The democratic peace : social theory and politics
(1.)Introduction
p. 1
(2.)The hidden presence of social theory
p. 2
(2.1.)The object of inquiry
p. 3
(2.2.)Causes and action
p. 9
(3.)The politics of the democratic peace
p. 13
(4.)Conclusion
p. 17
1. Introduction
The democratic peace is an observation in political science. It states, first, that democracies fight as
many wars as do non-democracies, and, second, that democracies do however not fight each other.
It is an important observation. Purportedly, the democratic peace is “as close as anything we have to
an empirical law in international relations.”1 Also, the research on it would showcase the possibility
of progressive science in International Relations.2 If the democratic peace holds true, and if it can
somehow be implemented, it could also contribute practically to world peace.3 At the same time,
critics of the democratic peace have been no less vocal. Some remain unconvinced that the
democratic peace even exists, dismissing it as a statistical artifact.4 Others question the causal nature
of the relationship.5 Still others worry about the congratulatory subtext of the finding, or fear the
policy implications that potentially flow from it.6
In this chapter, I sketch the contours of existing democratic peace research in some detail.
The purpose of this stock-taking exercise is not to an exhaustive discussion of the various
contributions to the debate. Given the vast numbers of publications on the subject, this would
scarcely be possible anyway. Moreover, very good surveys exist already.7 The purpose is rather to
draw out the social-theoretic premises that make the democratic peace work and to suggest why a
different set of premises should be considered. In other words, to the extent that I call for more
research on the democratic peace, I am not recommending that we continue to fiddle in the margins
1
Levy 1988, 662.
Chernoff 2004.
3
Russett 1993, 357.
4
Spiro 1996a.
5
Layne 1996 ; Rosato 2003.
6
Owen 2005.
7
E.g., Geis and Wagner 2008.
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(more data, more rival hypotheses), but rather that we envisage a fundamental reconsideration. As a
result, I have to argue my case with some fervor. What follows, therefore, is a thorough excavation of
the old, coupled with a substantive argument in favor of the strength and relevance of the new.
The “fact of the democratic peace”8 is not wrong. The observation has been observed
repeatedly and there is no obvious reason to assume that a malin génie is deceiving the scientific
gaze on this massive a scale. Democracies have rarely if ever fought each other. However, facts do
not exist outside of theories; data do. A datum becomes a fact when it is constituted as significant by
the theory that brings it forth and embeds it. “Being significant” should be understood here in its
dual sense both of “having meaning” and “being important.” However, it is not only that facts are
theory-dependent.9 Equally, theories have a political dimension to them. In Robert Cox’ well-known
phrase: “Theory is always for someone and for some purpose.”10 I am concerned, in short, with the
(social) theory and the politics of the democratic peace.
The next section reveals social theory as a hidden presence in democratic peace research.
Both its conception of the object of inquiry and its construction of causal explanations betray a
fundamentally un-sociological approach. It is my argument in this chapter that it would be fruitful to
recast research into the democratic peace in a more sociological mould.11 While this runs the risk of
taking the politics out of it, I will argue that a turn to sociology actually adds to our understanding of
“the politics of the democratic peace.” The reason is that it reconnects democratic peace with the
quintessential, and in fact quintessentially political, problem of order.12 This is, however, not to deny
that important costs are incurred in the process.
2. The hidden presence of social theory
In this section, I critically review existing democratic peace research. The discussion has two parts:
one dealing with its explanandum (2.1.), the other with its explanans (2.2.). I use the Latin
terminology deliberately because it implies less methodological bias than the more common notion
of dependent and independent variables. The Latin terms allow for a more encompassing
understanding of causation and explanation. In the process, their use also signals the methodological
8
Russett 1993, chapter 1.
Compare Waltz 2008, 93. Waltz, quoting Goethe, affirms that: « The highest wisdom is to realize that every
fact is already a theory. »
10
Cox 1981, 128.
11
Compare Kratochwil 2008. Recasting International Relations in a « more sociological mould » was the exact
purpose of the introduction of constructivism into the discipline (e.g., Onuf 1989 and Wendt 1999). Logically,
the question ensues: “Which sociology?” On this point, see Godard and Nexon 2005.
12
Rengger 2000. Also Ringmar 2008.
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bias in evidence when the more common terminology is deployed.13 For this reason, I entertain the
hope that changing vocabulary proves instrumental in excavating the implicit social-theoretic
premises of existing democratic peace research; premises which are by definition wagers:
“provisional commitments *…+ that can really never be settled definitively.”14
2.1. The object of inquiry
In ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, ’15 an article published in two parts in
Philosophy & Public Affairs and one of the loci classici of democratic peace research, Michael Doyle
states his topic of inquiry unambiguously: “What difference do liberal principles and institutions
make to the conduct of the foreign affairs of liberal states?”16 Compare the work of Dean Babst, a
former government-employed sociologist who is generally credited for having published the first
empirical piece on “Elective Government” being a “Force for Peace.” Almost two decades before
Doyle, Babst set out to study if “There *have+ been any wars *fought+ between independent freely
elected governments,” a hypothesis that had been arrived at “purely impressionistically.”17 The latter
claim is rather puzzling given the international context at the time of Babst’s writing,18 which
basically pitted the free world against the communist bloc – the Cold War was in full swing, with the
1962 Cuba crisis having just recently occurred. Bruce Russett, whose ongoing work takes democratic
peace research out of the context of the Cold War and explores its use for the Post-Cold-War world,
extends Babst’s concerns: “Why Democratic Peace?”19 Thomas Risse paraphrases Russett: “Why is
that the ‘security dilemma’ appears to be far less significant when democracies deal with each other,
while it seems to govern their interactions with authoritarian systems?”20 Critically engaging the
democratic peace within the context of a broader discussion on the causes of war, Hidemi Suganami
describes the program’s substantive concern as being about the relative frequency of war
occurrence. “Under what sort of circumstances have wars occurred more frequently?”21
Notice how these are in fact different questions. Some are obviously complementary. Thus,
Babst’s and Russett’s questions complement each other in a neat chronological way: settle the facts
13
Compare Kurki 2008.
