that they were involved in more colonial and imperialistic wars than other states during the 1816-1945 period. On the other hand, this relation disappears if controlling for factors like power and number of colonies. Liberal democracies have less of these wars than other states after 1945. This might be related to changes in the perception of non-European peoples, as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Related to this is the human rights violations committed against native people, sometimes by liberal democracies. One response is that many of the worst crimes were committed by nondemocracies, like in the European colonies before the nineteenth century, in King Leopold II of Belgium's privately owned Congo Free State, and in Stalin's Soviet Union. England abolished slavery in British territory in 1833, immediately after the First Reform Bill had significantly increased democracy. (Of course, the abolition of the slave trade had begun under the Tories; and many DPT's would disclaim so undemocratic a state as Melbourne's England in other contexts.)

Many democratic peace theories implicitly or explicitly exclude the first years of democracies; for example, by requiring that the executive derive from genuinely contested elections, which would eliminate both administrations of George Washington. These theories are therefore perfectly compatible with, and not at all falsified by, established democracies preying upon nascent, attempted, proclaimed, or unstable democratic states.

External causes

Strictly speaking, the theory of a Kantian peace contradicts the absolute theories of democratic peace. If three factors are required for a perpetual peace, no one of them can be the only thing needed.

There has also been a confluence of the old theory (dating back to Richard Cobden and Benjamin Constant) that Free Trade will produce and ensure peace, with the modern theory that trade will produce democracy, or at least spread it to the non-democratic trading partner, as argued by Houshang Amiramahdi and others. According to this, democracy and peace are indeed correlated, because they arise from a common cause, either common trade or common prosperity.

Other critics again argue that any apparent association between democracy and peace is an illusion, due in part to chance, and in part to peace being induced by other and transient causes. For example, Joanne Gowa observes that much of the data used to infer an absolute democratic peace consists of Western democracies not going to war with each other while allied against the Soviet Union, and argues that this offers limited hope that non-allied democracies will remain at peace. Other critics have ascribed the democratic peace to the relative isolation of democratic states (particularly those not part of the Western alliance). This again overlaps with the third category above, since there is also an argument that the relative peace of the twenty-first century (so far), is due to the completion of decolonization.

As often on academic matters, these criticisms are disputed. Papers have been done claiming significant correlation, even after controlling for such variables.

See also

• Peace
• Perpetual peace
• The End of History
• War
• World peace

References

Many of the following are from Rummel's bibliography, see #External links below.

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• Brown, Michael E., Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller. Debating the Democratic Peace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. ISBN 0262522136.
• Doyle, Michael W. Ways of War and Peace. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. ISBN 0393969479.
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• Gowa, Joanne. Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. ISBN 0691070229.
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• "Human Security Report" (pdf). 2006-01-24. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |Author= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Publishyear= ignored (help) This is a table of contents; actual document is pdf.
• Huth, Paul K., et al. The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press: 2003. ISBN 0521805082.
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• Lipson, Charles. Reliable Partners: How Democracies Have Made a Separate Peace. Princeton University Press: 2003. ISBN 0691113904.
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• Ray, James Lee. Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition. University of South Carolina Press: 1998. ISBN 1570032416.
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• Rummel, R.J. Power Kills: Democracy As a Method of Nonviolence. Transaction Publishers: 2003. ISBN 0765805235.
• Russett, Bruce & Oneal, John R. Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations. W. W. Norton & Company: 2001. ISBN 039397684X.
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• "Global Conflict Trends". Center for Systematic Peace. October 1. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
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• Weart, Spencer R. Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another. Yale University Press: 2000. ISBN 0300082983.

External links

• Summary of common examples and arguments
• Rummell's extensive bibliography

Supportive

• Rummell's website
• Democide, Democracy and the Man from Hawaii
• A summing-up in favor of Rummellism as of 1998
• Spread of Democracy Will Make World Safer, Historian Says a moderated webchat with Victor Davis Hanson hosted by the Department of State, International Information Program.

Critical

• Criticisms of this article
• The Myth of Democratic Pacifism

• Political theories
• Peace
• Futurology
• Democratic Peace Theory