Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another

by Spencer R. Weart

 

–From Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another, Chapter One: Investigating the Puzzle of Democratic Peace by Spencer R. Weart. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997) © 1997 by Spencer R. Weart and Yale University Press, used by permission.

 

With the patient brutality of a beating by mobsters, artillery shells fell one by one into the old city of Dubrovnik. The streets, once busy with citizens and tourists, were strangely quiet in November 1991, aside from intermittent explosions and the occasional crack of sniper fire. Dubrovnik’s citizens huddled in their cellars and talked about their enemy, the Serbs. 

“I have stones,” a Croatian sculptor told a reporter. “I think I could throw them on their heads. I was a kind of pacifist. Never hated anybody. But now?” 

People reading the news in Western Europe and America, people who perhaps had only recently come to view Dubrovnik’s picturesque streets and massive city walls, could scarcely believe that it was all being battered into rubble. A war between Communist nations would not have surprised them. But this fight had begun after both sides, Serbia and Croatia, held free elections. Somehow a war between democracies seemed horribly wrong. 

When Eastern Europe began to turn toward democracy back in 1988, news analysts said the risk of war in Europe was “of course” diminishing. As the Soviet Union also stumbled toward democracy, then “of course” at each step the Cold War dwindled. The democracies would “of course” be good friends even with a nation like Iraq if only it were a democracy too. When troubled nations from Nicaragua to Namibia held free elections, the U.S. government drew back from intervention. Everyone from American presidents to Russian peasants spoke as if increasing democracy must decrease the risk of warfare.

Incidence Of Militarized Disputes Between Liberal States, 1816-1992

by Frank W. Wayman (Univ. of Michigan-Dearborn)

 

A paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, La., Mar. 23-27, 2002.

 

Abstract

Although liberal states have not fought a war against each other, they have occasionally been on opposing sides in the militarized interstate disputes that can escalate to war.  Among some 2,000 militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) since 1816, I have identified sixty-two that have been between liberal states.  What is the implication of this for the democratic peace literature?  This paper examines the severity of these sixty-two clashes to assess what degree of hostility they represent.  While often involving the use of force, liberal MIDs are almost always confined to two parties (i.e., do not escalate horizontally), and are usually unreciprocated or tit-for-tat incidents (i.e., rarely escalate vertically).  While inter-state war between liberal societies may occur in the future, not many of the MIDs that have occurred between them in the past two centuries can be seen as cause for alarm.  

 

Introduction

            The inter-democratic peace sometimes seems to be the major focus of those seeking to understand the causes of war (e.g., Oneal and Russett 2001), and to prevent war in our own time (e.g., the Clinton administration effort to foster democracy).  But most of the empirical research on the inter-democratic peace examines militarized disputes (MIDs) rather than war.  Concerning democracies clashing with other democracies in inter-state wars (i.e., sustained combat involving more than a thousand battle deaths), it is hard to say more than this:  there have been fewer than a hundred such wars since the birth of modern democracy in the nineteenth century; and there are no cases of inter-state wars between states that are clearly liberal democracies (Rummel 1994: 2).  Those who believe strongly that democracies do not fight other democracies say flatly: this means there are no wars between democracies.  Indeed, I join them on one narrow point.  I believe (modifying Jack Levy’s aphorism) that this is as close to a counter-intuitive law-like generalization that we have in the social sciences.  It is something surprising for which there are no exceptions. 

            Critics respond that maybe clashes such as Athens fighting Syracuse or the American Civil War or Syria fighting Israel in 1948 are counter-examples.  Ultimately, most of these seem a little forced, since typically one of these so-called democracies is drawn from a rogue’s assemblage of slave-owning societies and states prone to chronic military rule.

IR in Theory and Practice: Blind Dates in a Knowledge Society

By Jaap de Wilde (Department of IR & IO, University of Groningen)

 

Paper for Second Global International Studies Conference (WISC II) Ljubljana, Slovenia, 23-26 July 2008

 

This paper reflects on the ongoing debate about distinguishing IR as an academic discipline and IR as a guideline for foreign policy making. Although ‘IR in politics’ and ‘IR as a discipline’ are different social constructs, it will be argued that their intertwinement is such that they need to be seen parts of one knowledge society. Originally, the aim of this paper was to focus on the role of foreign policy think-tanks in the European and the American context. But reviewing recent literature on the relationship between IR in theory and practice, I saw a need to contribute to that debate first, and to preserve the analysis of think-tanks for a later moment.

            The relevance of studying the presumed or the desired relationship between theory and practice goes back to the normative starting point that inspired the original institutionalisation of IR as a discipline shortly after WW-I: how can academic research contribute to better insight in ‘the causes of war and the conditions for peace’? However, with the acknowledgment of the constructivist turn in social sciences, the idea of building cumulative knowledge over the years has become a myth. So the question emerges what ‘academic prestige’ has to add to the quality of foreign policy making.

            As for an introduction, reflecting on the role of IR theory in foreign policy making, the first thing that came to my mind was the success of the neoconservatives in the USA during Bush administrations; the second was the success of Marxism/Leninism in the former Soviet Union.

Debate Rudolph J. Rummels with Kevin Shimmin

Democracies Don’t Fight Democracies

By R.J. Rummel

 

In the literature on the “democratic peace,” this term refers to the idea that democracies do not (or virtually never) make war on each other. I will call this the war version. I believe it is misleading to focus only on this version. Democracies not only have not made war on each other; they also have, by far, the least foreign violence, domestic collective violence, and democide – a much greater killer than war by several orders of magnitude. (Democide is the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.)

Democracy is a general cure for political or collective violence of any kind – it is a method of nonviolence. I call this understanding of the democratic peace the general version.

Within this general understanding of democratic peace, democracy in its 20th Century form means: