shh2 xoren_subjectivity Rosato-TheFlawedLogicofDemocraticPeaceTheory
Hello! I need help with an essay. I have already worked on the first part, but I need help with the rest. DPT and Democratization – 1 paragraph on DPT as understood in current academic/policy-making spheres (ie not Kant). – Critiques to DPT 1. the ″definitional issue″ –˃ already written, please don′t write this part. 2. the causal logic of DPT –˃ assess counter arguments for the structural/institutional logic and the normative/cultural logic. –˃please focus on someone who rejects the normative logic, as I have already done the structural/institutional part. 3. the realist argument provides a better explanation –˃please focus on Rosato 2003 – Work in Oren with his arguments as a build in for democratization: i) democratic peace doesn′t have anything to do with democracy itself, but rather attends to normative parameters. ii) said parameters change in time and together with the was the US forges itself through history. iii) the normative parameters change, but not necessarily in response to internal change, but instead it is very influenced by its foreign policy: “America’s identity has historically developed in ways that made political enemies appear subjectively further and friends subjectively closer to it” (Oren 1995, 151–53). – Democratization –˃ what it is and how it relates to DPT (400 words). – 1 paragraph conclusion on democratization PhD level Thanks a lot
Democracia, guerra y conflicto – Memo 2:
La teoría de la paz democrática
En el presente memo se desarrollará el concepto de la teoría de la paz democrática (en adelante DPT, por sus siglas en inglés) indicando también los argumentos en contra. Seguidamente, se intentará entender su aplicación desde otro punto de vista, el de la democratización de los estados.
Convencionalmente, al hablar de las causas de la paz y la guerra uno de los tópicos inevitables es la llamada “teoría de la paz democrática”, que deriva del libro Sobre la paz perpetua de Immanuel Kant (1795), quien propuso que las constituciones republicanas, el intercambio comercial (materializado en la ley cosmopolita) y un sistema de ley internacional entre repúblicas que siguen el rule of law —que por ende son interdependientes— podría entregar las bases para una paz sostenida (Oneal and Russett 1999, 1; Russett 2013, 95). Contemporáneamente la teoría de la paz democrática alude a que los estados democráticos rara vez incurren en una guerra entre ellos (Oren 1995, 148; Rosato 2003, 585). Hoy en día se trata de un campo bastante amplio tanto en Relaciones Internacionales como en Seguridad Internacional, donde se ha estudiado desde el punto de vista empírico, logrando que tal como famosamente indica Levy (1989, 88): “This absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations” y como anunciaron los editores de la revista International Security, la DPT se ha transformado en una opinión generalizada (“conventional wisdom”) (Editors’ Note 1994, 3).[footnoteRef:1] [1: Nótese que aquella nota editorial (Editors’ Note 1994, 1–4) lo que hizo fue abrir el debate sobre la DPT, y dar cuenta de argumentos a favor y en contra.]
Efectivamente existe bastante evidencia que apunta a que la paz democrática se puede testear desde el punto de vista empírico.[footnoteRef:2] Así, la DPT actual —avanzada entre otros, por el liberalista Michael Doyle— supone que una manera de explicar dos importantes regularidades en la política mundial es: (i) que los estados liberales tienden a la paz en sus relaciones entre sí y que (ii) éstos tienden a la guerra en sus relaciones con estados no-liberales (Doyle 2005, 463).[footnoteRef:3] [2: Ver, por ejemplo, Owen (1994), Oneal y Russett (1999) y Dafoe et al. (2013).] [3: Nótese que Doyle (2005, 463) no usa el término “democracias liberales”, tomando en consideración que no todas las democracias son iguales: “There is no reason at all for indirectly majoritarian governments to be peaceful toward other majoritarian governments. Clearly, a democracy of xenofobes or hyper-nationalists would externalize their preferences”. Por ello es que en ese artículo enfatiza los tres pilares de la DPT que ha postulado desde 1983: (1) la representación democrática republicana, (2) un compromiso ideológico con los Derechos Humanos, y (3) la interdependencia económica transnacional.
]
“Because non-liberal governments are in a state of aggression with their own people, their foreign relations become for liberal governments deeply suspect. In short, fellow liberals benefit from a presumption of amity; nonliberals suffer from a presumption of enmity” (Doyle 1986, 1161).
También existe la propuesta de Maoz y Russett (1993, 624), quienes aseguran que (i) los estados democráticos son tan propensos a la guerra como los estados no democráticos, y que (ii) en los últimos 200 años, las democracias raramente van a la guerra con otra democracias y que ellas “have virtually never fought one another in a full-scale international war”.[footnoteRef:4] El argumento es que algo en la composición interna de los estados democráticos previene que vayan a la guerra con otras democracias, a pesar de ser igual de propensos que estados no democráticos en ir a la guerra (Maoz and Russett 1993, 624). Considero que las definiciones de estados democráticos y estados liberales no es equivalente necesariamente. Pero coincido con Rosato (2003, 586) en que los defensores de la DPT —en su mayoría— han tendido a usar los términos de forma intercambiable, igualando su significado. [4: Estos segundos postulados son más cercanos a los de Gursozlu (2017, 213), en que (i) las democracias liberales rara vez pelean entre sí y que (ii) las democracias liberales son tan propensas como cualquier otro estado en sus relaciones con estados no democráticos.]
Ahora bien, una de las mayores complicaciones que ha suscitado la DPT es que ha sido reducida a un entendimiento limitado de las implicancias y se ha concebido simplemente como que las democracias no se atacan entre sí, lo que a la vez ha llevado a que, por ejemplo, la política exterior de Estados Unidos esté basada en que la mejor manera de asegurar su seguridad y construir una paz durable es apoyando el avance democrático en otros lugares (Oren 1995, 147; discurso de Bill Clinton en Owen 1994, 87). Y, como indica Gursozlu (2017, 213), esta forma de pensar ha llevado a intervenciones militares desastrosas (Layne 1994, 47) y a guerras democratizantes justificadas en base a que es una forma de construir una paz durable (Fiala 2010, 66).
Críticas
Sin embargo, existen tres grandes críticas a la DPT: (1) que la definición de una democracia es poco clara e inconsistente (la misma crítica se le hace a la definición de guerra); (2) que la lógica causal de la DPT está errada; (3) que el realismo ofrece una mejor explicación para la paz entre democracias. Los contraargumentos expresados en los puntos 2 y 3 tienden a estar entrelazados.
(1) El “definitional issue” se basa en que no hay estándares claros o únicos bajo los cuales se pueda catalogar qué país es una democracia y qué país no lo es (Owen 1994, 87–88; Spiro en Russett et al. 1995, 179–80).[footnoteRef:5] Se trata de un asunto que enfrentan todos los conceptos que engloban demasiadas variables y que llevan mucho tiempo discutiéndose, como qué países son liberales e incluso, qué exactamente es una guerra. ¿Cómo podemos comenzar a responder preguntas básicas sobre la paz democrática si ni si quiera podemos convenir en qué es una democracia? [5: El discurso de Bill Clinton puede ser encontrado en:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=50409#axzz1ss6W8zdb]
Como bien explica John Owen (1994, 87–88) —quien defiende la existencia de paz entre democracias—, uno de los flancos que hacen que la DPT sea vulnerable a las críticas es la cuestión de la definición están en dos ambiguedades inmanentes: ¿cómo se define democracia? y ¿qué puede ser considerado una guerra? En la vereda del frente está el cuestionamiento de David Spiro (1994, 55) quien desafía la teoría de la paz democrática argumentando que en ella se adoptan selectivamente las definiciones de variables clave, con el fin de que su análisis de datos produzca los resultados que buscan tener. Eso es sabido por autores a favor de la DPT, quienes admiten que “[t]he slipperiness of these terms provides a temptation to tautology: to define them so as to safeguard the proposition”
(Owen 1994, 87–88)
. Ahora bien, ese argumento es válido para ambos lados: ni quienes están a favor ni quienes están en contra la DPT tienen una definición y criterios únicos para llegar a sus resultados.
Aun así, no se trata sólo del aspecto de su definición, sino que la crítica va más allá y provoca inconsistencias a la hora de medir el nivel de democracia. Tal como indica Gunitsky (2015), existen diversos índices que dicen medir el nivel de democracia de un país, los más populares son Polity IV y Freedom House. El problema es que sus resultados para un mismo país en un mismo año son muy distintos—ya que las mediciones no miden los mismos asuntos—. Polity IV mide la competitividad de la participación política, la competitividad del reclutamiento del ejecutivo, la apertura del reclutamiento del ejecutivo, y las restricciones al jefe ejecutivo, lo que lleva a resultados que van desde el -10 (fuertemente autocrático) al 10 (fuertemente democrático). Mientras, Freedom House (2020) —una entidad mucho más activista— lo que hace es “defender los derechos humanos y promover el cambio democrático” enfocándose en los derechos políticos y las libertades civiles, analizando cada caso en una escala del 1 (más libre) al 7 (menos libre). Lo anterior hace que las mediciones obviamente sean completamente diferentes, ya que al tomar distintos parámetros es evidente que llegan a resultados diferentes. ¿Cómo se podría solucionar esto? Lo lógico, me parece, es que tanto quienes defienden como quienes niegan la DPT deben llegar a una definición y medición común, ya que, así las cosas, quienes se oponen a una teoría de la paz democrática pueden descartar desde el principio cualquier resultado de un defensor de la DPT a causa de una divergencia en las definiciones o los parámetros. De todas formas, es poco probable que aquello suceda.
(2) La lógica causal de la DPT puede ser institucional (estructural) y/o normativa (cultural) (Maoz and Russett 1993, 624).[footnoteRef:6] El primero se enfoca en los aspectos institucionales que son característicos de los regímenes democráticos, como los checks and balances (la estructura política doméstica) o los efectos restrictivos de la opinión pública (Layne 1994, 6; Oren 1995, 149). El segundo, en tanto, destaca el respeto normativo que las democracias tienen hacia otras democracias —en el entendido de que habría un “shared commitment to the peaceful adjudication of political disputes”— lo que explicaría la lógica causal de los estados democráticos (Layne 1994, 6; Oren 1995, 149). [6: O puede incorporar ambas, ya que no son excluyentes (Maoz and Russett 1993, 626).]
Both norms and institutions may contribute to the phenomenon of peace between democracies; they are somewhat complementary and overlapping. But they are also in some degree distinctive and competing explanations, allowing us to look for greater impact of one or another in various contexts. (Russett 1993, 41)
Christopher Lane —desde un enfoque neorealista— es un crítico de ambas lógicas. Él asegura que los “institutional constraints” no explican la paz democrática (Layne 1994, 12). De acuerdo al enfoque institucional que hace hincapié en los checks and balances, el argumento se basa en que ya que en los estados democráticos los ejecutivos responden a sus votantes, tienen competencia política institucionalizada, y los tomadores de decisiones están repartidos en diversas instituciones o personas, esos estados tienen altas limitaciones institucionales y por ende, es menos probable que decidan a la guerra (Layne 1994, 9).
Este argumento está atado a otro enfoque institucional—el que las democracias son reacias a ir a la guerra porque tienen que responder a sus ciudadanos (Layne 1994, 8). Layne presenta dos buenos contraargumentos. El primero apunta a que si la opinión pública realmente tuviera el efecto que se le asocia, las democracias serían pacíficas con todos los estados —independiente de si el segundo estado es democrático— (Layne 1994, 12). El segundo, Layne, citando a Morgan y Schwebach dice que los checks and balances institucionales no dicen nada sobre cuán proclives son las democracias en ir a la guerra, ya que se enfoca en constreñimientos de la estructura política doméstica de los estados, que aunque normalmente son asociados a las democracias, no son exclusivos a ellas (Morgan y Schwebach en Layne 1994, 12). Así, descarta desde el principio el argumento institucional.
Por otro lado, el argumento normativo es examinado y rechazado por Rosato,
(3) La última crítica es la que dice que el realismo tiene una mejor explicación de por qué los países no van a la guerra que la DPT.