Jackson 2010, xxx.
15
Doyle 1983a,b.
16
Doyle 1983a, 206. Elsewhere, Doyle recounts that, in publishing “Liberal Legacies,” he had wanted to
demonstrate Kant’s infamous peace essay “could be constructed as a coherent explanation of two important
regularities in world politics: the tendencies of liberal states simultaneously to be peace-prone in their relations
with each other and unusually war-prone in their relations with nonliberal states. Cf. Doyle 1996, 358.
17
Babst 1964, 9.
18
Cf. Macmillan 2004, 489.
19
Russett 1993, chapter 2.
20
Risse 1995, xxx. Look up (p. 23 in the reprinted version in the Geeraerts and Stouthuysen collection.)
21
Suganami 1996, 6.
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first, account for them second. Doyle’s and Suganami’s questions, however, suggest more holistic
concerns. Both are out to paint a picture of a “whole” of which Babst’s and Russett’s inquiries can be
seen to be a “part.” But they are different wholes: the study of liberalism, on the one hand, and the
study of war, on the other. From liberalism’s perspective (as Doyle depicts it), one should find it a
pity that the democratic peace is so easily subsumed within a study of war occurrence (as Suganami
not incorrectly frames it). With Doyle, the liberal peace concerned both the use of military force and
international redistributive justice. He gestured toward Galtung’s notion of a positive peace. After
Doyle, the focus narrowed down again to a concern for international security only. Recently,
however, its range has broadened again from a mere democratic peace to the exploration of a more
general democratic distinctiveness.22 Increasingly, democracy is believed to be positively correlated
to trade interdependence, to institution-building, and to peace “proper”; and these four elements
are seen to be involved in a virtuous circle of mutual reinforcement.23 Clearly, there is no full
consensus on what it is that we are explaining. However, to the extent that the object of inquiry is
peace “proper,” which it is largely, then scholars do conceive of it in negative terms. Democratic
peace concerns the absence of war.
Note, further, that while the democratic peace is perhaps true, its significance is contested in
multiple ways. Thus, David Spiro has argued that democracies do indeed not fight each other, but
that this cannot be statistically significant because of the low numbers of democracies in the
international system and because of the low numbers of wars that occur anyway. Spiro argues, in
other words, that “the distribution of wars among democracies is not statistically different from that
which is generated by random chance.”24 This is not to say that leaders of democratic countries
throw the dice to decide on war, but it does imply, says Spiro, that the search for a theory of
democratic peace is ill-founded. The reason is that there is nothing surprising to explain; there is no
puzzle.25 Spiro’s mode of argumentation is technical in nature. It fights fire with fire, statistics with
(presumably) ever better statistics. Unsurprisingly, a statistical back and forth26 has ensued, which
Chernoff applauds as (one of the elements) signaling the possibility of meaningful dialogue toward
consensus, and thus of progress in studying international relations.27 It is nonetheless noticeable that
Chernoff does not discuss those contributions to the democratic peace debate that voice a more
22
Geis and Wagner 2010 ; Owen 2004.
Russett and ONeal 2001.
24
Spiro 1996a, 215.
25
Spiro believes that scholars should be paying more attention to explaining the habit of democracies to ally
with one another more than other regime types do. This finding, he maintains, would be significant. Cf., Spiro
1996a, 231.
26
Russett 1996; Spiro 1996b.
27
Chernoff 2004.
23
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radical critique still, either because they think that the very observation does not hold,28 or because
they question its theoretical and political contextualization.29
Ido Oren, for example, states vigorously that “*it+ is the empirical claim of a democratic peace
that I challenge *…+” and he does so from the perspective of a “historical sociology of knowledge.”30 If
one does not define democracy trans-historically, as Oren thinks one should not, but rather defines it
as was habitual at the time of a given conflict, then the democratic peace falters. Moreover, when
war breaks out, countries are often redefined as democracies depending on whose side of the
conflict they are on. Weimar Germany, for instance, was only defined as a non-democracy when war
broke out in 1914, and only securely so when the United States intervened in the war in 1917. Tarak
Barkawi and Mark Laffey, for their part, argue that the democratic peace, as the likes of Doyle and
Russett describe it, does not take the relevant historical context into account. Most democratic
peace research approaches its object from the inside-out, so that “the relevant context” is the
national context of each state. However, according to Barkawi and Laffey, it is more appropriate to
reason from the outside-in, and to embed the “fact of the democratic peace” within a holistic story
of world social development. Capitalism is an unfolding process which has bred states, which orders
the relations between states, and which fosters, via what Kautsky described as the mechanism of
“ultraimperialism,”31 the observed peace among democracies as an epiphenomenon. In the same
process, war with, and the economic exploitation of, non-democracies comes about.32
In fact, more than directly engaging the debate over the causes of the democratic peace (on
which more below), these contributions add up to a re-description of its explanandum. An
explanandum is a description (!) of a state of affairs that begets a concern for explanation.33 Redescribing that same state of affairs, i.e., re-describing the facts, likely leads one to different kinds of
explanations and probably the very description of the fact constitutes a large part of its explanation.
