Peace through democracy
The desire to eradicate war has been the primary motivation for the study of international relations over time. The savage wars of the 20th Century and the invention of nuclear weapons only added to this urgency.
The idealist approach has, toward this noble end, proposed a number of solutions—collective security, international law, and arms control—that have worked better in theory than practice.
That the Great War is now called World War I tells us something about how well the League of Nation’s collective security system worked. Indeed, the League’s tepid response to Axis aggression in the 1930s only confirmed that great powers won’t run risks to involve themselves in quarrels in distant places “between people of whom we know nothing” (in the words of Neville Chamberlain regarding Czechoslovakia).
International law, for its part, works fine for seating protocol at embassy dinners and international mail flows, but collapses under the pressures of war because those it seeks to regulate won’t risk their survival in order to adhere to unenforceable legal statutes.
Finally, arms control founders because it mostly treats the symptoms rather than the disease—countries don’t distrust each other because they have arms; they have arms because they distrust each other; which also means effective arms control tends to be unachievable when most needed and unnecessary when not.
Given these deficiencies, the realist side has probably gotten the better of the debate over war with its recommendation of deterrence through a balance of power—think NATO on one end of the Fulda Gap and the Red Army on the other during the Cold War as an example of how power can check power and thereby deter aggression.
Alas, the problem with relying upon the balance of power is that it inherently unreliable. It requires high levels of military preparedness, often skilled diplomacy to manage shifting alliances, and the willingness to fight small wars today to prevent larger ones tomorrow. And it is, of course, susceptible to breakdown with tragic results, as demonstrated by events in the summer of 1914.
But in recent decades, scholars have found new hope for eradicating war in something that has less to do with the interaction between states and more with what goes on inside them—democratization.
What has been called the Democratic Peace Theory (DPT) was first proposed by Emmanuel Kant at the end of the 18th Century, and popularized by Woodrow Wilson at the beginning of the 20th. But it sat largely dormant until two more recent developments. The first of these was the dramatic increase in the number of democracies throughout the world as a result of the global democratic revolution that began in the mid-1970s. Second was the accumulation of a body of research, now benefiting for the first time from a statistically significant sample size, indicating that democracies don’t go to war against each other.
Put the two together and you have an expanding global zone of peace due to a decline in dyadic opportunities for war. If democracies don’t fight other democracies for a range of political, cultural, and economic reasons, then a world that consists of nothing but democracy becomes a world without war.
A host of theorists have subsequently attached some corollaries to DPT.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has developed the Golden Arches theory of Conflict Prevention, claiming that no two states that have acquired levels of affluence sufficient to host McDonald’s franchises have gone to war, while political scientist John Mueller has gone as far as to argue that war between advanced democratic states has become “subrationally unthinkable” (consider the long, undefended border between Canada and the United States on this score).
The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of our Nature, has likewise pointed to the pacific effects of feminization that allegedly occur as democracies expand the franchise to bring women into their political processes.
We could even throw demographic variables into this mix—affluent democracies have significantly lower fertility rates that lead to smaller family size and thus a reduced willingness to see lives jeopardized by war; they become, in effect, casualty-averse societies. Lower fertility rates also lead to aging populations, wherein we get larger numbers of those least prone to violence (little old ladies) and smaller numbers of violent young males.
George W. Bush’s administration expanded the thinking behind DPT by suggesting that democratization could not only prevent war but also reduce international terrorism.
Democracies don’t go to war with other democracies, so the thinking reasonably went, but they also don’t provide support to or allow their territory to be used by terrorist organizations either (hence the effort to begin “draining the swamp” with the nation-building project in Iraq).
In the end, it is worth noting, in support of DPT, that both Great Britain and France have enough nuclear weapons to destroy most of our larger cities. But we don’t lose any sleep over this fact.
So would an Iran that was democratic still support terrorism? Would it still seek nuclear weapons? And would we care, under those circumstances, if it got them?