Far from being woolly-headed idealism, liberalism is a theory of how the
United States can best enhance its security. If political liberalism’s contention
that democracies do not fight one another is correct, then the more
democracies there are, the more peaceful the world will be. If political
liberalism is right in postulating that non-democratic states tend to be
troublemakers, the United States has an interest in seeing such regimes
replaced by democratic governments. And if political liberalism and
commercial liberalism accurately predict that democracy and economic
interdependence have pacifying effects on states’ foreign policies, the
United States can buy security by helping potential great-power rivals like
Russia and China to transform themselves into free-market democracies. (Layne 2001, 800)
The other posits that it is democratic norms and culture-a shared commitment to the peaceful adjudication of political disputes-that accounts for the absence of war between democratic states. As I demonstrate, the institu- tional-constraints argument fails to provide a compelling explanation for the absence of war between democracies. Thus, democratic peace theory’s ex- planatory power rests on the persuasiveness of the contention that demo- cratic norms and culture explain why, although democratic states fight with non-democracies, they do not go to war with each other.(Layne 1994, 6)
Uno de los exponentes actuales de las crítica (2 y 3) es Ido Oren (1995, 148), quien afirma que “[t]he democratic character of foreign countries depends on the peacefulness of their foreign policies, no less than their foreign policies toward the United States depend on their democratic character”. Él sostiene que los estudios empíricos sobre la paz democrática son subjetivos y que no hay consenso respecto a cuál es la explicación para aquellos resultados.[footnoteRef:7] Ahora bien, es fundamental remarcar que lo que Oren (1995, 149) busca es desafiar la afirmación de la paz democrática empírica, sin importar su explicación subyacente. Para ello utiliza tres argumentos que van mucho más allá de las críticas de los 90 e implican que todo el concepto de democracia gira en torno a Estados Unidos: (i) la democracia debe ser “normalizada”, entendiéndose que la paz democrática en realidad no tiene que ver con la democracia en sí, sino que atiende a parámetros normativos—y éstos son establecidos en torno a Estados Unidos; (ii) dichos parámetros normativos cambian en el tiempo, junto con la forma en que Estados Unidos se va forjando a través de la historia; y (iii) los parámetros normativos cambian, pero no necesariamente en respuesta a cambios internos, sino que está muy influenciado por la política exterior: “America’s identity has historically developed in ways that made political enemies appear subjectively further and friends subjectively closer to it” (Oren 1995, 151–53). [7: Oren (1995, 149) indica que hay dos formas de explicar los resultados sobre la paz democrática: el argumento normativo y el institucional, explicados anteriormente. Lo importante de esto es que el argumento de Oren no depende de estas líneas explicativas. ]
DPT como justificación para “democratizar”
More recently, this idea about the stabilizing and peace-making power of democracy has influenced neo-conservative ideas in U.S. foreign policy, where the hope is that peace will occur as democracy is spread.
The idea that peace is founded in a just political order is connected to the ideas of the just war tradition. Defenders of the just war tradition—from Augustine to Walzer—argue that occasionally it is necessary to make war in order to establish such a tranquil and just social condition. More recent defenders of the just war idea have argued that interventionist wars should be fought in order to create stable conditions by defending human rights (Fiala 2018)
Aun así, concuerdo con Gursozlu (2017, 217) en que es distinto defender la promoción de la democracia y anunciar una cruzada a favor de las democracias, a la hora de impulsar la paz que se asocia a las democracias.
In terms of processes operating in the present interstate system, this result suggests that to the extent that norms and institutions take time to de- velop, newly created democracies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere may still experience some significant amount of interstate conflict while their political systems are in the process of transition to democracy. But the process of global democratization may carry long-term prospects of international stability that arises not out of the missile launchers but out of (Maoz and Russett 1993, 636)
popular control of governments and of norms of peaceful resolution of political conflicts associated with democratic political systems. It is possible that major features of the international system can be socially constructed from the bottom up; that is, norms and rules of behavior internation- ally become extensions of the norms and rules of domestic political behavior. When many states are ruled autocratically (as they were at the Peace of Westphalia and throughout virtually all of history since then), playing by the rules of autocracy may be the only way for any state-democracy or not-to survive in Hobbesian international anarchy. But if enough states become stably democratic-as may be happening in the 1990s-then the possibility emerges of reconstructing the norms and rules of the interna- tional system to reflect those of democracies. A system created by autocracies may be recreated by a critical mass of democratic states. (Maoz and Russett 1993, 637)
A second challenge is that the lack of wars among democracies, even if true, is not surprising. Wars are so rare that random chance could account for the democratic peace, much as it could account for an absence of war among, say, states whose names begin with the letter K.4 A third critique points out that the democratic peace lacks a convincing theoretical foundation. No one is sure why democracies do not fight one another and yet do fight non-democracies.5 That we do not really know the causal mechanism behind the democratic peace means we cannot be certain the peace is genuine. It may be an epiphenomenon, a by-product of other causal variables such as those suggested by realist theories of inter- national politics.6
(Owen 1994, 87–88)
Trabajos citados
Dafoe, Allan, John R. Oneal, and Bruce Russett. 2013. “The Democratic Peace: Weighing the Evidence and Cautious Inference.” International Studies Quarterly 57(1): 201–14.
Doyle, Michael W. 2005. “Three Pillars of the Liberal Peace.” The American Political Science Review 99(3): 463–66.
“Editors’ Note.” 1994. International Security 19(2): 3–4.
Fiala, Andrew. 2010. Public War, Private Conscience: The Ethics of Political Violence. London: Continuum.
———. 2018. “Pacifism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/pacifism/.
Freedom House. 2020. “Our Issues.” https://freedomhouse.org/issues (February 26, 2020).
Gunitsky, Seva. 2015. “How Do You Measure ‘Democracy’?” The Washington Post (Monkey Cage). https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/06/23/how-do-you-measure-democracy/.
Gursozlu, Fuat. 2017. “The Triumph of the Liberal Democratic Peace and the Dangers of Its Success.” In The Routledge Handbook of Pacifism and Nonviolence, ed. Andrew Fiala. New York: Routledge, 213–24.
Layne, Christopher. 1994. “Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace.” International Security 19(2): 5–49.
———. 2001. “Shell Games, Shallow Gains, and the Democratic Peace.” The International History Review 23(4): 799–813.
Levy, Jack. 1989. “Domestic Politics and War.” In The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars, eds. Robert Rotberg and Theodore Rabb. New York: Cambridge University Press, 79–100.
Maoz, Zeev, and Bruce Russett. 1993. “Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946-1986.” The American Political Science Review (1927) 87(3): 624.
Oneal, John R., and Bruce Russett. 1999. “The Kantian Peace: The Pacific Benefits of Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations, 1885-1992.” World Politics 52(1): 1–37.
Oren, Ido. 1995. “The Subjectivity of the ‘Democratic’ Peace: Changing U.S. Perceptions of Imperial Germany.” International Security 20(2): 147.
Owen, John M. 1994. “How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace.” International Security 19(2): 87–125.
Rosato, Sebastian. 2003. “The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory.” The American Political Science Review 97(4): 585–602. http://www.jstor.org.pucdechile.idm.oclc.org/stable/3593025.
Russett, Bruce. 1993. Grasping the Democratic Peace. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
———. 2013. “Liberalism.” In International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, eds. Timothy Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 94–113.
Russett, Bruce, Christopher Layne, David E. Spiro, and Michael W. Doyle. 1995. “The Democratic Peace.” International Security 19(4): 164–84.
Spiro, David E. 1994. “The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace.” International Security 19(2): 50–86.
The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace: Changing U.S. Perceptions of Imperial
Germany
Author(s): Ido Oren
Source: International Security, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall, 1995), pp. 147-184
Published by: The MIT Press
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The Subjectivity of the Ido Oren
“Democratic” Peace
Changing U.S. Perceptions of
Imperial Germany
Few claims about in-
ternational relations are as widely accepted as the claim of a democratic peace.
Many scholars are convinced, along with President Clinton, that “democracies
rarely wage war on one another.”‘ This proposition provides an important
rationale for promoting “democratization” as a pillar of American foreign
policy: “ultimately the best strategy to insure our security and to build a
durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere.”2
However, the search for a democratic peace, scientific though it may be, is
not value-free. I argue that the democratic peace claim is not about democracies
per se as much as it is about countries that are “America-like” or of “our kind.”
The apparently objective coding rules by which democracy is defined in fact
represent current American values.
The democratic peace claim is ahistorical; it overlooks the fact that these
values have changed over time. In no small part, this change has been
influenced by changing international political realities. The values embodied
in the current definition of democracy were historically shaped by the need to
distance America from its adversaries. They are products, more than determi-
nants, of America’s past foreign political relations. The reason we do not fight
“our kind” is not that “likeness” has a great effect on war propensity, but rather
that we from time to time subtly redefine our kind to keep our self-image
consistent with our friends’ attributes and inconsistent with those of our ad-
versaries.
Ido Oren is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. He is currently an
SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Fellow on Peace and Security in a Changing World.
I thank the following individuals (some of whom disagreed with my argument) for helpful counsel:
William Dixon, Geoff Eley, Scott Gates, Jeff Legro, Rhona Leibel, Yair Magen, John Mearsheimer,
Andy Moravcsik, Dick Price, Diana Richards, Bruce Russett, Marc Trachtenberg, Stephen Van
Evera, Bill Wohlforth, Amy Zegart, two anonymous referees, and especially Raymond Duvall and
James Farr. Ethan Cherin and Luigi Cocci extended excellent research assistance.
1. William Clinton, Confronting the Challenges of a Broader World (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department
of State, 1993).
2. President Clinton’s State of the Union Message, January 1994, quoted in John M. Owen, “How
Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace,” International Security, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 1994), p. 87.
International Security, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall 1995), pp. 147-184
? 1995 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
147
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International Security 20:2 | 148
In 1917 President Wilson denounced German autocracy, and declared war
on Germany to “make the world safe for democracy.” Wilson’s legacy is
embraced by the present proponents of the democratic peace theory.3 I show,
however, that as a political scientist Wilson viewed Germany not as an autoc-
racy, but as a most advanced constitutional state, and that he admired Prussia’s
statism, administration, and its unequal suffrage. In the 1890s Wilson’s political
values were different from those currently associated with “democracy,” and
Germany as he perceived it was significantly more “normal” by his standards
at the time than it appears by present norms. Only after U.S.-German political
rivalry developed did Wilson begin to differentiate a democratic America from
an autocratic Germany. Indeed, America’s very self-portrayal as a democracy
and the norms by which it defines democracy were in part shaped by the
conflict with Imperial Germany These norms, I argue, came to be selected
because the difference between America’s political system and its adversary’s
was greatest when measured against them.
In the following section I criticize the democratic peace literature and elabo-
rate my argument. Then, I reconstruct the political theories and perceptions of
Germany held by two prominent political scientists of the late nineteenth
century: Woodrow Wilson, later U.S. president, and John Burgess, founder of
the first graduate program in political science in the United States. I conclude
with the theoretical and policy implications of the argument, especially that
“democratization” provides but a frail foundation for U.S. security policy The
democratic character of foreign countries depends on the peacefulness of their
foreign policies, no less than their foreign policies toward the United States
depend on their democratic character.
The Appearance of a Democratic Peace
A remarkable finding emerged from recent empirical research in international
relations: democracies do not wage war on one another.4 In these studies,
3. For example, the motto of chapter 1 in Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles
for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), is excerpted from Wilson’s
1917 war message to Congress.
4. Key studies include: Michael Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science
Reviezv, Vol. 80, No. 4 (December 1986), pp. 1151-1169; Zeev Maoz and Nasrin Abdulali, “Regime
Types and International Conflict, 1815-1976,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 33, No. 1 (March
1989), pp. 3-35; T. Clifton Morgan and Valerie L. Schwebach, “Take Two Democracies and Call Me
in the Morning: A Prescription for Peace?” International Interactions, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1992), pp. 305-
320; William Dixon, “Democracy and the Settlement of International Conflict,” American Political
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The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 149
polities are coded on a scale that typically takes competitiveness and fairness
of electoral processes, as well as constraints on the freedom of executive action,
as the defining empirical features of democracy.5 It is then shown statistically
that, controlling for other variables, the likelihood of war between democratic
countries is significantly smaller than between non-democracies or between
democracies and non-democracies.
There is no consensus on explaining this finding. Two lines of explanation
have emerged: one highlights the normative respect that democracies harbor
toward each other,6 while the other focuses on institutional features charac-
teristic of democratic regimes.7 The differences between these two strands
notwithstanding, their proponents use essentially identical rules for coding
regimes.8 I question the objectivity and trans-historical validity of these coding
rules, and hence my argument does not discriminate between the two expla-
nations. It is the empirical claim of a democratic peace that I challenge, what-
ever its explanation.
Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 1 (March 1994), pp. 14-32; Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, “Normative
and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946-1986,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 87,
No. 3 (September 1993), pp. 624-638; and Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace. The recent studies
by Russett and his collaborators are indicative of the high methodological sophistication attained
by the literature. The technical quality of the statistical studies is not challenged here.
5. These features are central to Ted Robert Gurr’s coding scheme, which is the most widely used
in studies of the democratic peace. See Ted R. Gurr (Principal Investigator), Polity II: Political
Structures and Regime Change, 1800-1986 (Codebook) (Ann Arbor: ICPSR No. 9263, 1990). Gurr’s data
are used, for example, by Dixon, Maoz and Abdulali, and Maoz and Russett (see fn. 4). Other
researchers employ coding schemes that assign greater weight to indicators of civic, political, and
economic freedom (e.g., Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” p. 1164). But despite the lack of
definitional uniformity, the assignment of countries to the democratic/liberal or to the auto-
cratic/illiberal ends of the continuum must be consistent across the various studies or else the
consensus on the robustness of the democratic peace finding would not have been as strong as
it is.
