Saturday Responses 4-29-06
Rudy Rummel
"The Best Discovery Since Fire—Pax Democratica"
Mike "Veeshir" Fisher said on Dean's World:
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.
RJR. The democratic peace has been tested on every democracy that has existed in history, most notably by Spencer Weart. See the summary chapter of his book Never At War. Anther way of looking at this is that there are 121 democracies today, and not a chance of even military action between any of them. Not even among the European nations, which throughout history have been at each other's throats. What changed this is that they all became democracies.
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