How do liberals try to explain why democracies rarely fight each other, and which do you find most or least plausible?
How do liberals try to explain why democracies rarely fight each other, and which do you find most or least plausible?
The democratic peace theory claims that democratic countries act differently towards each other than they do towards non-democracies. According to this theory, democratic states rarely, if ever, fight each other (Layne 1994, pp. 5-6). Its opponents believe that it does not happen just because those countries are democracies but because of other various reasons. In my essay I will try to evaluate this theory. I am going to examine why such a trend occurs, and find the democratic peace theory's most and least plausible arguments. In order to do so I will describe the democratic peace theory and present its supporters' views and after that I will use its critics' arguments to show why I reckon that the theory is generally fallible.
The democratic peace theory was inspired by Immanuel Kant's 1795 essay Perpetual Peace (Baylis and Smith 2005, p. 308). As I have just said, the democratic peace theorists argue that it is empirically based (i.e. based on past experience) that democracies never or exceptionally rarely go to war against each other. Besides, they almost never experience civil wars or major internal violence, and they usually do not engage in serious human right violations or genocides (Ravlo et al. 2003, pp. 520-521). They do go to war against non-democracies and they are not less war-prone than them, but they almost never fight other democracies. The more democratic countries are, the more peaceful the international system will be. Therefore, the way to achieve global peace is democratisation (Kadera et al. 2003, p. 234). Democratic peace theorists list two reasons why the theory is right. Firstly, 'institutional constraints': the public opinion controlling actions of the government, checks and balances inside the government and 'shared commercial interests' (Doyle 1983b, p. 324). Democracy is rule by the people, who must pay for potential wars, which they are unwilling to do. Also they share a common moral system which includes respect for liberties and competition, both being natural values for them. Thus, they do not like violence and try to make their leaders avoid it in their foreign policies (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999, pp. 791-792). Secondly, 'democratic norms and cultures', which is rather a hypothetical argument saying that democracies have a mutual respect for and a positive perception of each other (Layne 1994, pp. 9-10).
As Doyle (1983a), who is a strong supporter of the democratic peace theory, argues, the successes of liberalism in the domestic sphere are obvious and many. Today in the liberal democratic states live more people than ever. However, he does notice that there are still several problems that are yet to be solved, such as unemployment, inflation, citizen participation, further industrialisation in response to foreign competition, etc. And as he says, the foreign sphere of liberalism is even more complicated (pp. 209-212). As I have already mentioned, for democratic peace theorists one of the reasons why democracies do not fight each other is mutual respect. As Doyle claims, the mutual respect for such rights as liberty, freedom and political independence is 'the touchstone of international liberal theory' (Doyle 1983a, p. 213). Later he writes that statistically a short-term war between two states is a very unlikely event. When it does happen though, liberal democracies tend to stand on the same side in spite of their possible complex historical, political and economic factors. In order to prove his point he presents a few case studies of liberal democratic countries that did not go to war when it was really close to happen. During the American Civil War (1861-1865) commercial and sentimental links between Britain and the American South, alongside with disputes over the rights of a British ship blockaded by the North, nearly brought the United Kingdom and the United States to war but it never actually happened. Despite the colonial rivalries between Britain and France, the crisis in Fashoda in 1898 was resolved peacefully, and later, before the First World War in 1914, they together formed an alliance against illiberal Germany. Later during the same war, Italy, a liberal state which had initially joined an alliance with illiberal Germany and Austria, decided to leave the alliance as they did not want to fight other liberal states. They joined the United Kingdom and France and declared war on Germany and Austria. The last example Doyle gives us is the fact that in spite of tensions between the United States and Britain and British limitations on American trade, the United States supported the United Kingdom and France during the First World War. In order to strengthen his opinion that there exists special peace between liberal states, he quotes Woodrow Wilson's War Message from 1917: 'Our object … is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the … world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples … such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles.' (Doyle 1983a, pp. 215-217.)