6. See, e.g., Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics”; Dixon, “Democracy and the Settlement of
International Conflict;” Maoz and Russett, “Normative and Structural Causes of the Democratic
Peace.” For a helpful review of the theoretical debate see T. Clifton Morgan, “Democracy and War:
Reflections on the Literature,” International Interactions, Vol. 18, No. 3 (1993), pp. 197-203.
7. See, e.g., Morgan and Schwebach, “Take Two Democracies and Call Me in the Morning.” Much
of the work on the structural-institutional explanation of the democratic peace is formal-deductive,
most notably: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman, War and Reason: Domestic and Interna-
tional Imperatives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), chap. 5; David Lake, “Powerful
Pacifists: Democratic States and War,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 86, No. 1 (March 1992),
pp. 24-37. These formal studies are imaginative, and their normative content-residing in the
axiomatic assumptions-is less opaque than in the verbal explanations. Still, to verify their impli-
cations the formal studies rely on the same data used by the purely statistical studies.
8. For example, Gurr’s Polity data are employed both by Morgan and Schwebach, “Take Two
Democracies and Call Me in the Morning,” and by Maoz and Russett, “Normative and Structural
Causes of the Democratic Peace,” proponents of the structural-institutional and of the normative
arguments respectively.
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International Security 20:2 | 150
CRITIQUE
The appearance of a democratic “zone of peace” is the product of three inter-
related biases. First, the scientific claim of peace among democracies, let alone
the claim’s articulation by policy makers, is not value-free. This is hinted by
the fact that in all studies America receives virtually perfect scores on the
democracy scale.9 America is the norm against which other polities are meas-
ured. American scholars are busier searching for a democratic peace rather
than, say, a Moslem peace not least because democracy enjoys strong normative
approval in present-day America. Furthermore, the selection of the empirical
criteria by which this abstract concept is described-primarily fair electoral
processes and executive responsibility-is consistent with the dominant image
of democracy in current American culture.
The second bias of the democratic peace literature is betrayed by the fact that
America’s perfect democracy scores are applied to its past as much as to its
present.10 Current American values are projected backward and other polities,
past and present, are ahistorically compared to the present American ideal.
Considerable historical experience suggesting that political norms are elastic
over time is ignored.11 Thus, the tastes of present researchers, disguised as
impartial coding rules, are conflated with the rather different tastes of past (and
arguably of future) actors.12
Third, the studies of the democratic peace not only disguise elastic values as
fixed coding rules; they risk mistaking the cause of these values for their effect.
In postulating “regime type” as an independent variable, they rule out a priori
9. In Gurr’s Polity II data set, for example, the United States receives a perfect score on the
democracy scale and the lowest score on the autocracy scale. See Gurr, Polity II. Interestingly, on
an alternative scale of democracy constructed by a Finnish author (not used in democratic peace
studies), it is Finland that scores the highest, far higher than the United States. See Tatu Vanhanen,
The Process of Democratization: A Comparative Study of 147 States (New York: Crane Russak, 1990). I
thank Chris Lindborg for calling my attention to the book.
10. In Doyle’s data set the United States (north of the Mason-Dixon line) is one of only two
countries that are classified as “liberal regimes” continuously from the eighteenth century (the
other is Switzerland). In Gurr’s Polity II data set the United States is the only great power that
consistently receives perfect democracy scores for the pre-World War I period. See Doyle, “Liber-
alism and World Politics,” p. 1164; Gurr, Polity II.
11. Terrence Ball, James Farr, and Russell Hanson, eds., Political Innovation and Conceptual Change
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The essays in that volume document how both the
empirical meanings and the moral signs attached to concepts such as democracy, the state, and
representation have changed in time.
12. I fully share John Owen’s belief that we must examine how actors “coded” each other at the
time. Such historical awareness makes his analysis richer and more nuanced than the statistical
ones. But my critique is more radical than Owen’s in emphasizing the historical change of the
actors’ perception of themselves (which Owen assumes constant). See Owen, “How Liberalism
Produces a Democratic Peace.”
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The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 151
the possibility that democratic norms are the products, as much the determi-
nants, of America’s past foreign relations.
THE ARGUMENT
Following these three critiques, my argument is in three steps concerning the
“normalizing,” historicizing, and endogenizing of the concept of democracy
First, I argue, “democracy” must be “normalized.” The democratic peace
proposition is not about democracy per se; rather, it should be understood as a
special case of an argument about peace among polities that are similar relative
to some normative benchmarks. What is special about the benchmarks repre-
sented by the coding rules of “democracy” is that they are American. They
represent “our kind.”
Second, I contend that “our kind” changes over time. Both the normative
and empirical content attached to “democracy” by American elites changed
notably over the past two centuries. In the nineteenth century, democracy was
associated with socialism more than with liberalism. It was understood as the
rule of a particular class, the working demos. Democracy was thus deplored by
most American intellectuals, who feared that the untamed rule of mass majori-
ties would lead to tyranny and subvert individual liberty.13 Therefore, in the
nineteenth century American elites were reluctant to identify America as a
democracy, and instead associated America with republicanism, constitution-
alism, liberty, and even Teutonism. It was only around the turn of the century
that the moral sign of democracy was reversed. The reversal was facilitated by
a re-conceptualization that cleansed democracy of its class connotation. By
marrying it to the Prussian science of administration and thus insulating wide
areas of decision making from the immature masses, democracy was made safe
for the world before the world could be made safe for democracy.14 Indeed,
making democracy safe was precisely the project in which the statist political
science of Woodrow Wilson and his generation was engaged in the 1890s. Still,
13. Russell Hanson, “Democracy,” in Ball, Farr, and Hanson, Political Innovation and Conceptual
Change, pp. 68-89; Charles S. Maier, “Democracy Since the French Revolution,” in John Dunn,
Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 508 BC to AD 1993 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992),
pp. 125-154; James Farr, “From Modern Republic to Administrative State: American Political
Science in the Nineteenth Century,” in David Easton, John Gunnell, and Michael Stein, Regime and
Discipline: Democracy and the Development of Political Science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1995), pp. 131-168. A similar sentiment was expressed earlier by the Prussian philosopher
Immanuel Kant, whose legacy is currently invoked by proponents of the democratic peace:
“Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general
will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ.” See Kant, Perpetual Peace (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 15. Emphasis original.
14. Charles Maier, “Democracy Since the French Revolution,” pp. 126 and 140.
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the New York Times continued to contrast authoritarianism against “republic”
or “constitutional government” (read: America) until 1917; only thereafter did
“democracy” become America’s chief self-portrayal.15
“Democracy” remains a moving target. Today the association of democracy
with a set of classless electoral practices seems to dominate American culture-
and, by extension, the scientific coding rules-but this image is not uncon-
tested. It is challenged by the successors of “Students for a Democratic Society”
and the New Left who wish to re-associate democracy with class, advocating
greater participation of the demos.16 Equally critical, if less radical, are political
economists fearful of the atrophy of democracy into “demosclerosis” due to
the malignant effect of “special interests.” 17 And critics on the right wish to
emancipate the people from “big government,” i.e., the very administrative
bureaucracy erected in order to make democracy safe for the world. Historical
experience cannot tell us which challenge to the present vision of democracy
will succeed, but from it we can draw two more modest lessons: that the
present vision is not permanent-the future may bring different under-
standings of democracy or even a renewed disapproval of the concept-and
that the future direction of “democracy” (or “our kind”) will not be inde-
pendent of the course of America’s foreign relations, the third step of my
argument.
The process by which the definition of “our kind” changes in time is not
entirely an internal one. To a considerable degree it is influenced by foreign
affairs. America’s identity has historically developed in ways that made politi-
cal enemies appear subjectively further and friends subjectively closer to it. The
estrangement of democracy from the demos can be better understood if we
recognize that many of America’s enemies in the twentieth century identified
themselves as “people’s democracies.” By the same token, the reason why after
World War I “constitutionalism” has become less central to America’s self-
definition must be related to the fact that Imperial Germany was widely
15. See Ithiel de Sola Pool with Harold D. Lasswell and Daniel Lerner, Symbols of Democracy
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1952), p. 27.
16. See Hanson, “Democracy,” pp. 83-84.
17. See Maier, “Democracy Since the French Revolution,” p. 147. For a forceful articulation of this
critique see Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social
Rigidities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Interestingly, the “Asian tigers” appear to be
Olson’s normative model in that book. For an indication of Olson’s influence outside academia see
Peter Passell, “Democracy’s Hardened Arteries and Washington’s Problems,” New York Times, June
2, 1994, p. C2. The term “demosclerosis” is from the latter article.
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regarded as an advanced constitutional state. America’s Aryan and Teutonic
identities were purged for the same reason.18
Current American social science is not insulated from this process. Polities
have numerous objective dimensions by which they can be measured. The
dimensions captured by the current empirical measures of democracy came to
be selected through a subtle historical process whereby objective dimensions
on which America resembled its enemies were eliminated, whereas those on
which America differed the most from its enemies became privileged. Thus,
the coding rules defining democracy are better understood as a time-bound
product of America’s historical international circumstances than as the timeless
exogenous force that they are presumed to be.
THE CHANGING “CODING” OF IMPERIAL GERMANY
The contrast between the present and past “coding” of Imperial Germany by
American political scientists provides a case in point. Examination of Polity II
scores for the pre-1914 period shows that England and France are ranked close
behind the United States (i.e., the norm) on the democracy scale, whereas
Imperial Germany is significantly behind them, and Austria-Hungary and
Russia are even further behind. Alas, the predecessors of today’s coders, the
political scientists of 100 years ago, subscribed to a different concept of the
“good state.” To them, Imperial Germany was a member of a select group of
states-modern, constitutional, administrative, cohesive nation-states-that
were politically the most developed on earth. The difference in political devel-
opment between this select group (whose chief members included the United
States, France, Germany, and England) and the rest of humanity was perceived
as far greater than the differences among members of the group themselves.
Certainly, members of this group, Germany included, were considered superior
in their political development to countries such as Greece, Italy, Argentina, and
Chile that are listed by Michael Doyle as members of the liberal club for the
pre-World War I period.19 Within the group of “modern constitutional states,”
Germany was not necessarily the farthest from the ideal. John Burgess’s belief
in the superiority of the German polity and culture was fairly close to the views
of ardent German nationalists such as Treitschke and Droysen. And Woodrow
Wilson’s more Anglophile disposition did not exclude Germany from the small
18. On the search for America’s Aryan and Teutonic heritage by nineteenth century intellectuals,
see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1991), chap. 3.
19. Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” p. 1164.
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International Security 20:2 | 154
circle of the most modern nations, nor did it preclude high regard for important
features of the German system. To Wilson circa 1890, for example, the Prussian
administrative model was superior to the French one (not to mention Anglo-
American administrative impotency); the Prussian constitutional state was
preferable to the immature democracy of France; and Prussian local govern-
ment was the shining model of “self-government” not despite but partly because
of its three-class voting system. If any West European country deviated from
Wilson’s norms it was France, not Germany.
The “re-coding” of Imperial Germany cannot be attributed to the discovery
of new facts regarding the nature of its political system. The political scientists
of the late nineteenth century knew the facts full well since most of them
trained in Germany, and they all read German. The disagreement between the
current coders and their predecessors is rather about the selection of the facts.
Imperial Germany, like any polity, was a complex multidimensional creature.
What changed over time was not the objective creature as much as the dimen-
sions by which it came to be defined. The selection of such defining dimensions
is a subjective, normative exercise, and it fundamentally affects the classifica-
tion of the creature relative to others: if one selects “constitutionalism,” “rule
of law,” or “federalism,” Imperial Germany appears “normal” relative to Amer-
ica; select “efficient administration,” “progressive social legislation,” or “aca-
demic freedom,” and it becomes the norm; set the norm to Prussia and
“one-person, one vote,” and Germany becomes “abnormal” (although not so
different from the United States if the latter’s disfranchised black population
is properly accounted for). Social scientists must recognize that their coding
rules constitute such summary measurement norms, and that norm selection is
not unaffected by the scientist’s historical context.
The present coding of regime types in general, and of the Imperial German
regime in particular, cannot be understood outside the context of the history
of German-American political relations. Whereas in the 1870s and 1880s friend-
ship between the United States of America and “the United States of Germany”
was taken as axiomatic, around the turn of the century diplomatic tensions
began to mount as both nations were simultaneously emerging on the global
imperial scene (the focal points that triggered the tension included Samoa, the
Philippines, and Venezuela).20 The rising tension brought about a gradual
20. See Manfred Jonas, The United States and Germany: A Diplomatic History (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1984).
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The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 155
erosion of Germany’s positive image in America.21 America’s entry into the
war in 1917 led to a more radical change in its image of Germany, including a
re-characterization of the German political system. It was then that the sharp
dichotomy between “autocratic” Germany and democratic America was born.
Colleges across the country hastily introduced patriotic “War Issues” courses
whose subject matter “presented itself as a clear-cut contest between the forces
of light and the forces of darkness.”22 Not only did American social scientists
bring war propaganda into their classrooms, some of them also participated in
the administration’s propaganda effort abroad.23 Those who dared to take issue
with the anti-German hysteria risked their jobs and professional reputation.