Consider Oren’s re-description of the democratic peace as a “peace of our kind” and Barkawi and
Laffey’s re-description of it as an “imperial peace.” Discovering a “peace of our kind” suggests that
this peace is the outcome of the dialectical logic of self-other relationships and, therefore, points to
social identity theory as a source of theoretical inspiration (which Oren himself gives an explicitly
materialist, “exogenous-interest-based” grounding). Moreover, it would lead one to expect that
28
Oren 1996.
Barkawi and Laffey 1999.
30
Oren 1996, 265, 296.
31
Kautsky 1914.
32
Barkawi and Laffey 1999.
33
As such it is different from « naming » the dependent variable.
29
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different “kinds” could manipulate a state of peace as well. Developed socialist states, for example.34
Or how about a peace of the umma?35 Discovering an “imperial peace,” on the other hand, implies a
Marxist approach and would question the possibility of extending the democratic peace by making
more countries democratic since the political-economic process of global capitalism takes
precedence over the desire for, and thus actually impedes the possibility of, democratization.36
Clearly, the work of Oren and that of Barkawi and Laffey upsets Chernoff’s assessment of
progress. As in different Kuhnian paradigms37, the same concept does, it turns out, mean quite
different things to different researchers. “*The] notion that there is but one ‘Democratic Peace’ no
longer holds water.”38 As a result, it is unsurprising to find that these alternative accounts are not
referred to in Chernoff’s evaluation, nor are they engaged with in Russett’s and Oneal’s “Kantian”
reformulation of the democratic peace. They are simply not mentioned.39 In some ways, this is a pity
because, as I will argue below, it impairs a full appreciation of the politics of the democratic peace.
Still regarding its explanandum, it is important to stress that the democratic peace is
conceived of as a dyadic datum. This means, foremost, that democracies are not inherently peaceful.
The monadic thesis exists, but it has largely been disproven empirically. Democratic states have
fought wars, just not with other democracies. There is near consensus on this, but the occasional
dissident does exist. Thus, John Macmillan intelligently advances the argument that a democracy is
not necessarily a singularly “liberal state.” Rather, he speaks of liberally inclined people or politicians,
or of liberal “agencies” within the state. If one disaggregates “the democratic state” in one’s analysis
of conflict situations – also with non-democracies – one finds that liberals have consistently been
34
Oren and Hayes1997.
Moses 2006.
36
For this very reason, Heikki Patomäki argues for the necessity of scaling up the process of democratization to
the world-political level in the form of a global security community. Cf. Patomäki 2002, chapter 8. While
disagreeing with Patomäki on the nature of global democracy, Beate Jahn is nonetheless developing a similar
argument concerning the political economy of democratization. Cf. Jahn 2010.
37
In a recent discussion, Patrick Jackson and Daniel Nexon argue that the vocabulary of paradigms is
inappropriate for describing the state of theoretical disagreement in International Relations Theory. Unlike
paradigmatic contenders, proponents of different theories can meaningfully communicate with each other, as
becomes obvious, amongst others from the debate over absolute and relative gains. Katzenstein’s and Sil’s call
for “analytical eclecticism” likewise contradicts the existence of mutually exclusive paradigms. However,
toward the end of their article, Jackson and Nexon do entertain the possibility that on epistemological and
methodological issues, there might in fact be paradigmatic faultlines in International Relations Theory. Cf.
Jackson and Nexon 2009, 919; Katzenstein and Sil 2008.
38
Macmillan 2004, 490.
39
Even more striking, given their aspiration to initiate work on a critical theory of democratic peace, is that Geis
and Wagner (2010) do not refer to them neither.
35
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pushing for the more peaceful solution.40 Macmillan’s liberal peace is monadic, the democratic peace
is dyadic.
