The Best Discovery Since Fire—Pax Democratica
Rudy Rummel
Support for the democratic peace proposition that democracies don't make war on each other continues to accumulate from social scientific research, while the information gatekeepers continue to ignore it. This is an incredible gap. On the one side there is these well accepted empirical findings about this solution to war, democide, and famine; on the other side is American foreign policy based on these findings; but in the middle there is a vast ignorance and misunderstanding of the democratic peace. So, I will continue to harp on it in the hope that I will help making more widely known this incredible power of democratic freedom. That is the purpose of this blog, my website, my novels, and all else I've written in the last 25 years.
Also to this end, I want to present the best work I've read on the democratic peace, which is the Ph.D. dissertation by Harries-Clichy (Pete) Peterson, Jr., titled PAX DEMOCRATICA: IMPLEMENTING THE INTER-DEMOCRATIC PEACE PROPOSITION (University of Hawaii, 2001—I had retired well before then and was not a member of his dissertation committee). The date is crucial, since it was written the year of the 9/11 attack, and thus before President Bush announced his democratic peace based, Forward Strategy of Freedom. Anyone reading both Peterson's dissertation and Bush's speeches since then might conclude that Bush had studied what Peterson had to say. I don't think so, but it is clear that both are eating at the same social scientific table.
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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.