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Are Democracies Really More Peaceful? by G J Bass 
NYT, January 1, 2006 Idea Lab Are Democracies Really More Peaceful? By GARY J. BASS In his second inaugural address, President George W. Bush proclaimed that "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world." Behind these lofty words lies one of the most powerful ideas in international relations. Neoconservative pundits like William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan put the point plainly when they called for toppling Saddam Hussein because of "a truth of international politics: democracies rarely, if ever, wage war against one another." The original author of this idea was Immanuel Kant. In "To Perpetual Peace," Kant argued that a world made up of republics, whose citizens must bear the miseries of fighting and financing wars, should be more peaceful than a world made up of monarchies, whose kings can go to war with little personal risk. (In a rare Kantian joke, the essay is written in the form of a peace treaty, with preliminary and definitive articles of perpetual peace.) In the 1980's, political scientists began looking for empirical evidence that Kant's prophecy had come true. Michael W. Doyle wrote that a separate "zone of peace" existed among liberal states, underpinning America's alliances with NATO and Japan. Although the notion has been subjected to fierce scrutiny, most scholars agree that a liberal peace exists - and that it offers a way to end the age-old scourge of war. The theory has been endorsed by leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and it played a role in the Clinton administration's efforts to create a worldwide "community of democracies." Yet for all its influence, the theory of the democratic peace carries a crucial caveat. In a series of studies culminating in their new book, "Electing to Fight," the political scientists Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder argue that new democracies are often unstable and thus particularly warlike. Mansfield and Snyder note that democratizing countries often lack the rule of law, organized political parties and professional news media. Without those restraining institutions firmly in place, empowering the public can mean empowering bellicose nationalists. As communism crumbled in Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and Franjo Tudjman in Croatia used populist nationalism to fuel their rise to power - and to start a blood bath. Mansfield and Snyder try to prove that young democracies without fully formed domestic institutions are especially aggressive; their examples range from France's disastrous 1870 attack on Prussia to Turkey's 1974 invasion of Cyprus to Vladimir Putin's continuing brutal clampdown in Chechnya. At best, scholars agree, the democratic peace exists only when established liberal democracies face one another. Confronting nondemocracies, established democracies are about as warlike as normal dictatorships. Think of Britain, France and Israel's attacking Egypt in 1956, or Bush's invasion of Iraq. When a democratic government squabbles with a dictator, it often doesn't trust the dictator enough for serious negotiations, and war is a likely result. Elihu Root, who'd been Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of state, said in 1917: "To be safe, democracy must kill its enemy when it can and where it can. The world. . . must be all democratic or all Prussian." The Bush administration might applaud Root's statement, but it's no small task to make the world "all democratic." Mansfield and Snyder cite writers like Samuel P. Huntington, who gingerly emphasizes that democratization works best in proper sequence: first establishing functioning institutions - political parties, courts - and then allowing widespread elections. Poland and Chile democratized successfully, Mansfield and Snyder say, but Iraq, it seems, has not. They warn that "unleashing Islamic mass opinion through a sudden democratization could only raise the likelihood of war." China, too, proves worrisome, lacking as it does political pluralism, a reliable rule of law or a professional free press. Greater political freedom - a longstanding American goal - could at worst empower more aggressive leaders in a nuclear-armed economic powerhouse. Like many skeptics of democratization, Mansfield and Snyder may overestimate the stability of the authoritarians. Young democracies can be bellicose, but it's hard to imagine many regimes more threatening to their neighbors than Saddam Hussein's. The authors also appear to strain their argument when they suggest that Milosevic's decision to crack down on the Kosovars was driven by his anxieties over winning a future election, or that Iraq's faltering experiments in parliamentary democracy helped drive its 1948 attack on Israel. (After all, many Arab authoritarians also attacked.) And yet their work should give pause. If democracy is to promise peace - perpetual or otherwise - we must become far better at laying its foundations. Gary J. Bass, an associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, is writing a book about humanitarian intervention. |