For example, the chairman of the University of Minnesota’s department of
political science, William Schaper, was summarily dismissed by the university’s
regents for insisting that the blame for the war did not rest wholly upon
Germany.24 John Burgess, the father of the discipline of political science in
America, is virtually forgotten today in part because of his unrelenting pro-
Germanism. 25
21. In the prewar years the stellar reputation of German scholarship began sagging, and anti-
German books began to supplant the more sympathetic literature of years past. See Konrad H.
Jarausch, “Huns, Krauts, or Good Germans? The German Image in America, 1880-1980,” in James
F. Harris, German-American Interrelations: Heritage and Challenge (Tiibingen: Tiibingen University
Press, 1985), pp. 146-149; Frank Trommler, “Inventing the Enemy: German-American Cultural
Relations, 1900-17,” in Hans-Jurgen Schr6der, Confrontation and Cooperation: Germany and the United
States in the Era of World War I, 1900-1924 (Providence: Berg Publishers, 1993), pp. 99-126.
22. David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1980), pp. 53-59; quotation, p. 58. The “War Issues” courses evolved after the
war into the “Contemporary Civilization” curricula. See “Columbia to Celebrate 75 Years of Great
Books,” Nezv York Times, November 16, 1994, p. B9. For a contemporary condemnation of the
hysterical “coalescence of the intellectual classes in support of the military programme” see
Randolph Bourne, “The War and the Intellectuals,” The Seven Arts, Vol. 2 (1917), pp. 133-136,
reprinted in David F. Trask, World War I at Home (New York: Wiley, 1970), pp. 73-80.
23. For example, University of Chicago political scientist Charles Merriam served as chief Ameri-
can “publicist” in Italy. See Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, p. 454. On the role of leading
historians in the propaganda effort at home and abroad, see George T. Blakey, Historians on the
Homefront: American Propagandists For the Great War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970).
See also Jarausch, “Huns, Krauts, or Good Germans?” p. 150.
24. Charles McLaughlin, A Short History of the Department of Political Science (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota, 1977). At the University of Minnesota, recording machines were placed in
classrooms, and the desks of allegedly unpatriotic professors were rifled at night. See Robert
Morlan, “The Reign of Terror in the Middle West,” in Arthur S. Link, The Impact of World War I
(New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 76. On the dismissal and intimidation of professors at
Columbia and elsewhere, see “The Case of the Columbia Professors,” Nation, October 11, 1917,
pp. 388-389, reprinted in Trask, World War I at Home, pp. 159-162.
25. See Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science: From
Burgess to Behavioralism (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1967), p. 3.
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It is the 1917 image of Germany, greatly magnified by the experience of
1933-45, that pervades current American social science.26 The coding rules
employed by the democratic peace literature are heavily influenced by this
image. Gurr’s democracy/autocracy scales are explicitly informed by the no-
tion that “the empires of Central and Eastern Europe-Germany, Russia, Aus-
tro-Hungary-implemented the trappings but not the substance of effective
democratic participation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”27
Now not only is it curious that a “scientific” data set relies so heavily on a
particular interpretation of “trappings” versus “substance,” it must also be
recognized that this interpretation is ahistorical. For Wilson and the political
scientists of a century ago did not consider Germany an autocracy, did not lump
the German and Russian regimes in the same category (Russia was an autoc-
racy), and were remarkably ambivalent as to whether mass electoral processes
were the substance, as opposed to “mere trappings,” of effective democratic
participation. In sum, the perception of Imperial Germany imprinted in the
present coding rules is grossly colored by hindsight and by contemporary
values, which in no small part became our values because of the benefit of
hindsight.
While the present definition of “democracy” was shaped by the social reality
of past U.S.-German enmity, its endurance and universal appeal derive from
26. Three classics of American social science, their differences aside, single out Germany as a
country whose political and economic development sharply diverged from the Anglo-American
“norm”: Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Transaction Publishers, 1990 [1915]); Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical
Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962); Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of
Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), esp. chap. 8. In the 1960s and 1970s these
social-scientific models influenced the writings of German historians who sought to combat the
impulse to downplay German guilt for the horrors of Nazism. See, e.g., Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The
German Empire, 1871-1918 (Dover, N.H.: Berg Publishers, 1985 [1973]). More recently, English
historians led by David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley sought to correct what they regarded as the
ahistorical quality of the “special path” interpretation of German history. They argued that the
emphasis on past German peculiarity is overly colored by hindsight, that Imperial Germany tends
to be judged by the standards of idealized images of the Anglo-American past, and that the German
past might look more “normal” if compared to the experience of continental Europe rather than
to England. The present essay, inasmuch as it shows that past American scholars regarded Imperial
Germany as more normal than do present scholars, provides support for this critique. See David
Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in 19th
Century Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); David Blackbourn, Populists and
Patricians: Essays in Modern German History (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987); Geoff Eley, “Liber-
alism, Europe, and the Bourgeoisie, 1860-1914,” in David Blackbourn and Richard Evans, The
German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late 18th to the
Early 20th Century (London: Routledge, 1991). For helpful reflections on the debate, see Peter Paret,
“Some Comments on the Continuity Debate in German History,” in James Harris, German-American
Interrelations, pp. 83-88.
27. Gurr, Polity II, pp. 36-37.
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The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 157
the material reality of America’s triumph. America’s military victories estab-
lished it as the world’s leading military, economic, and academic power. But
consider, as a counterfactual, the possibility of a German victory in 1917-18.
Would Heidelberg not have remained more prestigious than Princeton or
Oxford? Would it be common knowledge that Imperial Germany was auto-
cratic, or would we instead remember Victorian England as the imperialistic
“autocrat of the sea,” as John Burgess described it in 1915? Would articles on
peace among “our kind” have sprouted in American political science journals,
or rather in German Staatswissenschaft periodicals? And would “our kind” not
have been defined in terms of, say, powerful professional bureaucracies insu-
lated from mass public caprice?
The science of the democratic peace is an American social science.28 Citizens
of small, vulnerable countries tend to be acutely aware of the historical contin-
gency of their present circumstances, but from the perspective of an extraordi-
narily secure, triumphant superpower, counterfactuals such as the above are
almost unimaginable. It is a social science written from the latter perspective
that typically assumes away the historical contingency of the present. And it
is from such a perspective that particular time-bound values can be mistaken
for universal timeless truths.
The bulk of what follows is devoted to reconstructing the political theories
and views of Germany held by two leading American political scientists,
John Burgess and Woodrow Wilson. But first, two methodological issues must
be addressed: why focus on political scientists, and, among them, why these
two?
METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
The political scientists of the gilded age generally shared the socioeconomic
background of contemporary American political elites. Whether by birth or by
education, they belonged to a cosmopolitan gentry class that was mostly
northeastern in residence, liberal or heterodox in religion, and whiggish in
outlook.29 But the socioeconomic affinity of academic and political elites cannot
alone justify selecting political scientists to represent “America’s” perception
28. On this theme, see Stanley Hoffmann, “An American Social Science: International Relations,”
Daedalus, Vol. 106, No. 3 (1977), pp. 41-60; Ekkehart Krippendorf, “The Dominance of American
Approaches in International Relations,” Millennium, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer 1987), pp. 207-214.
29. Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, chap. 3. Ross’s book provides excellent guidance
on the intellectual history of American political science, as does (in a more stylized fashion) Farr,
“From Modern Republic to Administrative State.”
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International Security 20:2 | 158
of Germany; academics, after all, exerted little direct influence over American
diplomacy.
There are, however, two other important reasons for focusing on the views
of past political scientists. First, they constitute the most appropriate “control
group” for today’s democratic peace theorists who are also mostly political
scientists. Early American political scientists were deeply committed to induc-
tive, if unimaginative, science “firmly bottomed on fact and experience.”30 They
prized precision of definition and measurement no less than their successors.31
Therefore, inasmuch as their account of Germany differs from the present
account the difference cannot be attributed to pre-scientific idle speculation.
Second, while political scientists qua academics had no direct control of the
levers of government, one prominent member of the profession did go on to
make a crucial mark on U.S. foreign policy: the relevance of Woodrow Wilson’s
scholarship to assessing the democratic peace proposition need not be re-
hearsed.
An examination of the political theory of John Burgess in addition to Wil-
son’s makes the “sample” more representative of early American political
science. Wilson and Burgess represent two distinct, if immediately successive,
professional generations. Burgess was the most prominent member of the
German-trained generation that founded professional political science in Amer-
ica, whereas Wilson belonged to the first Ph.D. cohort “minted in America.”
The two scholars also represent two distinct institutional settings. Burgess
founded the graduate school in political science at Columbia University
(1880)-the first, and for many years the leading, political science graduate
program in the country 32 Wilson was trained (1883-85) and for several years
30. Woodrow Wilson, “Of the Study of Politics,” November 25, 1886, in Arthur Link, The Papers of
Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 400. (Below, this invaluable
comprehensive collection of Wilson’s papers is referred to as PWW, followed by volume number.)
On the disdain for writing that is unsupported by evidence, which Wilson absorbed as a graduate
student at Johns Hopkins, see “Editorial Note to ‘The Modern Democratic State’,” PWW 5, p. 55.
On John Burgess’s strong belief in modeling the social after the natural sciences, see Somit and
Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science, p. 28.
31. What separates the current coders of the democratic peace from their predecessors is the
inferential statistical tools that are available to them, more than the very commitment to rigorous
empirical science. The common belief that a “scientific revolution” swept political science in the
mid-twentieth century unfairly understates the scientific aspirations of earlier generations. See Ido
Oren, “Perceptions of Germany in Early American Political Science,” paper delivered at the 1994
annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York.
32. Somit and Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science, pp. 7-21. See also Wilfred
McClay’s introduction to the recent re-issue of John Burgess, The Foundations of Political Science
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1994 [1933]); and Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths:
Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (New York: Basic Books, 1987), pp. 164-168.
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The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 159
taught at Johns Hopkins University, then Columbia’s rival for the discipline’s
leadership.33 Burgess was a Germanophile, while Wilson’s cultural and senti-
mental compass was more oriented toward England. Burgess and Wilson
epitomize different shades of the theoretical concerns, political views, and
professional experiences of mainstream American political scientists in the late
nineteenth century
Another reason for the inclusion of Burgess in this study is theoretical as
much as methodological. There is one key contrast between Burgess and
Wilson that is more than a matter of shade or nuance. Whereas Wilson’s
characterization of Germany changed radically in time, Burgess’s positive view
of Imperial Germany withstood the worsening of U.S.-German relations and
even the hysteria of 1917-18. To the end of his life in 1931, Burgess regarded
the German-American conflict, which he considered an intra-Teutonic one, as
a calamitous error. The variation between the shifting views of one individual
and the steadfastness of the other’s elucidates an important theoretical point,
namely that my argument operates at the social level more than the individual
one. The contrast between Wilson and Burgess, in other words, suggests that
a sociology rather than a psychology of knowledge may be appropriate if we
wish to understand the process by which values and “coding” of nations
change in time. Burgess’s case demonstrates that individual scholars are not
necessarily puppets in the hands of historical forces, nor do they readily revise
their attitudes to accommodate changing political realities. But it also shows
that the knowledge generated by, and clung to, by such individual scholars is
liable to being forgotten by future communities of scholars. John Burgess was
arguably the most important political scientist of his time, and yet few present
political scientists recognize his name, let alone are familiar with his theory.
Woodrow Wilson’s legacy, on the other hand, is well remembered by present
political scientists, notably by democratic peace theorists. But even in Wilson’s
case, collective historical memory is selective. It is the 1917 image of Wilson
deploring German autocracy that is etched in the present recollection rather
than the earlier Wilson who detested French “democracy,” approved German
constitutionalism, and admired Prussian statism.
33. For a concise factual account of Wilson’s academic career see August Heckscher, Woodrow
Wilson: A Biography (New York: Collier Books, 1991), chaps. 2-3. Henry W. Bragdon, Woodrow
Wilson: The Academic Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1967), if somewhat dated, remains an
excellent biographical source on Wilson’s pre-political career.
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The Nationalist Theory of John W Burgess
Two episodes that critically shaped the life of John Burgess can also be said to
have shaped the origins of academic political science in America: the Civil War
and the encounter with Germany The traumatic experience of disunion and
Civil War “provided American political science at the moment of its birth with
a compelling raison d’etre and a proximate task: formulating the grounds for an
enduring and cohesive national political unit.”34 Of the members of his gen-
eration, John Burgess was the most effective in providing the nationalist post-
war impulse with a “complete and scientific” theoretical foundation.35
Born in Tennessee in 1844 into a family that upheld firm Unionist principles,
Burgess enlisted in the Federal army, and observed the horrors of the Civil War
first hand.36 When he graduated from Amherst College after the war there was
virtually no academic institution in America that offered rigorous graduate
training in the social sciences. Like thousands of other young Americans,
Burgess was drawn to Germany, whose universities were the most advanced
in the world.37
Virtually all the founders of academic social science in America studied in
Germany. John Burgess earned his Ph.D. there in the 1870s, and the three young
scholars he recruited in 1880 to join him at Columbia had also studied in
Germany.38 Herbert B. Adams, who was to lead the program in history and
political science at Johns Hopkins and to supervise Woodrow Wilson’s studies
there, trained in Germany, as did Wilson’s two other teachers.39 Upon their
return to the United States these scholars sought to emulate the model of the
34. McClay, “Introduction,” p. vii.
35. Charles Merriam, A History of American Political Theories (New York: Macmillan, 1903), p. 299.
The preoccupation with national cohesion was shared by American elites in general; it was not
limited to political scientists alone. See Trommler, “Inventing the Enemy,” p. 110.
