The mechanisms and bureaucracy of democracy also contribute to conflict aversion. The two main aspects of democracy in question are the speed of mobilisation and the inability for governments to plan surprise attacks. Democratic governments need substantial amounts of time in order to persuade the electorate and potential dissenters that the war is just and necessary. In the same way, the slow mobilisation of democracies is further compounded by the fact that it must be planned in the public domain, prohibiting surprise attacks and allowing time for peaceful resolution in the mean time (Rosato, 2003). The next factor which can be seen to create strong ties between dyadic democracies is the existence of trade and commerce, a purely prudential argument.
As early as 1623, Émeric Crucé was arguing for economic liberalisation as he assumed a community of traders would be less aggressive than one of aristocrats. (Crucé, 1623). The basic view is that ‘two nations that trade together become mutually dependant’ (Mansfield & Pollins, 2003), so that two countries who trade with each other would see little benefit, the ‘peace of free economic exchange’ (Kant, 1991). This can be further split into four separate headings; opportunity cost, efficiency, cosmopolitan identity and bargaining ability (McDonald, 2004). Opportunity cost is simply the large economic cost of going to war, the necessary diversion of resources and labour for example. The efficiency argument relies on commerce opening up access to resources that governments would otherwise have to gain through hostility. Thirdly, the opening up of trade barriers leads to the mixing of cultures and nationalities which may lead to reluctance to go to war with other countries. Finally, bargaining is the ability for countries to use economics to achieve a goal, using sanctions to punish hostile behaviour instead of force or trading instead of invading. These interconnected reasons are crucial in understanding why countries that are trading on an international stage are less likely to go to war. (McDonald, 2004). A fifth face of free trade and peace could be that protectionist barriers create animosity between nations and that an opening up of markets reduces this hostility. Democratic and liberal trade is therefore useful in explaining why democracies rarely go to war as it is democracies that are closely linked to free market capitalism. In the same vein as cosmopolitan identity we must now look at democratic global organisations which help explain the idea of democratic peace.
The events of the 20th century led to a shift in thinking, the First World War had shaken the liberal view that humans were inherently good. Liberal scholars started to contend that peace was not natural and comply with the realist idea of anarchy between states. However, liberal thinkers differed on the subject of international organisations and called for a ‘constructed’ peace (Dunne, 2008). Thus the League of Nations and later the United Nations were born; who’s purpose stretched from an ‘election monitor’ to ‘active participant in aggressive peace operations’ (Lebovic, 2004), meaning that the UN is primarily a democratic and peace keeping organisation. The UN’s relevance to the essay title is that the main constituent countries are democratic, harsh sanctions and military action can be threatened in order to maintain peace, another reason for democracies not to go to war. Another example is the European Union, a group of countries that are now linked economically and socially. The single European currency leads us to believe that that an inter-European war is unthinkable, which strengthens the idea that if all countries were democracies or part of a democratic union then there would be little reason to go to war. (Cortright, 2008, p. 254)
A more modern argument is that the empowerment of women (as we would expect in a democracy) has had an effect on the ability for democracies to go to war. Both the French and German Women’s Suffrage Unions were advocates of peace among nations (Cortright, 2008, pp. 255-259) this is further strengthened by the fact that both pacifism and feminism are rooted in the same ‘struggle against...the root of violence and oppression’ (Carroll, 1987, p. 19) and that women consistently show ‘a greater propensity to support peaceful solutions to international conflict’ (Cortright, 2008, p. 257). In this way, it can be argued that the political empowerment of women and the pressure they can then assert on government has lead to more peaceful times.
Finally and most possibly the most convincing argument that can be made in defence of the democratic peace proposition is that the empirical data supports its claims. ‘Democracies rarely, if ever, fight each other’ (Russet, 1993) and this is backed up by data gathered through academic research. James Lee Ray makes a summary of the statistics and concludes that ‘the findings of these analyses are supportive of the democratic peace proposition.’ (Ray, 1998). However one must be wary of certain findings as there are debatable methodological tendencies with regard to conflict and peace studies. Spiro argues that the measurement of ‘dyad-years’, that is the amount of years one nation is at war with another, is inaccurate as it bias toward peaceful nations. This method also takes into account pairs of countries that are never realistically going to be involved in conflicted with each other, for example Bolivia and Bahrain. (Spiro, 1994). It is also crucial when discussing both war and democracy that we consider the definition that is assigned to them; Ray argues that some definitions of war exclude all conflicts between democracies whereas certain definitions of democracy (i.e. true universal suffrage) exclude all states. (Ray, 1993).