As a dyadic observation, the democratic peace is not only not monadic, but neither is it a
feature of the international system. Consider the difference. In line with Suganami’s description of
the democratic peace as a theory of the relative frequency of the occurrence of war, and reminiscent
of Durkheim’s sociological interest in the distribution of suicide, Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett have
stated that they “want to explain patterns of conflict.”41 Taken into account that a system, or society,
is sometimes defined as a “patterned arrangement,”42 it would seem that a structural description –
not only explanation – of the democratic peace should be possible. Such an account would have to
theorize, in Hobbesian terms, a “state of peace”: its nature, its causes, its internal and external
constitution, its dynamics. Arguably, Doyle actually conceived of his project in these terms, remarking
that “the thesis *he+ drew from Kant focused on a state of peace distinguishing liberal relations from
the state of war characterizing liberal-nonliberal and nonliberal-nonliberal relations.”43 However, in
spite of these provocative suggestions, and a recent article-length attempt notwithstanding,44 no
existing analysis of the democratic peace is actually systemic in such a thick, might I say Waltzian,
sense. The democratic peace is thickly dyadic in that it conceives of every specific relationship as a
freestanding entity. Relationships are in a “state”, they are not seen to be embedded in a more
encompassing systemic “state.” What’s more, every year that a specific relationship endures counts
as a separate observation. Hence, not only are the relationship between France and the United
States and that between Great Britain and the United States theorized to be independent
relationships, but also the relationships between Great Britain and the United States in 1980 and
1981 are considered to be separate ones. “Society” and “history,” in short, are absent from the
explanandum. Sovereign states, which seemingly exist ex nihilo, interact one-on-one, and the sum of
all this interaction remains just that: a vast set of one-on-one interactions. This is a thoroughly unsociological conception.
In a review article, perhaps too uncompromising to be appealing, Sebastian Rosato has
pushed this argument a bit further still, observing that the logic of the democratic peace is really a
monadic one, even if the observation is not.45 Rosato situates his remark in the debate on the
explanation of the democratic peace, but it pertains to its explanandum no less. True enough, the
40
Macmillan 1996.
Maoz and Russett 1993, 628.
42
E.g., Merton xxx, 370. Here, Merton is defining his notion of social structure.
43
Doyle 1996, 360 (italics in original). He concludes: “War or peace are thus merely indicators of the ‘states’
that permit them.”
44
Harrison 2004.
45
Rosato 2005, 467.
41
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dependent variable of democratic peace research is “war,” or, alternatively “militarized interstate
disputes” defined as “a set of interactions between or among states involving threats to use military
force, displays of force, or actual uses of force.”46 Empirical descriptions of a dispute must, by
definition, feature more than one party, and hence, they are dyadic. It takes two to tango. However,
the theoretical description of war – that description which presents itself as puzzling – is, in fact,
monadic. What ultimately interests democratic peace researchers is not “war” as something that
exists as a patterned distribution in the system (pace Suganami), or as the carrier/exponent of a
system of inter-subjective meaning,47 but rather war as a foreign policy choice. A dyad is at war when
each side decides either to initiate war or to resist prior aggression. War is theorized as interaction
and, allegedly, it can neatly be decomposed into, or rationally reconstructed as, a set of actions and
reactions. What demands explanation, then, is every instance and reiteration of this decision, all of
which are held (theoretically) to be independent from each other. In case of the democratic peace, it
specifically concerns the decision to avoid fighting war in spite of being caught in a situation of
(possibly intense) conflict.48
And puzzling this is, or so we are told. After all, is not international relations the realm of
repetition and recurrence, where morality has no place and where war is a constant possibility? On
first inspection, the cumulative findings of democratic peace research prove this traditional realist
thesis wrong.49 And herein lies, arguably, its particular attraction. However, on closer inspection, the
case is not that obvious, nor that compelling. First, realist scholars have advanced their own theory of
the democratic peace. Given the material, power-political, circumstances in which inter-democratic
interaction has unfolded, realist theory would allegedly predict peace between democracies.50
Second, in the way that war is theorized in democratic peace scholarship, i.e., as a constantly reiterated decision, war does in fact not generally disqualify as a reasonable foreign policy option. It is
only argued that there is a growing recognition in democracies that violence is not necessary; it is
safe not to wage war, so to speak, since fellow democracies are for various reasons not seen to
constitute a physical threat51. However, nowhere is it argued that war has become unreasonable in
their mutual relationships. What is theorized, in other words, is war avoidance in certain dyadic
relations, not the absence of war as an emergent property of these relations.
As such, the
democratic peace surprisingly resembles a realist theory of war. Third, I would like to suggest that
46
Maoz and Russett 1993, 628.
Cf. Bull 1995, chapter 8.
48
Kinsella 2005, 455.
49
Doyle 1983a, 218-224.
50
Farber and Gowa 1996; Rosato 2003, 599-600.
51
Zinnes 2004, 436. “*…+ states that use bargaining to solve societal problems can only afford to use bargaining
to settle international conflicts if they are not threatened [in their security+.”
47
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proponents of the democratic peace are, in a certain way, getting realism wrong. That is to say, they
are getting Waltz wrong. After all, Waltz has stated time and again that his is no theory of foreign
policy, but one of international relations.52 Waltz was a Parsonian concerned with the problem of
order. He was a sociologist.53 Research into the democratic peace, on the contrary, re-interprets
realism as a theory of foreign policy, and finds it, unsurprisingly, inadequate; an assessment that
Waltz would probably agree with. If the democratic peace really wants to challenge realism, it
should, therefore, engage realism at the systems level. It should become “an observation in
sociology”: a fact still, but of a different kind – a social fact perhaps –, and calling for a different
explanation.