36. McClay, “Introduction,” pp. xiii-xv.
37. During the nineteenth century about 9,000 American students flocked to German universities,
most of them after 1870. Berlin, the national Prussian university, was the most popular destination,
with American enrollment totalling 1300 for the 1880s. See Ross, The Origins of American Social
Science, p. 55; Somit and Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science, pp. 15-16;
Jarausch, “Huns, Krauts, or Good Germans,” p. 148; Jurgen Herbst, The German Historical School
in American Scholarship, 1800-1870 (Port Washington, N.Y: Kennikat Press, 1972), chap. 1.
38. Somit and Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science, p. 17.
39. Richard Ely instructed Wilson in political economy and George S. Morris in philosophy. See
Niels A. Thorsen, The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson: 1875-1910 (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1988), chap. 4; John M. Mulder, Woodrow Wilson: The Years of Preparation (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 75, 83.
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The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 161
German research university.40 Students in their German-style graduate semi-
nars were required to master the German language, since German scholarship
was held in the highest esteem.41
But Germany’s appeal was not limited to academic excellence. Germany also
provided a powerful model of national reunion and consolidation. Upon ar-
riving in Berlin in 1871 Burgess witnessed the victory parade of the troops
returning from the Franco-Prussian war, and compared it favorably to “the
march of the Grand Army of the Republic through Washington six years
before.”42 This personal experience foreshadowed a lifelong love affair with
German institutions and culture.
NATION, STATE, LIBERTY, GOVERNMENT
The major theoretical work of John Burgess, Political Science and Comparative
Constitutional Law (pub. 1890) contains four sections: “the nation,” “the state,”
“liberty,” and “Government.”43 The first section opens with a “German,” i.e.,
exact and scientific, definition: “A population of an ethnic unity, inhabiting a
territory of a geographic unity, is a nation.”44
Nations are not born equal, Burgess argued. They have talents latent in their
character, largely determined by the racial composition of their population. At
the bottom of the racial hierarchy are the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin
America (who do not even merit “scientific treatment”), while the middle ranks
are populated by the non-Teutonic European races. The Greek and the Slavonic
races excel in the arts, philosophy, and religion, but their form of political
organization “manifests a low order of political genius.” The Celts “have never
manifested any consciousness of political principles or developed any con-
stancy in political purpose.” The Romans have a gift for building empires. The
most advanced polities were formed by “those nations that may be termed the
political nations par excellence, viz, the Teutonic; and if the peculiar creations of
these nations may be expressed in a single phrase it must be this: that they are
40. Somit and Tanenhaus, The Development of American Social Science, pp. 34-38.
41. Wilson, for example, characterized German scholarship as exceptionally “diligent” and
“learned.” See “A Book Review,” April 17, 1887, PWW 5, p. 494.
42. McClay, “Introduction,” p. xvi.
43. In later years Burgess prepared an abridged version of the book, but a contract to publish it
was rescinded during World War I because of the author’s pro-German sympathy. That version
was published only in 1933, posthumously, as The Foundations of Political Science. My discussion
below draws on the 1994 re-issue of the latter book, which I refer to as Foundations.
44. Foundations, p. 3.
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International Security 20:2 | 162
the founders of national states.” For Burgess, thus, the nation-state is the
highest form of political development, a form that only the Teutonic nations
are capable of approaching.45 Fortunately, in America “an amalgamated Teu-
tonic race is the dominant factor,” although the Teutonic elements, “the Anglo-
Americans, the Germans, and Scandinavians do not yet mingle their blood
completely.”46 Also Teutonic were Germany, England, Holland, Switzerland,
the Scandinavian nations, and France (although French blood is diluted by
Iberian, Celtic, and Roman elements).47
Burgess subscribed to an idealist conception of “the state,” subject of the
second section of his treatise. The state is not the aggregate product of a
contract among free individuals,48 but an organic body that grows in historical
time toward the ideal of the perfect state.49 Along the state’s evolutionary
growth path, the creation of a national monarchy signals “the beginning of the
modern political era.” Then, “a large proportion of the population is awakened
to the consciousness of the state, and feels the impulse to participate in the
work of its objective realization.” They “gather about their king” and “make
him but the first servant of the state.”50 Once the king turns into a mere office-
holder, subordinate to popular sovereignty, the state can be said to be demo-
cratic. Democracy is embodied in a revolutionary popular act of constitution-
making, and is conditional upon national harmony and cohesion: “the
democratic state must be a national state, and the state whose population has
become truly national will inevitably become democratic.”51
On this historical path, Burgess found both Germany and the United States
in the most advanced category of (Teutonic) popular democratic states. For
Burgess, the German process of constitution-making was no less revolutionary
and progressive than its counterpart, a century earlier, in America. In both cases
the people consciously formed a modern national state.52 Moreover, Burgess
45. Foundations, pp. 31-38. On the popularity and legitimacy of racialist ideas in the intellectual
discourse of late nineteenth-century America, see Rogers M. Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal,
and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 87, No. 3
(September 1993), pp. 558-560; John Higham, Strangers In the Land: Patterns of American Nativism,
1860-1925, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), chap. 6.
46. Foundations, p. 20.
47. Foundations, p. 16.
48. Foundations, p. 66.
49. Foundations, chap. 5.
50. Foundations, p. 70.
51. Foundations, pp. 85-86.
52. The analogy between the German and American experience is most evident in John Burgess,
“Laband’s Public Law of the German Empire,” Political Science Quarterly, No. 1 (March 1888), esp.
pp. 124-126.
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The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 163
identified the Prussian monarch, whether in his capacity as king of Prussia or
as emperor of Germany, as a constitutional office holder,53 a signal of the
formation of the modern popular democratic state.
Burgess was a staunch defender of individual liberties, and he regarded the
constitutional state as the ultimate guarantor of liberty; it protects individuals
both from the incursion of government and from the tyranny of majorities.
While in all modern nation-states individuals enjoy similar freedoms, it is in
the United States that these freedoms are protected best. In America the fun-
damental principles of freedom “are written by the state in the constitution;
the power to put the final and authoritative interpretation upon them is vested
by the state in a body of jurists, holding their offices independently of the
political departments of the government.”54
How do the other modern democratic nation-states measure up? “Of the
three chief European constitutions only that of Germany contains, in any
degree, the guarantees of individual liberty which the constitution of the
United States so richly affords.” As much as Germany falls short of the Ameri-
can ideal, its system is superior to France where “there is not the slightest trace
of a constitutional guaranty of individual liberty,” or to England where the
trouble is “that the whole power of the state is vested in the government, and
that no sufficient distinction is made between the state and the government.”
As far as constitutional liberty is concerned, then, Germany is more America-
like than either France or England (not to mention countries such as Italy and
Greece which are currently coded as having been “liberal” at the time).55
John Burgess went to a great length to distinguish “the state”-an abstract
organic concept-from the actual government. In fact, the form of the state and
the form of the government need not necessarily be in harmony. “It is difficult
to see why the most advantageous political system, for the present, would not
be a democratic state with an aristocratic government, provided only the
aristocracy be that of real merit, and not of artificial qualities. If this be not the
real principle of the republican [read: American] form of government then I
must confess that I do not know what its principle is.”56 In expressing a
preference for a democratic state with a meritocratic government, Burgess
53. John Burgess, “Tenure and Powers of the German Emperor,” Political Science Quarterly, No. 2
(June 1888), p. 335.
54. Foundations, p. 106.
55. Foundations, pp. 106, 108, 109 respectively. Italy and Greece in the late nineteenth century are
listed as liberal countries by Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” p. 1164.
56. Foundations, pp. 75-76.
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International Security 20:2 | 164
anticipated the program of Woodrow Wilson and his generation-who sought
to erect an efficient administrative state in the service of the nation-but he
himself stopped short of fully articulating this agenda.
Having elaborated the distinction between state and government, Burgess
ends his treatise by assessing the merits of various forms of government. A
“representative government” is only good if it is constitutionally limited, i.e.,
“if the state confers upon the government less than its whole power, less than
sovereignty, either by enumerating the powers of government, or by defining
and safeguarding individual liberty against them.” On the other hand, “if the
state vests its whole power in the government, and reserves no sphere of
autonomy for the individual, the government is unlimited; it is despotism in
theory, however liberal and benevolent it may be in practice.”57 From Burgess’s
earlier discussion of liberty, the identity of the good and bad prototypes of
representative government is unmistakable. The English system where “the
whole power of the state is vested in the government” epitomizes the bad
unlimited representative government; it is despotic in theory and there are no
firm guarantees that would arrest a potential slide toward despotism in prac-
tice. The United States is the good limited representative state, and from
Burgess’s earlier discussion of liberty it can be inferred that Germany is closer
to this ideal than either England or France.
Another interesting distinction in Burgess’s taxonomy of governments
concerns “the tenure of the persons holding office or mandate. Viewed from
this standpoint, the government is either hereditary or elective.” Burgess makes
no normative judgment whatsoever regarding the superiority of one system
relative to the other. Discerning four alternative hereditary principles, he con-
cludes that “primogeniture in the male line appears the most useful and
successful.”58 That this is precisely the Prussian principle should come as no
surprise.59
Burgess also made a distinction between presidential and parliamentary
government. In presidential systems “the state, the sovereign, makes the ex-
ecutive independent of the legislature, both in tenure and prerogative, and
furnishes him with sufficient power to prevent the legislature from trenching
upon the sphere marked out by the state as executive independence and
prerogative.” Burgess has high praise for presidential government: “it is con-
57. Foundations, p. 114 (both quotations).
58. Foundations, pp. 121-122.
59. See Burgess, “Tenure and Power of the German Emperor,” p. 337.
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The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 165
servative. It fixes the weight of responsibility upon a single person; and there
is nothing like this to produce caution, deliberation, and an impartial regard
for all interests concerned.”60
Now one naturally associates the United States with presidential govern-
ment, but Imperial Germany was also squarely a member of Burgess’s “presi-
dential club.” In his essay on the “Tenure and Powers of the German Emperor,”
he refers repeatedly to the kaiser as the president of the German union or
“president of a republic.”61 That the king of Prussia was the president of
Germany was written in the German constitution, and for Burgess to have
referred to him as such (accepting the form of the constitution as its substance)
was entirely uncontroversial in 1888. The kaiser’s lack of electoral approval did
not matter to Burgess at all (the kaiser, after all, inherited the crown through
the best hereditary principle); and if one “president of a republic” should
emulate the other, then it was probably the American executive who could
learn from his more powerful German counterpart. Burgess’s comment about
the emperor’s veto power in his capacity as king of Prussia is instructive:
“These are very wise provisions under existing conditions. I do not see how
the Emperor would be able to discharge his great duties to the nation without
them.”62
Parliamentary government was regarded by Burgess as inferior to presiden-
tial government. Conspicuously alluding to England, Burgess suggested that
the successful operation of parliamentary government depended upon peculiar
conditions: a hereditary kingship “possessing the most sincere devotion and
loyalty of the masses,” a national religion that preserves “the morality of the
masses,” and “limited suffrage through which the intelligent, conservative and
moderate classes shall be the bearers of the political power.” The extension of
the franchise was threatening to undermine the system. For “how with the
present degree of popular intelligence in even the most advanced states can
these qualities [stability, civility] be secured in a legislature whose members are
chosen by an universal or a widely extended suffrage?”63 To the extent that
Burgess liked liberal England, then, it was the England envisioned by conser-
vative whiggish liberals such as Walter Bagehot, rather than the increasingly
democratic England of the late nineteenth century.
60. Foundations, p. 124.
61. See pp. 334, 335, 347.
62. Burgess, “Tenure and Powers of the German Emperor,” p. 349.
63. Foundations, pp. 127-128.
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In sum, for John Burgess, Germany, England, and France were all closer to
the American ideal than Italy, Greece, and the Slavic countries, let alone the
colonial world, and among the ranks of those most advanced nation-states,
Germany was clearly at the top.