This essay will now proceed to critique the idea of democratic peace, starting with the realist theoretical objections. Realists believe in international anarchy, that is, that all states are self serving units concerned with only power and survival. Realists do not believe that ‘domestic arrangements’ and ‘shared liberal values’ have effects on the likelihood of conflict because they do not solve the problem of power imbalance and the lack of an international sovereign. (Light, 2000), whereas it has been shown that liberals see states as externalising internal norms. In this respect, a realist perspective would see that a world of democratic states would still be a world of conflict. This is heavily supported by the fact that democracies are no less likely to go to war than non democracies when the conflict is of differing domestic structure (i.e. a democracy invading an autocracy) for example the American invasion of Iraq. To further compound this point, states which are in the process of democratisation are more prone to war, this could be because ‘they tend to be unstable and lack the deeply rooted political institutions and culture of openness’ that older democracies have (Cortright, 2008, p. 250), especially when in the case of Iraq, it is in the process of democratisation yet surrounded by autocratic states which could, in the future, mean international conflict in the area.
Some academics may argue that democracies do indeed go to war with each other. One example of this could be the state of war between Finland and the UK, both established democracies, although this has been discounted by liberals as a war by proxy, that is, it was excluded because it was part of a multi nation conflict. (Small & Singer, 1976). The Paquisha War is also eligible, but under convenient definitions of the concept of war, it is discounted because not enough people were killed. (Weart, 1998). This is also proof of the previous point that definitions can be shaped to exclude many case studies. Christopher Layne also puts forward a convincing argument in using four examples of where fully fledged democracies (France, Germany, the UK and the USA) were very close to conflict yet shied away at the last second, Layne then shows that it was aspects of realism, not democratic peace theory that forced these conflicts to remain benign. (Layne, 1994)
In addition to this, democratic peace theory does not encompass civil war, which takes place in democracies and non democracies. Examples can be found easily in Africa. This shows that even if the world was to become completely democratic, then there would still be the chance of domestic strife. Although this is not strictly international conflict, it is still a point worth considering. (Cortright, 2008, p. 250)
Democratic peace theory has also received criticism for forming the basis of many foreign policy incidents concerning intervention. Doyle’s ‘zone of peace’ (Doyle, 1997) theory of expanding the liberal zone by removing illegal regimes has serious policy relevance and has been the mentality of the United States of America since the end of the cold war, such as in Chile and Guatemala. (Layne, 1994). If, as liberal thinkers believe, democracy is based on non violence and cooperation surely using democratic peace theory to justify a war is contradictory.
The final critique of the democratic peace theory that will be discussed is that in the liberal democratic world which places such high importance on the need for market liberalism, we must account for the power wielded by transnational corporations and wealthy individuals to influence the state. A realist would argue that the self serving nature of man would ensure that even if all government were democratic, that there would be oligarchy in the form of external pressure from powerful companies, sectors of society or wealthy people that would undermine the good will of the general public.
The liberal peace proposition puts forward a compelling argument that a world united under democracy would be a peaceful one. The school of thought uses arguments from the normative, empirical and prudential points of view; chiefly the values of democracy, war statistics, feminism and economics to persuade us of the democratic peace theory as well as utilising the existence of democratic international organisations to further the argument. However, we have been able to find small flaws in the findings of liberal academics. We see an ambiguous definition of democracy and restrictive prerequisites for a conflict to be called a war. We must also remember that young democracies are as prone to conflict, if not more, than autocracies. Liberal thinkers do not count on the self serving nature of states in most of their thinking, for example the power that large companies may have over democracies. Realists have also pointed out the cynical and contradictory use of democratic peace theory to intervene in foreign states such as Iraq and Vietnam. Finally it is the failure of liberalism to account for internal conflicts, paramilitary action and the fact that democracies have in fact gone to war in the past that persuades us to disagree with the proposition set out at the start of the essay, that even if the governments of the world were united in liberal democracy, it would not change the self serving, survivalist and statist nature of international and domestic politics.
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