> Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> When you said two constitutional democracies can't fight a war
against each
> other are you saying constitutional democracies can't start wars?
Or that
> the way they both run or treat others makes war between them hard to
start?
>
> In US history we have invaded Mexico and had a war with Spain, both
of which
> were started by us. You can blame the newspapers or war hawks, but
didn't
> the US declare war on both nations first for Imperialist reasons?
> Mike V.
Welcome to one of the most contentious issues in political science :-)
First a historical note, then on to political theory (run for your
lives :-) If I start to get technical, stop me, as I tend to slip
into poli. sci. jargon at the drop of a hat.
Historically, there is no question that our war with Mexico was
essentially a war of conquest against a fairly defenseless state. Our
war with Spain is a little more complicated - the chief cause of the
war, imo, was American public outrage at the remarkable brutality of
Spanish forces in putting down a revolt on Cuba. An attempt to snap
up an empire was certainly a part of it, but if it was the sole part
we would have kept Cuba, which we (notably) did not.
Democratic peace theory in its modern form is the rather poorly-named
construct of Michael Doyle, a brilliant Princeton international
relations theorist. Doyle noted the interesting fact that in all of
history there is no clear-cut case of two democratic states going to
war with one another. What he really meant was that there is no
clear-cut case of two liberal republics going to war with one another,
but that's what people have in mind when they say democracy nowadays,
so let's give him a pass on that one, eh? :-) In this Doyle was
resurrecting a fascinating argument made by Immanuel Kant in his work
_On Perpetual Peace_ in which he suggested that republican governments
that had free trade between them and did a few other things would
never go to war.
The argument that _no_ democracies have ever gone to war is a little
sketchy, although (imo) true. The closest case is the aforementioned
Spanish-American War, where Spain sort of resembled a democracy if you
squint, but was far enough from it that most of the standard political
science datasets don't place it in that category until later. Note
that these datasets have fairly strict standards - Great Britain
doesn't qualify in most of them until the Reform Act of 1850 or
thereabouts. But even if you don't accept that it _never_ happens,
the argument that it happens very rarely seems very strong. The best
statistical analysis I have seen suggests that if you treat war as a
random event occurring in a dyadic relationship between two states,
then wars between liberal democracies happen about 3 standard
deviations less often than you would expect given the base-rate of
conflict in the international system over the past two centuries. We
use a two-century time horizon because most of the databases put the
total # of democracies prior to 1783 at 0. This is, all by itself,
pretty strong evidence that something fishy is going on.
Unfortunately, what we lack is causation. There are lots of fairly
unpersuasive theories which boil down to the idea that democracies
accord each other's governments mutual legitimacy and are thus more
likely to negotiate things. There are a bunch of standard arguments
against it as well (democracies are rare, they're geographically
diverse, democracies were largely English influenced and so had
cultural similarities, and whatnot - I don't find them persuasive).
OK - all of that is "what the field thinks" - I'm sure you're all
eager to hear what I think :-) On the whole, I think there's
something to democratic peace theory. The statistical evidence I
actually find somewhat persuasive, and I wrote up a case study of
British-American disputes during the Civil War that persuaded me that
the reason Britain didn't intervene in the American Civil War on
behalf of the South - as it should have done had it been playing
strictly power politics - was the respect of British liberals for
American democratic institutions. British liberals in fact credited
the Union victory in the War with providing them with a strong impetus
for domestic reform, in fact (source - _Diplomat in Carpet Slippers_ -
a history of the foreign policy of the Lincoln Administration). My
best guess as to why it happens? Start with a (surprising) fact. The
base rate for wars is quite low. If you pick any given year in the
history of any given country randomly, the odds are very high that it
will be at peace with most of its neighbors, and in fact quite high
that it will just plain be at peace with everyone. So you start out
with a relatively rare phenomenon. Second, democracies have some
degree of mutual respect - so let's say that makes wars between them
half as likely as usual (to pick an arbitrary number). Second, most
wars are actually the product of miscalculations by states that think
the other side will yield when it won't. Democracies are more
transparent, making such miscalculations less likely. Third, many
wars are started by mistake - a country that is trapped in a poor
decision cycle, something like that. Democracies, because of their
openness, are less likely to make massive policy mistakes of that
type. Put all those together, stir in a bit of good luck, and
Voila! - no wars between democracies for the last 200 years.
Note what this does _not_ say - that democracies don't start wars.
They do. Also, note that it does _not_ say that democratization per
se is always a good thing. The same databases that tell us that
fully-fledged liberal democracies don't fight each other tell us that
democratizing countries tend to fight wars _a lot_ (see 1930s Germany,
Italy, and Japan for examples). Note that a lot of countries around
the world seem to be in the process of democratization as well, and
think about what this might mean, too. :-(
********************Gautam "Ulysses" Mukunda**********************
* Harvard College Class of '01 *He either fears his fate too much*
* www.fas.harvard.edu/~mukunda * Or his deserts are small, *
* [EMAIL PROTECTED] *Who dares not put it to the touch*
* "Freedom is not Free" * To win or lose it all. *
******************************************************************