2.2. Causes and action
Often, it is claimed with respect to the democratic peace, that there are “many data, but little
explanation”54; i.e., empirically virtually uncontested, but theoretically weak. I doubt this because
good empirical research is not possible without sound theoretical backing. Therefore, if research on
the democratic peace is judged to be empirically strong, then it cannot, by fiat, be argued to rest on
theoretical quicksand. Remember, in this respect, that Michael Doyle, and increasingly Bruce Russett,
relate the democratic peace to Kantian political theory; not the worse basis to work from, even if,
arguably, they are getting Kant wrong.55 Moreover, its earlier theoretical weakness has spawned
innovative (e.g., game-theoretical) theorizing.56 Therefore, it is important to discuss the causal, or
explanatory, claims that are being made. What causes the democratic peace?
Note foremost that a rather weak claim is being advanced. The argument is emphatically not
that democracy alone causes peace. According to Doyle, for example, “republican representation, an
ideological commitment to human rights, and transnational interdependence are the causal
mechanisms of the explanation,” likening them to the “constitutional, international, and
cosmopolitan” articles of Kant’s peace treaty, and insisting that the “three causes explained liberal
peace and liberal war when, and only when, combined.”57 Similarly, Maoz and Russett have claimed
that – obviously – other factors (not in the least political realist or geopolitical ones: contiguity,
balance of power, etc.) play their part in pacifying an international relationship, but, if one controls
52
E.g., Waltz 1979, 48-49.
Goddard and Nexon 2005.
54
Müller and Wolff 2006.
55
Baum 2008; Behnke 2009; Cavallar 2001; Jahn 2005; Macmillan 1995. More on Kant and the Democratic
Peace is to follow in the second chapter.
56
E.g., Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson and Smith, 1999.
57
Doyle 2005, 463.
53
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for these factors, one nonetheless discovers that democracy has some autonomous influence on
peace. Not much perhaps, but still some: “All the theories competing with that about democracy find
solid support. Nevertheless, a strong, independent, and fairly robust role for joint democracy remains
evident.”58 In like fashion, Slantchev, Alexandrova and Gartzke submit that even if a theory (in casu,
the theory that holds that democracies can signal their resolve better) only holds true in 10% of the
cases, it should not be discarded, because they are an important 10%.59 Universally valid in practice,
the democratic peace remains probabilistic in theory. Its causal claims are mild ones. Consequently, I
am not interested in suggesting yet another rival hypothesis, let alone suggesting a mono-causal
alternative.60 Rather, I’ll focus on how, in its causal accounts, democratic peace scholarship conceives
of the concept of causal explanation, and what it conceives causes to be. My argument will be that
underlying one’s understanding of causal explanation lies a theory of action. In case of the
democratic peace, this theory is (predominantly) that of rational choice.
Consider, first, Doyle’s original contribution. Remember that his argument concerns the role
of “liberalism in world politics”61: “What difference do liberal principles and institutions make to the
conduct of the foreign affairs of liberal states?”62 It is Y-centered, so to speak, and could in many
ways be recast as an ideal-typical analysis of the workings of “liberalism” in world politics. Given a
certain definition of “liberalism,” this is how (i.e., peacefully) one expects it to unfold. If it does not,
this is not because of a flaw in the analysis but because there are countervailing forces in the world,
which impede the unconstrained unfolding of liberalism. As a result, in relations with nonliberal
states, and because of them, the condition of anarchy prevails, the security dilemma perseveres, and,
war will, ultimately, ensue.63 The causal challenge, for Doyle, is to theorize liberalism’s agency. Can
states be liberal? Can even people? How does one know that when a state or a person is acting, that
it is acting on its liberal personality or inclination? Or, is liberalism the designation of a set of
institutional arrangements that enable and constrain otherwise “normal” states and people to act in
various ways? If so, what institutional arrangements count as liberal? Do they exist domestically and
internationally? And, again, if so, are they of necessity compatible at these different levels? In other
words, what is liberalism and what kind of a cause is it?
I restrict myself to a discussion of these issues in the two best-known causal models of
democratic peace: the normative and the structural; paralleling Doyle’s “principles” and
58
Maoz and Russett 1993, 632.
Slantchev, Alexandrova, and Gartzke 2005, 460.
60
This is Rosato’s flaw. Cf. Rosato 2003.
61
Doyle 1986.
62
Doyle 1983a, 206.
63
Doyle 1983b, part vi.
59
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“institutions” respectively. The latter is also called the “institutional” explanation and it is garnering
increasing support.64 The normative model hypothesizes that “states, to the extent possible,
externalize the norms of behavior that are developed within and characterize their domestic political
processes and institutions.”65 Within their domestic realm democracies settle their disputes through
peaceful means, i.e., in the final analysis, by means of regular and free elections which entail, in case
of electoral loss, the possibility of a return on the scene with the next election. The model is
“normative” because, underlying the behavioral norm, there is a deeper norm, that of “live and let
live.”66 Preferably, it is argued, democracies will act peacefully in their external relations as well. But
with non-democracies, they cannot take this risk. Given the violence that (supposedly) is habitual
within non-democracies, where conflict is a zero sum game, the safe bet is to assume that nondemocracies will behave aggressively toward outsiders as well, and to harness yourself against them.
Naiveté in relations with non-democracies is ill-advised. In relations with democracies there can be
no naiveté because they are trustworthy after all.