GERMANY: EUROPE S BEST GUARANTEE OF PEACE
In “Tenure and Powers of the German Emperor,” Burgess discussed the em-
peror’s powers in the area of foreign affairs. The emperor was constitutionally
empowered to make “alliances with foreign powers, and to declare [defensive]
war and make peace.” But he was “most heavily handicapped in the exercise
of the power of declaring offensive war” since for such an act “the consent of
the Federal Council is necessary” As king of Prussia, the kaiser controlled 17
seats in the Federal Council, yet in order to muster the 30 votes necessary to
declare war, he needed “an agreement between the princely heads of at least
three states besides Prussia.” The German princes are not only “old” and
“conservative,” they are also “hostile to centralization of power in the Imperial
government, and they know that war tends to that.” Hence, the German
constitution provides the best “safeguards against arbitrary, ill-considered,
unnecessary declarations of war” that one could possibly devise.64
Burgess closes the essay with the following evaluation of the character of the
German imperium:
It is full of the spirit of conservatism, and well regulated by law. Its constitution
guards it well against personal arbitrariness or vacillation on the part of the
Emperor or the princes, or fickleness and violence on the part of the people. It
is Europe’s best guaranty of peace through the power to enforce peace. In a
sentence, it is a constitutional presidency; and if it needs any reform, it is in
the direction of more strength rather than less.65
BRITAIN: “AUTOCRAT OF THE SEA”
John Burgess remained an unwavering Germanophile even after the turn of
the century, when the mainstream of political science was beginning to mod-
erate its German accent. His remarks before the Germanic society of America
in 1908 betray a feeling of unease about the erosion of German-American
amity 66 In 1914 Burgess, who had retired from Columbia in 1912, was not alone
in sympathizing with the German side. But on balance, when Burgess publish-
64. Burgess, “Tenure and Powers of the German Emperor,” pp. 345-347.
65. Ibid., p. 357.
66. John Burgess, Germany and The United States (New York: The Germanistic Society of America,
1908).
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The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 167
ed The European War of 1914, he was swimming against the stream of public
opinion.67 Attempting to avert a German-American conflict, Burgess pulled no
punches in venting his pro-German and vehemently anti-British views. He not
only depicted England as “despotic” and “navalistic-militaristic,” but also
drew a most unflattering comparison between the “autocrat of the sea” and
the “autocrat of the land” (Russia). Germany, however, Burgess proclaimed to
be Britain’s “opposing counterpart”:
Its economic system is by far the most efficient, most genuinely democratic,
which exists at the present moment in the world, or has ever existed. There is
no great state in the world today in which there is so general and even a
distribution of the fruits of civilization as in the United States of Germany And
there is no state, great or small, in which the plane of civilization is so high.68
The Statist Theory of Woodrow Wilson
Born in the South in 1856, young Woodrow Wilson shared his father’s Confed-
erate sympathy, but as an adult he came to support the Union’s cause.69 The
Civil War experience cast a shadow on Wilson’s thought no less than it did on
the older Burgess; one theme that recurs throughout Wilson’s writings is the
concept of an organic, cohesive nation-state. Yet whereas for Burgess the state
remained an abstract expression of the nation, Wilson sought to endow the
nation with a concrete, efficient, administrative state.70
Woodrow Wilson was a well-published political scientist, but he never com-
pleted The Philosophy of Politics, the treatise he hoped would become his defini-
tive theoretical book. According to the editors of Wilson’s papers, the book
would have consisted of a series of essays or addresses on “the modern
democratic state,” the historical chapters of his book The State, and above all,
Wilson’s notes for his lectures on administration, law, and jurisprudence.71
67. Burgess, The European War of 1914: Its Causes, Purposes, and Probable Results (Chicago: A.C.
McClury, 1915).
68. Ibid., pp. 92-94.
69. Upon entering Princeton College, Wilson identified himself as a supporter of Southern seces-
sionism. The reason for the subsequent alteration in his view had more to do with nationalism
than with concern for racial justice. See Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years, pp. 11-12,
21.
70. On the shift in the focus of late nineteenth-century political science from the issue of “nation”
to that of “state,” see Farr, “From Modern Republic to Administrative State.”
71. “Editorial Note: Wilson’s First Treatise on Democratic Government,” PWW 5, p. 58. Wilson,
The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1889). Perusing Wilson’s
papers from his academic years, one is struck by the thoroughness of his course notes. They read
more like preliminary book drafts than skeletal lecture outlines, and thus they provide an invalu-
able insight into Wilson’s thought.
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International Security 20:2 | 168
These materials were produced mostly in the decade subsequent to Wilson’s
receipt of the Ph.D. (1886), during which he taught at Bryn Mawr College, at
Wesleyan College, and from 1890 onward at Princeton.72 My analysis focuses
primarily on Wilson’s writings and notes from that period because they con-
stitute the core of his never-completed big book, because the book he did
complete during that period (The State, 1889) is considered his “greatest schol-
arly achievement,” and because it was the period of Wilson’s greatest produc-
tivity as a political scientist. (In later years he increasingly turned to popular,
largely historical, writing and speaking and to academic administration.)73
Before turning to Wilson’s Philosophy of Politics, a few comments are in
order with regard to his earlier writings. Woodrow Wilson is rightly remem-
bered as an Anglophile. His family maintained a strong sentimental attachment
to their Anglo-Scottish ancestry,74 and the young Wilson advocated the adop-
tion of the parliamentary system in the United States.75 The fascination with
England did not indicate an anti-German attitude, though. Bismarck in par-
ticular was the subject of Wilson’s admiration. The chancellor was not above
intrigue and deceit, Wilson wrote, but he was nevertheless a most “creative,”
“insightful,” and “energetic” statesman. “We can find on record few instances
in which a comparatively small and virtually dependent kingdom has been
raised in eight years to the proud place of a first class power by the genius of
a single man.”76
But even more important is the fact that from his earliest writings Wilson
had displayed extraordinary animus toward France. In his unpublished essay
on “Self-Government in France,” Wilson argued that the French people were
72. During 1888-95 Wilson also returned to Johns Hopkins annually to teach administration, thus
maintaining a vital connection with a graduate research environment. See Bragdon, Woodrow
Wilson, chaps. 8-10.
73. The State was a textbook that made available in English vast amounts of knowledge that were
formerly accessible only to advanced scholars. It was very successful, and was revised in 1898 and
1910. The first part of the book is historical, while the second part consists of comparative “country
chapters.” In writing the comparative chapters Wilson relied heavily on “the great” Handbuch des
Oeffentlichen Rechts der Gegenwart, an encyclopedic comparative survey of the theoretical principles
and practice of politics and administration. See “Editorial Note: Wilson’s ‘The State’,” PWW 6,
p. 245. The State was translated into several foreign languages one of which, ironically, was
German. See Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson, pp. 173-178. The opinion that the book was “probably
Wilson’s greatest scholarly achievement” is due to his biographer Arthur Link, quoted in Mulder,
Woodrow Wilson, p. 103.
74. Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson, chap. 1.
75. See especially Congressional Government, which was published in 1885 as a successful book and
was later accepted as Wilson’s dissertation. The book is fully reproduced in PWW 4, pp. 13-179.
76. “Prince Bismarck,” November 1877, PWW 1, p. 313. See also “Congressional Government,”
PWW 4, pp. 42-43, for a description of Gladstone’s status in Parliament as similar to Bismarck’s
status in the Reichstag.
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The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 169
not ready for self-government.77 French peasants are “almost hopelessly igno-
rant” and “acquiescent” (p. 529), while members of the bourgeoisie are “not of
the stuff of which trustworthy citizens are made” (p. 527). Inspired by Edmund
Burke, Wilson complains that the French are impetuous.78 They try to install
methods of self-government by way of revolution, methods that can only be
applied successfully in England and America, where they evolved naturally
over time. “The history of France since the opening of the Revolution has been
little more than a record of the alternation of centralized democracy with
centralized monarchy, or imperialism, in all cases of the sway of a virtual
despotism” (p. 523). The parliamentary system fits France “as ill as inde-
pendence of parental authority fits a child” (p. 524); “for more than a century
its forms have been observed” (p. 533; emphasis original).
In various subtle ways, the derogatory language of the essay reappears in
Wilson’s later writings. Throughout his more mature scholarship, references to
the French polity are laced with terms like “intoxicated,” “poisonous,” “me-
chanical,” “unstable,” and “impetuous.”79 The view of the French political
system as dissonant with French national character, of France as a democracy
in form only, and of French administration as inferior to Prussia’s is a virtual
constant in Wilson’s “philosophy of politics.” Unlike current social scientists
who tend to single Germany out as an aberrant case of political development,
Wilson rather considered France the “abnormal” case. In his political theory
Germany was in the proper place in its natural trajectory of political develop-
ment; “impetuous” France was not.
Let us now turn to Wilson’s “philosophy of politics,” written in fragments
at a time when Wilson had conquered the German language, and when his
intellectual horizon expanded to cover foreign polities other than England
alone.80 Wilson’s scholarship was typical of his generation in combining a
77. September 4, 1879, PWW 1, pp. 515-538. Page numbers in the text refer to this essay.
78. In later years Wilson adopted Burke as his chief mentor; see Mulder, Woodrow Wilson, pp. 126-
127.
79. French democracy is described as a “quick intoxicant or a slow poison” in “The Modern
Democratic State,” December 1885, PWW 5, p. 63. “Intoxication” is also attributed to France in
“Democracy and Efficiency,” October 1900, PWW 12, p. 6. For reference to “unstable” constitution-
alism” in France see “An Outline of the Preface to ‘The Philosophy of Politics’,” January 12, 1891,
PWW 7, p. 98. In the same outline Wilson also refers to French political development as “mechani-
cally homogenous” (p. 101) and “impetuous” (p. 102). Both terms carry a negative connotation
from the perspective of Wilson’s notion of “normal” organic political development.
80. On Wilson’s struggle with the German language see “WW to Edwin R.A. Seligman,” April 19,
1886, PWW 5, p. 163. That he won the struggle and read widely in German Staatswissenschaft,
philosophy, and political economy is most evident from Wilson’s “Working Bibliography, 1883-90,”
PWW 6, pp. 562-611. Wilson’s writings and lecture notes are loaded with citations of leading
German scholars.
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International Security 20:2 | 170
historical account of political development with a current cross-national com-
parison.
Wilson’s theory of political development is reminiscent of Burgess’s in that
it is racialist-hierarchical in nature. To understand the origins of modern gov-
ernment, Wilson wrote, one need not study the “savage” traditions of “de-
feated” primitive groups but rather the contributions of the “survived fittest,”
primarily the groups comprising the Aryan race.8″ From the infancy of Slavonic
village communities,82 Wilson traces the Aryan path to political maturity
through the history of the Greeks and Romans, the Germanic tribes, and the
English people. Each group adopted the positive practices of its predecessor
and added the ingredients consistent with its own character. The Teutons
“brought about that fusion of German customs with Roman law and concep-
tion which . . . was to produce the conditions of modern political life.”83 They
also bequeathed to England “the principle of representation.”84 In England,
“out of the freehold and local self-government grew the constitutional state;
out of the constitutional state grew that greatest of political developments, the
free, organic, self-conscious, self-directing nation, with its great organs of popu-
lar representation and its constitutional guarantees of liberty” Finally the
English nation “gave birth to America.”85 In sum, the Aryan race left behind
more backward races and embarked on a slow march toward political progress.
At the pinnacle of Aryan political development is the organic, free, constitu-
tional nation-state, and America is its best exemplar.
Wilson stressed even more emphatically than Burgess the organic nature of
the nation-state.86 The state is “an abiding natural relationship”; it is the eternal
“expression of a higher form of life than the individual, namely the common
life which gives leave to individual life.”87 The embodiment of the most
fully-grown modern nation-state is the constitutional state: “a self conscious,
adult, self-regulated (democratic) state.”88 This definition is important, for it
suggests that the “democratic state” was a sub-type, the most radical form of
81. Wilson, The State, p. 2. The Aryan theme is from the British scholars Sir Henry Maine and
William Hearn, while the Darwinian theme is from Herbert Spencer; see bibliography in The State,
p. 15. All references below to The State are to the 1889 (first) edition, unless noted otherwise.
82. The State, pp. 4-5.
83. The State, p. 154.
84. The State, p. 580.
85. The State, p. 577.
86. Wilson thoroughly rejected the social contract theory of the state. See The State, pp. 11-15.
87. “Notes for Lectures at the Johns Hopkins,” 1891-94, PWW 7, p. 124.
88. “Notes for Lectures on Public Law,” 1894-95, PWW 9, p. 12.
