Democratic peace theory
Alternative explanations for the correlation of peace among democracies include arguments revolving around institutions, commerce, interdependence, alliances, US world dominance and political stability.
[7][8][9][10] Though the democratic peace theory was not rigorously or scientifically studied until the 1960s, the basic principles of the concept had been argued as early as the 18th century in the works of philosopher Immanuel Kant[12] and political theorist Thomas Paine.
Melvin Small and J. David Singer responded; they found an absence of wars between democratic states with two "marginal exceptions", but denied that this pattern had statistical significance.
[27] Doyle requires (1) that "liberal regimes" have market or private property economics, (2) they have policies that are internally sovereign, (3) they have citizens with juridical rights, and (4) they have representative governments.
[28] Ray requires that at least 50% of the adult population is allowed to vote and that there has been at least one peaceful, constitutional transfer of executive power from one independent political party to another by means of an election.
"[70] They also state that thirty years worth of statistical research has revealed that only two variables decrease human rights violations: political democracy and economic development.
When disputes do originate between marketplace democracies, they are less likely than others to escalate to violence because both states, even the stronger one, perceive greater long-term interests in the supremacy of law over power politics.
[40] As described by Gelpi and Griesdorf, several studies have argued that liberal leaders face institutionalized constraints that impede their capacity to mobilize the state's resources for war without the consent of a broad spectrum of interests.
Also as described by Gelpi and Griesdorf, studies have argued that when democratic leaders do choose to escalate international crises, their threats are taken as highly credible, since there must be a relatively large public opinion for these actions.
[87] An explanation based on game theory similar to the last two above is that the participation of the public and the open debate send clear and reliable information regarding the intentions of democracies to other states.
The case of the Vietnam War might, nonetheless, indicate a tipping point where publics may no longer accept continuing attrition of their soldiers (even while remaining relatively indifferent to the much higher loss of life on the part of the populations attacked).
[91] A prominent rational choice argument for the democratic peace is that democracies carry greater audience costs than authoritarian states, which makes them better at signaling their intentions in interstate disputes.
[94][73] However, a 2012 study by Alexander B. Downes and Todd S. Sechser found that existing datasets were not suitable to draw any conclusions as to whether democratic states issued more effective threats.
[10] A 2017 study which recoded flaws in the MID dataset ultimately conclude, "that there are no regime-based differences in dispute reciprocation, and prior findings may be based largely on poorly coded data.
This line of thought started with several independent observations of an "Autocratic Peace" effect, a reduced probability of war (obviously no author claims its absence) between states which are both non-democratic, or both highly so.
[111][56][27] For example, Gowa finds evidence for democratic peace to be insignificant before 1939, because of the too small number of democracies, and offers an alternate realist explanation for the following period.
[73][24] However, this can be seen as the longest-lasting criticism to the theory; as noted earlier, also some supporters agree that the statistical sample for assessing its validity is limited or scarce, at least if only full-scale wars are considered.
Christian Welzel's human empowerment theory posits that existential security leads to emancipative cultural values and support for a democratic political organization.
[119] Some democratic peace researchers have been criticized for post hoc reclassifying some specific conflicts as non-wars or political systems as non-democracies without checking and correcting the whole data set used similarly.
One response is that many of the worst crimes were committed by non-democracies, like in the European colonies before the nineteenth century, in King Leopold II of Belgium's privately owned Congo Free State, and in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union.
Mousseau argues that both Germany and Japan – like the USSR during the Cold War and Saudi Arabia today – had state-managed economies and thus lacked his market norms.
[141] Gartzke argues that economic freedom (a quite different concept from Mousseau's market norms) or financial dependence explains the developed democratic peace, and these countries may be weak on these dimensions too.
Even so, the issue of whether free trade or democracy is more important in maintaining peace may have potentially significant practical consequences, for example on evaluating the effectiveness of applying economic sanctions and restrictions to autocratic countries.
[111] Rosato argues that most of the significant evidence for democratic peace has been observed after World War II; and that it has happened within a broad alliance, which can be identified with NATO and its satellite nations, imposed and maintained by American dominance as part of Pax Americana.
In his 1994 State of the Union address, then-President Bill Clinton, a member of the Democratic Party, said: "Ultimately, the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere.
"[198][f] In a 1999 speech, Chris Patten, the then-European Commissioner for External Relations, said: "Inevitable because the EU was formed partly to protect liberal values, so it is hardly surprising that we should think it appropriate to speak out.
[205] Furthermore, Weede has argued that the justification is extremely weak, because forcibly democratizing a country completely surrounded by non-democracies, most of which are full autocracies, as Iraq was, is at least as likely to increase the risk of war as it is to decrease it (some studies show that dyads formed by one democracy and one autocracy are the most warlike, and several find that the risk of war is greatly increased in democratizing countries surrounded by non-democracies).
[59] Those attempts which had a permanent and stable success, like democratization in Austria, West Germany and Japan after World War II, mostly involved countries which had an advanced economic and social structure already, and implied a drastic change of the whole political culture.
According to Micheal Doyle, there are three main reasons for this: Democracies tend to have similar domestic political cultures, they share common morals, and their economic systems are interdependent.
III: "The Law of World Citizenship shall be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality" Kant is referring to "the right of the stranger to not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another.".