Note that this is a very thin “normative” model. First, there is mention of a deeper norm, but
the real assurance of the behavioral norm being observed internally (which is the starting point of
the model) seems to come from the strategic consideration that an electoral failure does not mean
that all is lost. Notice also that, in the model, there are no norms at the international level. Norms, to
the extent they matter, originate at the domestic level and remain firmly lodged there. There are no
emergent norms, nor are there original international norms. This is most obvious in the way “live and
let live” is taken into account. This deeper norm plays no role in the external relations of states.
Whereas (perhaps) the deeper norm explained the behavioral norm (i.e., peacefulness) in the
domestic realm, in the international realm, the behavioral norm is adhered to only because it fits
(and determines) “rational cost-benefit calculations.”67 The internal observance of a norm fosters an
expectation regarding external behavior in the perception of outsiders, which expectation (of
peacefulness) “lowers the relative benefit to be achieved from violence.” The model is really “tit-fortat” with “tit” being cooperative, or at least non-violent, because it is assumed to be a safe bet.
The structural model of democratic peace starts from the observation that decision-making
in democratic states plays itself out in a very different institutional context than in non-democracies.
The most significant difference is that in a non-democracy, the executive has to seek and mobilize
support from a broad swath of actors before it can embark on action: bureaucracies, the legislature,
interest groups, and, not in the least, the public. As a result, decision-making would be slow even if
64
Russett 2009, 21.
Maoz and Russett 1993, 625.
66
Mazo and Russett 1993, 625.
67
Maoz and Russett 1993, 625.
65
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not a single one of the different actors are in principle opposed to war. Due to the slow pace of
democratic decision-making, diplomats of democracies in an inter-democratic dispute tend to have
more time to settle the disputes their respective governments are engaged in before war breaks out.
In relations with non-democracies, on the other hand “the non-democracy imposes on the
democratic political system emergency conditions enabling the government to rally support rather
rapidly.”68
Bruce Russett, who (with Zeev Maoz) first proposed to tell the two models apart, has recently
remarked that the distinction between them is “somewhat arbitrary.”69 I would argue that the two
models are distinct indeed but only superficially so. The reason is that both assume the same model
of action and, as such, the same model of causation. But this remains implicit. What is lacking is an
explicit theory of (state) action, even if an implicit theory of action is doing all the work: it informs the
explanandum and it does the explaining. My argument is that in both models rational, conscious,
will-driven action of atomic agents is the cause of the democratic peace. Democracy causes to the
extent that it is an institutional setting which constrains (and enables) action as an outside force, i.e.,
by means of an external manipulation of the rational cost-benefit calculus. So do all the other
“independent variables”: wealth, growth, alliances, contiguity, and capability ratio. A democratic
agent is a rationally calculating agent operating in a democratic setting; a liberal agent, a rationally
calculating agent operating in a liberal setting. Admittedly, in the case of the institutional model,
Bueno de Mesquita (and associates) has made his model of action explicit, and labeled it (correctly)
rational choice.70 However, the normative model is premised no less on rational choice
considerations. Of it, a benevolent reading would disclose a different understanding of action and
causation to be operative in the domestic realm, but not in foreign policy. The democratic peace, in
other words, is complicit in the neo-neo-synthesis.71 There is no constructivist theory of the
democratic peace because there is no constructivist conceptualization of the phenomenon nor of its
causes; neither, then, of liberalism as its cause.
A cause is something that brings something else about, or that prevents something else from
coming about. The rational choice model of action as cause assumes action to be an efficient cause
only. Aristotle’s sculptor is an efficient cause. Aristotle mentioned material causes (the marble),
formal causes (the statue’s shape), and final causes (e.g., display of wealth or religious symbolism) as
well. A constructivist-causal analysis of the democratic peace would have to factor in these types of
68
Mazo and Russett 1993, 626.
Russett 2009, 20.
70
Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson and Smith, 1999.
71
Compare Waever 1996.
69
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causes too (if conceivable).72 In the social world, which is a world of humans, this means that one
adds to an interpretation of action as efficient cause an understanding (and theorization) of agency
as material, formal, and final cause. When Doyle explains that “liberals have indeed established a
separate peace – but only among themselves,”73 it would appear that, given sufficient imagination,
Aristotle’s four causes could be put to work and that liberalism could become a formal or telic cause.
The democratic peace would become a statue that we proudly behold, observe with curiosity, or spit
on in disgust. But in existing democratic peace research, there is no statue to behold. As argued in
the discussion of its explanandum, the democratic peace does not exist as an emergent or
autonomous entity. It exists only as an epiphenomenon of individual and uncoordinated (state)
action. Internationally, presumably, there is neither matter, nor form, nor a telos. Liberals did not
establish anything – rather something came about. The democratic peace, it appears, is an
consequence, but not one that was sought after, of rational action operating as an efficient cause.
Probably, Aristotle could not even have conceived of an efficient cause separate from the three other
forms of causes. He surely would not have considered it an explanation of anything. For Aristotle,
democratic peace research would have been meaningless.
I want to conclude this account of the debate on the democratic peace – of its explanandum
and its explanans – by arguing that the real debate concerning the democratic peace should be one
of social-theoretical conceptualization. The democratic peace is an observation in social science and,
therefore, its grounding lies in social theory. The most fundamental challenge in social theory is that
of theorizing agency. What is action? What does it mean to act? Consider the democratic peace.
