I wonder if we don't really have a long enough time-line to consider the Democratic Peace proven. After all, there aren't many democracies much over 100 years old and most of them are significantly younger.
Look at Japan and South Korea. They are two of our more stable democracies and they're having quite the tiff.
I do feel that democracies war on each other less. But.....
People go to war. It's what we do. What happens when the majority of the Earth is democracies? Who do they war on? Or will it end war? And if it does end war, will it be because the US or somebody else is the most powerful and won't let the others war? Sort of like what happened in the USSR when they reserved the right to kill people to themselves.
I'm not really disagreeing, just posing some questions that occurred to me.
Pax Democratica -- nice line. I'm going to steal that shamelessly.
Mike,
Yes, we do, simply because war was so ubiquitous before the Democratic Peace.
People go to war. It's what we do. What happens when the majority of the Earth is democracies? Who do they war on?
No one. Consider Mexico, Canada, and the U.S., or better yet the EU nations: there have been endless historical territorial and trade disputes, but they never escalate into war anymore. That's what such a world be like.
People, as a rule, actually do not like going to war with each other. There is a certain segment of the population that relishes violence, but that can usually be channeled in positive directions or sated with sport. You look at most of history and young men usually had to be impressed into service, or joined up but were forced to agree to terms of service measured in decades. People, for the most part, don't WANT to go off and leave home and hearth just to go killing.
If you look at the number of democracies which share borders or waterways, we actually have thousands of years of opportunities for wars to begin, and none ever have--unless you count incredibly tiny conflicts, like the few times shots have been fired but no one killed, or the singular case where the French sunk the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand harbors and were very embarrassed by it and a single person died.
I've seen this many times posted here. I think it's been mentioned in the comments before, but I'd like to point to the discussion War Between Democracies, which analyzes the democratic peace claim from several angles. I wonder if Dean or Rudy would like to comment on the objections that are discussed there. Specifically, it seems that either there are quite a few exceptions to the rule of democratic peace, or, if you exclude most or all of those counterexamples as not representing democracies, then the claim of democratic peace becomes statistically much less remarkable, because of the greatly diminished sample size.
I think that the supporters of the Democratic Peace idea here are overemphasizing democracy. I agree that it is extremely unlikely that two democracies with modern Western values will go to war, but that probably has at least as much to do with the Western values as it does with the democraticness. Likewise, a democracy with an illiberal electorate likely still has a significant chance of going to war. Peace can probably be attained at least as easily by promoting Western values as by promoting democracy, and in illiberal countries, it may in some circumstances be better if the country is not democratic.
Look at Japan and South Korea. They are two of our more stable democracies and they're having quite the tiff.
I do feel that democracies war on each other less. But.....
People go to war. It's what we do. What happens when the majority of the Earth is democracies? Who do they war on? Or will it end war? And if it does end war, will it be because the US or somebody else is the most powerful and won't let the others war? Sort of like what happened in the USSR when they reserved the right to kill people to themselves.
I'm not really disagreeing, just posing some questions that occurred to me.
Mike,
Yes, we do, simply because war was so ubiquitous before the Democratic Peace.
People go to war. It's what we do. What happens when the majority of the Earth is democracies? Who do they war on?
No one. Consider Mexico, Canada, and the U.S., or better yet the EU nations: there have been endless historical territorial and trade disputes, but they never escalate into war anymore. That's what such a world be like.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
If you look at the number of democracies which share borders or waterways, we actually have thousands of years of opportunities for wars to begin, and none ever have--unless you count incredibly tiny conflicts, like the few times shots have been fired but no one killed, or the singular case where the French sunk the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand harbors and were very embarrassed by it and a single person died.
It's really quite remarkable.
I think that the supporters of the Democratic Peace idea here are overemphasizing democracy. I agree that it is extremely unlikely that two democracies with modern Western values will go to war, but that probably has at least as much to do with the Western values as it does with the democraticness. Likewise, a democracy with an illiberal electorate likely still has a significant chance of going to war. Peace can probably be attained at least as easily by promoting Western values as by promoting democracy, and in illiberal countries, it may in some circumstances be better if the country is not democratic.