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The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 171
the most advanced political form, the constitutional state. Constitutional states
are characterized by four elements: first, that “the people have some form of
representation. It does not make any difference what the representation is, as
long as it be broad enough”;89 second, administration subject to the laws; third,
an independent judiciary with independent tenure; and fourth, a more or less
complete formulation of the rights of individual liberty.90
There is absolutely no doubt that Wilson regarded both the German Federa-
tion and its chief member, Prussia, as members of this elite group of “consti-
tutional states,” along with England, the United States, France, Switzerland,
Sweden-Norway, and Austria-Hungary. These are the states that are the sub-
jects of “country chapters” in The State and that are most often used by Wilson
to illustrate his arguments on constitutional law and administration. The most
important of them in Wilson’s eyes appear to have been England, the United
States, Prussia/Germany, France, and Switzerland, whose constitutions Wilson
explicitly compares to the U.S. constitution in his lecture on the “modern
constitutional state.” These constitutions are not precisely alike; they should
not be, because “they originated in the circumstances of the time.” Their
differences notwithstanding, none is inferior to the others. All of these countries
possess the four elements characteristic of the modern constitutional state, and
in all of them the constitution is supreme. For example, “the King of Prussia
cannot change the constitution made by him: it is held fast in its place by the
feeling that it would be unsafe to play with it. Once given forth, it cannot be
withdrawn.”91
Wilson’s theory of organic political development stressed the importance of
harmony between actual legal and political institutions and the readiness of
the national “habit” to benefit from such institutions. Consider Wilson’s com-
mentary on the then new Japanese constitution, “copied, in the main, [from]
the Constitution of Prussia.” The chief point of resemblance between the two
is that “the ministers are responsible to the Emperor, not to the legislature….
Here the model is not one of responsible government in the English, French,
Italian sense.” Now, from a present perspective this sounds like a serious
indictment of the Prussian and Japanese arrangements, but Wilson says that
“‘considering the stage of development in which Japan now finds itself, the
89. “Report of a Lecture at the New York Law School,” March 11, 1892, PWW 7, p. 477.
90. “Notes for Lectures on Public Law,” PWW 9, p. 13. See also “Report of a Lecture at the New
York Law School,” PWW 7, pp. 477-479.
91. Ibid., p. 474.
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International Security 20:2 | 172
Prussian constitution was an excellent instrument to copy. Her choice of it as
a model is but another proof of the singular sagacity, the singular power to see
and learn, which is Japan’s best constitution and promise of success.”92 Notice
that this is not only a direct endorsement of the Japanese constitution but also
an indirect approval of the Prussian one. Prussia is not indicted for deviating
from the English norm, but rather praised precisely for not copying it mind-
lessly Prussia’s legal institutions are properly consonant with its national
“habit.” In contrast, the history of France illustrates the perils of copying
English arrangements in form only and of adopting legal institutions “not
sustained by habit.”93
THE DEMOCRATIC STATE
As noted earlier, in Wilson’s thought the “democratic state” is a sub-category
of the “modern constitutional state.” The membership of this category is
extremely limited: it includes the United States, Switzerland, Australia, and to
a lesser degree England, where there remain “some rebellious pulses” and “the
drill of liberty has not extended to all classes.” (Fortunately, though, “it was
[England’s] drilled classes that she sent to America.”) France would not become
a democracy unless “she shall have . . . [a] few more hard lessons in self-con-
trol.”94 To both France and Spain, moreover, democracy is a “slow poison” and
South America suffers from a “maddening drought” of democratic institu-
tions.95
While Wilson used “democracy” with approval, his understanding of the
term was quite unlike its present meaning. First, the concept of democracy was
as attached to the notion of organic national development as the wider category
of “constitutional state” was. Democracy and “nation” were inseparable, for
democracy is only possible when the nation is ripe for it. Thus, Wilson did not
denounce the continental states for not being democratic enough, since he
recognized that they were disadvantaged by their “hazardous” geographical
and historical circumstances.96 The English race was fortunate (like “closeted”
Switzerland) to be insulated from the “fierce contests of national rivalries” that
characterized the continental experience. For the continental countries prema-
92. All quotations are from “WW to Daniel Coit Gilman,” April 13, 1889, PWW 6, pp. 169-172.
93. “Minutes of the Johns Hopkins Seminary of Historical and Political Science,” March 15, 1889,
PWW 6, p. 153.
94. “A Lecture on Democracy,” December 5, 1891, PWW 7, p. 358.
95. “The Modern Democratic State,” December 1, 1885, PWW 5, p. 63.
96. “A Lecture on Democracy,” December 5, 1891, PWW 7, p. 358.
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The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 173
turely to adopt institutions which developed slowly and organically in the
English-speaking world would be a greater sin than to remain less democratic
yet in national habit. France was the impetuous sinner, whereas Germany’s
institutions were in harmony with her organic development.97
Second, Wilson greatly downplayed the role of elections as the proper touch-
stone of democracy A democracy is properly ruled by “the men of the schools,
the trained, instructed, fitted men.” As long as these men get a fair opportunity
to govern-through ballot or through civil service examinations-the require-
ments of democracy are met. The civil service method of selection is “eminently
democratic” since “it draws all the governing material . . . from such part of
the people as will fit themselves for the function.” Selection by merit “is but
another form of representation.”98 In Wilson’s eyes, then, democracy was not
an electoral process as much as a meritocracy. Indeed, one is struck by how
little Wilson expressed concern about electoral equality: “Not universal suf-
frage constitutes democracy Universal suffrage may confirm a coup d’etat which
destroys liberty”99 He had little moral problem with the fact that the U.S.
Senate was not popularly elected or with the disfranchisement of blacks in the
South. In The State he reviewed the details of the unequal three-class voting
system of Prussia in a purely factual manner without moral condemnation. At
the municipal level he unambiguously endorsed this very voting scheme for
the United States.100 Moreover, a democracy qua meritocracy-the rule of the
educated and trained-was for Wilson a bulwark against the ignorance of the
masses. As much as he championed the forces of public opinion, his view of
the mass public was very unflattering. The average citizen’s mind is fickle:
“you cannot expect him to have a ‘sound conviction’ on the silver question,
97. “The Modern Democratic State,” PWW 5, p. 63. Elsewhere Wilson wrote that England -was
fortunate to be geographically separated from “the fell sweep of European wars and revolutions.”
But it was not Germany’s fate that England was spared from, as much as the “international
compulsion which forced France to become a centralized military despotism.” Protected by their
natural boundaries, the English “were in every way much more German [read: better] than the
Franks.” See “The English Constitution,” 1890-91, PWW 7, pp. 12-14.
98. “A Lecture on Democracy,” PWW 7, p. 356. For the argument that meritocracy is a form of
democracy, see also “Notes on Administration,” 1892-95, PWW 7, pp. 392-393. In later years Wilson
used the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages as an example of an “absolutely democratic organi-
zation,” since its ranks were open to any qualified man, regardless of his class. See “Address at
the Inauguration of the President of Franklin and Marshall College,” January 7, 1910, PWW 19,
p. 743, and class notes taken by Homer Zink, a student in Wilson’s course in 1904, at the
manuscript library of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson collection, Box 6.
99. “The Modern Democratic State,” PWW 5, p. 85.
100. The three-class system is described in The State, p. 285. For an approval of that system in city
government see The State, p. 296; see also “Notes for Public Lecture at the Johns Hopkins,” March
16, 1888, PWW 5, pp. 713-714.
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International Security 20:2 | 174
substantial views on the Behring Sea controversy, or original ideas on the
situation in Brazil.”101
Thus it is not surprising that Wilson approved of insulating foreign affairs
from the scrutiny of popular assemblies. Noting that the House of Commons
exercised but minimal control over the conduct of British foreign policy, Wilson
opined that some matters are “of too delicate a nature to be publicly discussed
in Parliament; some plans, particularly of foreign policy, would be simply
frustrated by being prematurely disclosed…. A certain wide discretion must
be allowed the Ministers as to the matters they will make public.”102
In short, Wilson is better interpreted as a Burkean conservative than as a
champion of mass electoral democracy. His aim was to purify the concept of
democracy from its association with (French) revolution, Jacksonian populism,
and the rule of the unenlightened demos. Electoral equality was good “only up
to the point where all are equal in capacity to judge,” but since that point can
at best be only “roughly approximated,” government must be entrusted to an
educated, not necessarily elected, administrative elite.103 Enter Prussia, a model
of rational administration.
WILSON ON ADMINISTRATION
At the turn of the century, “public administration”-local and federal-was at
the center of the agenda of American political science. Woodrow Wilson was
among the pioneers of the academic study of administration. In his first essay
on the subject, published in 1887, Wilson lamented “the poisonous atmosphere
of city government, the crooked secrets of state administration,” and federal
“corruption,” which “forbid us to believe that any clear conceptions of what
constitutes good administration are as yet widely current in the United
States.” 104 The solution was to study the science of administration “developed
by French and German professors.” In France, administrative machinery was
perfected by Napoleon. In Prussia, an “admirable system” of administration
was “most studied and most nearly perfected”’05 by great kings and reformers
who “transformed arrogant and perfunctory bureaux into public spirited in-
101. “A Lecture on Democracy,” PWW 7, p. 354.
102. “The English Constitution,” 1890-91, PWW 7, pp. 36-37. On the lack of popular control of the
Foreign Office, see Zara Steiner, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1898-1914 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1969).
103. Zink notes.
104. “The Study of Administration,” PWW 5, p. 363.
105. Ibid., pp. 365-366.
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The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 175
struments of just government.”‘106 The English race, on the other hand, “has
exercised itself much more in controlling than in energizing government.”107
Americans must learn from continental administrative wisdom, and “distill
away its foreign gases” to suit the American system.108
In the following years, as Wilson’s knowledge of the German language and
of the continental literature improved, he mitigated his view that the continent
was “foreign gas.” Especially in the area of city government, Wilson was to
determine that the Prussian system was not foreign as much as “Pan-Teutonic”
in nature, and that it was the highest form of self-government.109 He was to
discover, furthermore, that to the extent that continental ideas contained for-
eign gases, the French ideas were more lethal than the Prussian.
The administrative state envisioned by Wilson was not the “night watch-
man” of the English liberal model but was rather patterned after the statist
German model. It was a state that fulfilled many tasks that as far as Washington
was concerned still lay in the far future: “poor relief, insurance (pensions and
other); savings banks; forestry, game and fishing laws”; promoting the “eco-
nomic and other activities of society by means of . .. posts, telegraphs, tele-
phones, etc.; Maintenance and supervision of railways; . . . Establishing of
institutions of credit” and so on.110 Furthermore, Wilson admired the model of
the University of Berlin-a university harnessed in the service of the nation.111
In sum, Wilson was an admirer of German statism, and in regard to the
functions of the state he unambiguously wished that the United States would
become more like Germany than England.112 He was by no means a maverick
within the ranks of American political science at the time.
Turning now from the functions of administrative states to their governmen-
tal structure, Wilson customarily classified states into three classes based on
their “type of headship.” In “autocratic” polities such as Russia and Turkey,
“there is an entire absence of any constitutional means of controlling the acts
of the head of the state.” In “republican” polities such as the United States,
106. Ibid., p. 376.
107. Ibid., p. 367.
108. Ibid., p. 378.
109. In the 1887 essay it was described as “not fully” self-government; see ibid., p. 380.
110. “Notes for Lectures on Public Law,” 1894-95, PWW 9, p. 24.
111. See “Random Notes for ‘The Philosophy of Politics’,” January 25, 1895; PWW 9, p. 130.
112. See for example “A Newspaper Report of a Lecture at Brown University,” November 12, 1889,
PWW 6, pp. 417-423. See also “Marginal Note to ‘The Labor Movement in America’ by Richard
Ely” and “Socialism and Democracy,” August 22, 1887, both in PWW 5, pp. 560 and 560-563
respectively.
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International Security 20:2 | 176
France, and Switzerland, “the Head of the State is made subject to complete
subordination to the laws, and is besides held to a personal responsibility for
his observance of them.” In the third category-“constitutional” systems-the
head of state is subjected to “constitutional control” while “there is no personal
liability on his part to arrest or other punishment.” Interestingly, both England
and Prussia exemplify the latter category (as do Bavaria, Spain, and Italy). In
constitutional states, royal sovereignty “is nowadays mediate; and mediate
sovereignty is no sovereignty at all. The modern monarch is, consequently
sovereign only representatively and by reason of his participation in the deter-
minations of the highest body of the State.”113
To learn about the status of the head of the “Federal State,” Wilson compared
the United States to Germany The U.S. head of state is “the executive agent of
the central government,” whereas in Germany he is “member of the sovereign
body [Bundesrat] as head of a presiding member state [Prussia].” Yet, “in all
these cases the head of the State is strictly subject to the laws, to constitutional
rule and procedure, though in some cases the responsibility is direct and per-
sonal, while in others it is only through ministerial proxy.”114 What the latter
phrase shows is that in 1894 Wilson perceived the German emperor as an
indirectly responsible executive. Overall, from Wilson’s lectures and from The
State, the picture arises of the kaiser as a hereditary chief executive who
“possesses no slight claim to be regarded as the most powerful ruler of our
time” yet who is nonetheless bound by a fine constitutional machinery. “There
are distinct limits to his power as Emperor, limits which mark and emphasize
the federal character of the Empire and of it a state governed by law, not by
prerogative.”115
Nowhere in Wilson’s writings from that period was I able to find references
to the emperor-whether in his capacity as federal president or king of Prus-
sia-as an autocrat. The adjective “autocrat” was reserved for absolutist tsars
and caliphs, and it was not counterposed to democratic rule but rather to
republican and constitutional forms of government.