Wars would not happen if no one acted. Without action, no war. Without action neither the absence
of war or diplomacy. Without action, no nothing. States cannot act. People can. But sometimes
people act as agents of states. And perhaps states, like people, can enact, or act out. Via the
(physical) agency of individual people, states can enact war, or peace for that matter. Different
theories of action, make for different theories, and different facts, of democratic peace. Social theory
should be the locus of the theoretical debate on democratic peace. Chapter 2 develops a sociological
theory of democratic peace on the basis of a theory of agency as the enactment (or performance) of
social practices. Section 3 of this chapter, its last section, answers the inevitable charge – i.e., “So
what?” – by inquiring into the politics of the democratic peace.
3. The politics of the democratic peace
72
73
Kratochwil 2008, 450-451 ; Onuf 2009, 188.
Doyle 1986, 1156.
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On its own terms, the democratic peace has been a story of unremitting scientific success. According
to sound Enlightenment reason, scientific progress ought to contribute to moral and societal
progress. According to this rule, in political science, the Baconian adage applies: “scientia propter
potentiam.” Of course, Enlightenment reason need not be sound. Opinions differ. The promise of the
Enlightenment, epitomized and driven by the promise of science, could well prove false.74 Bruce
Russett, for one, has turned his gaze inwards. He recognizes that scientific findings, when fed into the
real world of politics, have consequences that were neither foreseen, nor desired, by the scientific
community, let alone the individual scientist. The truth of the democratic peace having been invoked
as a post factum justification of the invasion of Iraq, Russett reports that he feels much like the
atomic scientists must have felt after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945: powerless and
betrayed because their scientific knowledge had been perverted for political purposes.75 And yet, if
the democratic peace is true, it should be spoken. “E pur si muove,” murmured Galileo. “And yet it
moves,” declares Russett.76 What’s more, from before Iraq the policy implications of the democratic
peace have always been part of the agenda, and part of the attraction of its scholarship. Implications
for policy were a selling chip. Note that Russett himself subtitled his 1993 book Principles for a PostCold War World. If the democratic peace is true indeed, shouldn’t we be embarking on a policy of
democratization? Of regime change? By force if need be? What does it mean to democratize? What
does it take? Can every state and people be democratized? Shouldn’t it be possible? Peace is at
stake. This is one dimension of the politics of the democratic peace.77
A second dimension concerns the so-called democratic or liberal wars: wars fought, or
violence committed, for reasons that only liberal actors would have. Just think of the plentiful
tradition of liberal imperialism in this respect.78 However, when traditional democratic peace
scholarship discusses the war-proneness of democracies in relation with non-democracies,
responsibility for the outbreak of war is rarely assigned to the democracies. Anarchy retains its
Hobbesian logic, and war accordingly ensues, because non-democracies cannot be trusted. The
autocracies are to blame, and if not they, then anarchy is. In no way are democracies. Historically,
critics maintain, this position is not tenable. The democratic peace is political, from this perspective,
because it carries out (wittingly) a biased research agenda. Violence that is specifically liberal or
democratic in origin is systematically ignored in the empirical analyses and left unaccounted for in
the theoretical explanations.
74
Horkheimer and Adorno 2002.
Russett 2005, 369.
76
Russett 1996.
77
For a concise but to-the-point discussion of this dimension, cf. de Wilde 2011.
78
Geis, Brock and Müller 2006; Howard 2008.
75
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Similarly, research into the democratic peace fails to theorize democracy adequately.
Because it consistently reasons from the inside out, democracy remains firmly lodged at the
domestic level. As a result, however, democratic peace scholarship fails to perceive, let alone
theorize, the lack of global democracy, the resurgence of intrastate violence, and the connection
between these two.79 Its “ontological conservatism” is empirically inadequate and politically
nefarious in the age of (distinctively capitalist) globalization, say some.
Notice that democratic peace scholarship cannot deal with any of these dimensions from
within its original design. Concerning the specifics of its implications for international security policy,
the democratic peace is clueless if it does not take recourse to theories of comparative
democratization.80 What’s more, on its own, the theory is not without danger because it holds the
promise of a solution where it cannot give any direction as to how to get from here to there. We
might as well opt for a quick fix and impose democracy by force; which is of course exactly what
happened even if no single scholar ever imagined it or even if all of them consistently opposed the
option from the start.81 The second dimension, for its part, largely undermines the democratic
peace’s normative attraction. Not only is the promise difficult to attain, its attainment could be less
promising than we are led on to believe. As a result, it cannot answer these charges of political bias
adequately without initiating a fundamental, and self-transforming, overhaul. The third dimension,
finally, imagines a world that traditional democratic peace simply cannot imagine. Exactly because it
cannot deal satisfactorily with any of these dimensions, calls to develop of a “critical theory of the
democratic peace”82 have recently been voiced.
These three dimension of the politics of the democratic peace are valid and challenging
observations. Yet none of them, except perhaps the third, are informed by the social-theoretical
considerations that entertained the previous section. But there is a fourth dimension which does. It is
concerned not so much with the politics of the democratic peace, as it is with the conception of
politics in the democratic peace. At the outset of this chapter, I stated that the democratic peace is
an “observation in political science.” Of modern political science, Jürgen Habermas has written that it
was established on “the model of the modern experimental sciences, having little more than its
name in common with the old politics.”83 The difference he notes is in part methodological and in
part substantive. Modern political science believes in the possibility of, and searches for, secure
79
Macmillan 2004.
