democratic peace

democratic peace, the proposition that democratic states never (or almost never) wage war on one another.

The concept of democratic peace must be distinguished from the claim that democracies are in general more peaceful than nondemocratic countries. Whereas the latter claim is controversial, the claim that democratic states do not fight each other is widely regarded as true by scholars and practitioners of international relations. Proponents of the democratic peace hark back to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and, more recently, to U.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson, who declared in his 1917 war message to Congress that the United States aimed to make the world “safe for democracy.”

In Project for a Perpetual Peace (1795), Kant envisioned the establishment of a zone of peace among states constituted as republics. Although he explicitly equated democracy with despotism, contemporary scholars claim that Kant’s definition of republicanism, which emphasizes the representative nature of republican government, corresponds to our current understanding of liberal democracy. Thus, the terms democratic peace (or liberal peace) and Kantian peace are today often used interchangeably.

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Project for a Perpetual Peace received little notice from students of international relations until, in a series of influential articles published in the mid-1980s, the American international-relations scholar Michael Doyle called attention to Kant’s work and argued that the zone of peace envisioned by Kant has gradually become reality. Subsequently, and especially after the end of the Cold War, the democratic peace became one of the most-popular subjects of research in international relations. Scores of studies were devoted to it, many of which employed quantitative methods to demonstrate that the democratic peace is a historical fact. What that research has shown is not that wars between nondemocracies, or between democracies and nondemocracies, have been frequent; instead, it has demonstrated that, although interstate war is a rare event in general, wars between democracies have been even rarer.

Although a number of critics have questioned the veracity of the proposition, the claim that democracies do not fight each other continues to be widely accepted in the international relations discipline. There is less agreement, however, on why the democratic peace exists. Two major competing (if not mutually exclusive) explanations have been elaborated. While some argue that democracies are more peaceful to one another because of a shared culture, others consider the main factor to be structural (or institutional). Proponents of the first view argue that the political culture of democratic societies is pervaded by the norm that disputes are to be settled by peaceful means. Democratic citizenries, the argument goes, apply that norm to their relations with other democratic societies; hence, when two democracies are locked in a dispute, their leaders expect each other to shun violent means of resolving the dispute. Proponents of the second explanation argue that the political institutions in democracies matter more than the norms harboured by their citizens. The separation of powers and the checks and balances characteristic of democratic political systems constrain the ability of elected leaders to move their countries rashly toward war. Thus, when a conflict arises between two democratic countries, their leaders need not fear a surprise attack; the inherently slow process of national-security decision making on both sides allows ample time for diplomats to resolve the conflict peacefully.

In the debate over international relations theory, the democratic peace is identified with the liberal perspective, and it is closely associated with two other liberal claims about world politics: that international peace is promoted by (a) economic interdependence between states and (b) international institutions. The major rival of international liberal theory is realism, which contends that the foreign policy behaviour of states is shaped primarily by the anarchic structure of the international system—that is, by the absence of a supranational authority capable of effectively providing for the security of individual states. For realists, so long as the international system is anarchic, violence will remain latent, if not always overt, in world politics regardless of the internal characteristics of individual states (e.g., their regime type). Thus, to the extent that a perpetual state of peace indeed prevails among liberal democracies, its emergence contradicts realist expectations and undermines the position of realism as the leading theory of international relations.

The popularity of the democratic peace idea has not been confined to the academy. The foreign policy rhetoric of U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton during the 1990s featured many appeals to this thesis. Spreading democracy throughout the globe was a principal aim of his foreign policy, and administration officials used the democratic peace idea to justify that policy. If the formerly autocratic nations of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union democratized successfully, the argument went, the United States and its western European allies would no longer need to contain these nations militarily, because democracies do not fight each other.

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The democratic peace was also embraced by the neoconservative thinkers and officials who shaped U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks. The belief that a zone of democracy equaled a zone of peace and security buttressed the desire of the George W. Bush administration to use force to topple Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq and its expectation that the democratization of that country would result in the spread of democracy throughout the Middle East.