As does, e.g., Russett 2005.
81
Russett 1993, 396. « The modelof ‘fight them, beat them, and make them democratic’ is irrevocably flawed
as a basis for contemporary action. »
82
Geis and Wagner 2010.
83
Habermas 1973, 41.
80
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knowledge of “the laws and compacts” that govern social life. Classical politics defined its capacity
restrictedly as a “prudential understanding of the situation.”84 In this chapter, I have hardly touched
upon methodology. Notice, though, that an evaluation of democratic peace research along classical
lines, and specifically its perversion in political practice, would not lay blame with the politicians that
pervert, but with the hubris of the scientist. It is not the specifics, or the substance, of their
knowledge that lends itself to perversion but its nature and the status that scholars assign to it. The
second difference that Habermas identifies concerns the definition of (the domain of) politics as a
field of action. Modern political science focuses upon decision-making by a governmental apparatus
(states or functional equivalents). Conceptually, The political is divorced from the cultural, the legal,
and the societal. To be sure, political decision-makers are theorized, and advised, to factor into their
decisions and, as such, into their actions, sentiments from “the public” and constraints from “the
law”, but the “public” and the “law” are seen to exist as separate entities. Applied to democratic
peace research, this means that politics is conceptualized as a set of policies that are decided upon
by foreign policy elites (cf. the first dimension), and this foreign policy elite is taken to stand in a
strategic relationship with its public, with other bureaucracies, with the law, and with the leaders of
other countries. Ultimately, politics, in existing democratic peace research, is about politicians
wanting to retain their office.85 Compare the classical conception of politics, which saw politics as
being about “the concrete collective life of the city, the customs, the habits and the passions of the
city.”86 Politics, classically conceived, was about the maintenance of the order of the polis. This
comprehensive conception of politics was lost in the eighteenth century, Habermas informs us, ever
since when “the newly emerging social sciences and the discipline of jurisprudence have drawn off
the waters of classical politics.”87
Habermas’ assessment is somewhat too radical if it concerns modern social science as such.
To be sure, the classical conception of politics is lost from contemporary political science, both
methodologically and substantively. Witness the democratic peace. However, traces of the classical
conception are still around in the broader social sciences. I refer, first, to Foucault’s tracing of the rise
of governmentality, which has been a source of methodological and substantive influence for a range
of scholars in the social sciences, also in international relations.88 I refer also to classical, earlytwentieth century sociology, which was centrally concerned with the problem of order in industrial
societies. The beauty of interpreting politics in light of classical sociology is that it brings out most
84
Habermas 1973, 42.
Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson and Smith 1999.
86
Viroli 1990, 156.
87
Habermas 1973, 41.
88
Foucault 1991 ; Leira 2009 ; Neumann and Sending 2010.
85
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explicitly that the problem of order becomes (reconstituted as) an experience in modernity. One
expects that classical politics under modern conditions make for a different set of dynamics than do
classical politics in antiquity, both on the level of observation and on that of action.
Now, if the democratic peace presents itself as a transcendence of the security dilemma, as
Thomas Risse suggests89 and thus as a solution to the problem of order,90 then it becomes plausible
to analyze it with the classical conception of politics in mind, and, accordingly, with the tools of
(classical) sociology. A sociological analysis will eventually assist the analysis of its politics, because it
will broaden our understanding of the reach of what its politics are about. Moreover, the need to
broaden this reach is not without empirical referent. Increasingly, politicians and activist-scholars,
not in the least in international law, are blending findings from the democratic peace with practical
designs for future world orders in the shape of a proposed “concert of democracies,” which would be
the “institutional embodiment and ratification of the ‘democratic peace’.”91 Ignorant of the socialtheoretic premises of democratic peace scholarship, and rightfully so, these people elevate the
democratic peace to a systemic phenomenon. Therefore, more than ever, understanding it requires
that we – scholars – theorize democratic peace in systemic terms. Both the object of inquiry, the
underlying conception of action and causation, and the implied conception of politics will alter in the
process. And this should be foregrounded, not remain implicit.
4. Conclusion
I started this chapter by stating that “the democratic peace is an observation in political science.” The
goal in the chapter was to draw out what the significance of this statement is. Perhaps it should be
summarized to mean that “the democratic peace is no observation in sociology.” Throughout, I have
implied that this is regretful. To a certain extent, feelings of regret are subjective. I do not think,
however, that, as a rule, sociology is superior to political science. Yet, in the case of the democratic
peace, my feelings of regret have substantive reasons. The democratic peace holds a particular
attraction (a) theoretically, because it promises to undo the dominance of political realism, and (b)
practically, because it promises the possibility of progressive politics in international relations. For
reasons that I have stated above, none of the promises can convincingly be maintained if the
democratic peace does not recast itself in a more sociological mould. This is the task of the next
chapter.
89
Cf. Risse 1995, xxx.
Rengger 2000, 112-126.
91
Ikenberry and Slaughter 2006. For a good discussion,see Clark 2009; Geis and Wagner 2010.
90
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