Wilson was as interested in local as in national government, for the “local
organs of self-government are . . . after all, the most important to the life and
113. All quotations are from “Notes For Lectures on Public Law,” September 1894, PWW 9,
pp. 26-27. One must remember that at the time the English crown, held by Victoria, did not appear
as lame as it does today, and that the negative image of King/Kaiser Wilhelm was yet to fully
crystalize in the future.
114. Ibid., p. 27. Emphasis original.
115. The State, p. 254.
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The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 177
vigor of political liberty.”116 American city government lacks vitality and “is
conspicuous chiefly because of its lack of system.” 117 In France, centralized
“interference in local affairs . .. more and more minute and inquisitive, results
in the strangulation of local government.”118 Prussia offers by far the best
model of local self-government. Whereas the highly centralized French system
“misses the principle of life, which is not uniformity but variety,” the Prussian
model of “concentration” (centralized oversight, but not control of local gov-
ernment) secures “local variety and vitality without loss of vital integration.” 119
In a framework such as Wilson’s which emphasizes organic national life, the
term “vitality” is the ultimate compliment.
Self-government is not about mass voting, but rather “consists in taking part
in the government: If we could give, say, to the better middle class the whole
power of government then we should have discovered self government….
What we should seek is a way to harness the people to the great wagon of
state and make them pull it.”,120 Wilson regarded Berlin-“the most perfect
flower of the Prussian municipal system” 121-as the best example of this ideal
system, where the “better” citizens (but not the demos) actively participate in
administration, and where rights are tied to service. In Berlin “over 10,000
people [are] associated in the Government, besides the paid officers of the civil
service.” They must serve without pay “or else lose [their] franchise and have
[their] taxes raised.” Berlin’s electoral system is “characteristic of the Prussian
system. The voters are divided into three classes, according to their contribu-
tion to the taxes.” Although unequal in size, “each of these classes elects an
equal number to the Board of Alderman.”122 These facts are recounted with
Wilson’s highest stamp of approval, namely with a certification of English
origins. Berlin was not a foreign example but “just as truly an English example.
It is a Pan-Teutonic example of processes that seemed to inhere in the ancient
policy of the people to which we belong … so we shall not find ourselves on
unfamiliar ground by going back to Berlin.”123 Berlin, in sum, embodied the
116. “The English Constitution,” October 1890, PWW 7, p. 41.
117. “A Newspaper Report of a Lecture on ‘Systems of City Government’,” April 8, 1890, PWW 6,
pp. 612-613.
118. “Notes for a Classroom Lecture,” February 14, 1889, PWW 6, p. 91.
119. “Notes for Lectures at the Johns Hopkins,” February 1892, PWW 7, pp. 388-391.
120. “A Newspaper Report of a Lecture on Municipal Government,” January 19, 1889, PWW 6,
p. 53.
121. “Note for a Public Lecture at the Johns Hopkins,” March 16, 1888, PWW 5, p. 712.
122. “A Newspaper Report of a Lecture on Municipal Government,” January 19, 1889, PWW 6,
p. 54.
123. Ibid., pp. 53-54.
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International Security 20:2 | 178
highest form of “self-government”: a most successful blend of popular partici-
pation with great administrative efficiency, a shining model to be emulated by
American reformers.
Conclusion: Implications for Theory and Policy
The claim that democracies do not fight one another is not about democracies
per se; it is better understood as a claim about peace among countries conform-
ing to a subjective ideal that is cast, not surprisingly, in America’s self-image.
Democracy is “our kind,” and the coding rules by which it is defined are but
the unconscious representations of current American political values. These
values are elastic over time, and their historical change is influenced by Amer-
ica’s changing international circumstances. The normative standards embodied
in the present definition of democracy were selected by a subtle historical
process whereby standards by which America resembled its adversaries have
been excluded, while those that maximized the distance between America and
its rivals have become privileged. In the process, not only has the perception
of friends and adversaries changed, but so has America’s own self-perception.
Democracy, therefore, is not a determinant as much as a product of America’s
foreign relations. The reason we appear not to fight “our kind” is not that
objective likeness substantially affects war propensity, but rather that we subtly
redefine “our kind.”
American political scientists do not stand apart from this historical process.
The political values espoused by scholars a century ago were rather different
than present values. John Burgess’s ideal political system was a Teutonic,
national, “democratic [read: constitutional] state with an aristocratic govern-
ment.”124 Woodrow Wilson was as fearful as Burgess of the untamed rule of
the demos, and by purifying the concept of democracy of its radical French
content he sought to make it safe for the world long before vowing to do the
converse. Wilson’s ideal polity was a constitutional (Aryan) state administered
efficiently by a selected, not necessarily elected, educated elite, insulated from
the ignorant masses. Relative to contemporary ideals, Imperial Germany ap-
peared more “normal” than relative to present norms, which prize fair electoral
process and executive responsibility For both Burgess and Wilson, Germany
was a member of a select group of the most politically advanced countries, far
124. Foundations, p. 76.
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constanzameneses
Resaltado
The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 179
more advanced than some of the nations that are currently coded as having
been “liberal” during that period.125 And within this group Germany was
ranked either as second only to the United States itself (Burgess), or as posi-
tioned below England yet above France (Wilson). What has changed since the
1890s was not the objective nature of the (Imperial) German polity as much
the nature of its political relations with America and, subsequently, the subjec-
tive norms by which it came to be measured. American social scientists are
deluding themselves if they believe that their scientific definitions are value-
free, or that their values are fixed in time and place. It is only from the
perspective of a secure and overwhelmingly victorious country that a time-
bound illusion can so easily be taken for a universal truth.
THE THEORETICAL CONTEXT
In the late 1930s, E.H. Carr was inspired by Mannheim’s sociology of knowl-
edge to expose the idealist foundations of the young English science of inter-
national relations. Building upon “the outstanding achievement of modern
realism”-revealing “the relative and pragmatic character of thought”-he
criticized the Wilsonian-liberal paradigm of the harmony of interests as the
unconscious product of the peculiar historical and geographic circumstances
of the English-speaking countries. Beneath the veneer of the objective concept
of international harmony, Carr argued, lay a post-hoc ideological justification of
Anglo-American mastery 126
By the dawn of the Cold War era, international relations has become a
predominantly American science.127 To Hans Morgenthau and fellow realists,
whose agenda was shaped by the lesson of Munich, Carr’s thought held only
a partial appeal, for as much as they admired his analysis of the bankruptcy
of liberal thought, they were justly reluctant to accept the policy conclusion the
analysis led him to: support of appeasement.128 Later, while the Cold War was
evolving into a “long peace,” the attraction of Carr’s historical realism eroded
further as a generation of “neo-realists” understandably found the analytical
125. E.g., Greece, Chile, Argentina, Italy; see Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” p. 1164.
126. Edward H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919-1939, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row,
1964 [1946]), esp. chap. 5. Quotations are from pp. 67-68. The influence of Karl Mannheim’s
Ideology and Utopia is acknowledged in Carr’s preface, p. ix.
127. Hoffmann, “An American Social Science,” pp. 44-45.
128. See Hans Morgenthau, “The Political Science of E.H. Carr,” World Politics, Vol. 1, No. 1
(October 1948), pp. 127-134. I thank Charles Lipson for bringing Carr’s pro-appeasement attitude
to my attention.
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International Security 20:2 | 180
tools of microeconomics more suitable for making sense of “the stability of a
bipolar world,”129 and for designing “deterrence” of a conveniently fixed ad-
versary. Indeed, in recent decades Carr’s legacy has not been upheld by realists
(or neo-realists) as much as by critical theorists, who were attracted to Carr’s
historicist-sociological approach.130
Now that the stability of the Cold War has given way to greater fluidity, and
so long as the new multipolarity does not yet seem to coincide with major war,
neo-realist theory appears out of alignment with the times. Its appeal is dimin-
ishing precisely when Wilsonian internationalism is re-issuing a formidable
challenge to realist pessimism in the form of the democratic peace claim. The
scientific, ahistorical tool kit of neo-realism is ill equipped to deal effectively
with the equally ahistorical and ostensibly more scientific neo-Wilsonian chal-
lenge. Engaging democratic peace theory on its own scientific ground-quib-
bling over particular coding decisions, the significance of statistical coefficients,
or the details of diplomatic cases-may usefully bruise it but does not critically
damage it.131 Instead, it may be time for realists to offer a more fundamental
critical exposition of the limits of the very ground. It is time for pessimists to
re-acquaint themselves with Carr’s historical sociology of knowledge.132 This
is the path I attempted to follow here.
129. Kenneth Waltz, “The Stability of a Bipolar World,” Daedalus, Vol. 93, No. 3 (Summer 1964),
pp. 881-909; and Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979).
130. Perhaps the most lucid statement of the nature of critical international relations theory, and
one which acknowledges Carr’s influence, is Robert Cox, “Social Forces, States, and World Orders:
Beyond International Relations Theory,” in Robert Keohane, Neorealism and Its Critics (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 204-254.
131. E.g., David Spiro, “The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace,” International Security, Vol. 19, No.
2 (Fall 1994), pp. 50-86; Christopher Layne, “Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace,”
ibid., pp. 5-49.
132. To the extent that realists re-adopt Carr’s historicist thought, they may find themselves
sharing some common ground with critical theorists. Of the variety of critical approaches currently
applied to international relations, this essay, in focusing on how an international interaction led to
“identity-change,” has an affinity with the social construction approach articulated by Alexander
Wendt; see Wendt, “Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,”
International Organization, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 391-425. My analysis differs from
Wendt’s approach in two ways, though. First, inasmuch as it centers on the construction of
knowledge by a community of scholars, my approach is more faithful to the label “social” (whereas
Wendt maintains the assumption that states are unitary actors; ibid., p. 21, note 2). Second, whereas
“constructivists” such as Wendt tend to discount the role of material capabilities (relative to social
interaction) in the construction of identities, my argument suggests that material power may be
very important. At minimum, it is a necessary condition for the interaction process. Had Germany,
for example, not possessed the material capability to challenge the U.S. Navy in Manila Bay, and
had the United States not possessed the capability to send a massive army to fight Germany across
the Atlantic, America’s identity would not have been affected by Germany more radically than it
has been shaped by, say, Luxembourg. More importantly, it is the very material fact of America’s
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The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 181
OTHER CASES AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS
Germany may not be the only nation that underwent a substantial transforma-
tion in the American mind, for in the twentieth century America faced two
other bitter enemies: Russia and Japan.
Several times in the past century Americans have come to believe that Russia
was closer to their ideals than they previously thought. In 1917-18 the United
States and Russia’s new Menshevik government were allied against Germany
Woodrow Wilson then declared that “Russia was known by those who knew
it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of
her thought.” Wilson himself apparently was not among those who knew
Russia best, since in his past writings he had never described it as anything
but a backward autocracy In 1917, though, he discovered that autocracy,
“terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin,
character, or purpose.” 133 A writer in the American Political Science Review struck
similar themes when he sought to refute the myth that the Russians were
“Asiatic” (read: inferior), to establish that “Russian Slavs in the early periods
of their national existence were democratic,” and to attribute the excesses of
Russian despotism to pervasive German influence.134
Russia’s image in America, tarnished following Wilson’s anti-Bolshevik mili-
tary intervention, improved again in the early 1930s. Against the backdrop of
deep capitalist crisis many liberal intellectuals (and not just “fellow travelers”)
looked to Russia for inspiration. Not only were they awed by Russia’s rapid
economic growth (contrasting sharply with America’s stagnation), they were
especially enamored of Soviet centralized planning.135 With the rise of the
Fascist threat and the formation of the popular front in 1935, Russia’s attraction
had grown so much that many liberal intellectuals were all too willing to
apologize for Stalin’s atrocities. Perhaps the most cogent philosophical justifica-
tion of “progressive” unity against Fascism was provided by political scientist
and popular commentator Frederick Schuman. Liberalism and communism, he
battlefield victory that accounts for the universal appeal of the identity known as “democracy.” As
noted earlier, had Germany won World War I, American scholars might have been busy searching
for peace among countries ruled by selfless professional bureaucracies and autonomous chief
executives, rather than among “democracies.”
133. Quotations from N. Gordon Levin, Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics (London: Oxford
University Press, 1968), pp. 42-43. Emphasis added to first quotation.
134. Simon Litman, “Revolutionary Russia,” Vol. 12, No. 2 (May 1918), pp. 181-191. Quotations
are from p. 187 and 182 respectively.
135. Stalin’s first five-year plan was praised even by the conservative New York Times. See Frank
A. Warren, Liberals and Communism: The “Red Decade” Revisited, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993), chap. 4.
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International Security 20:2 | 182
argued in 1936, shared common philosophical roots, and were both on the
“democratic” side; Russia and America were both democracies, and they might
become even more alike as the Russians moved toward greater political liberty
while America progressed toward greater economic equality.136
The positive image of Russia receded in 1939 as a result of the Nazi-Soviet
pact, only to be revived in 1941. The uncritical depiction of Russia and “Uncle
Joe” Stalin during the wartime alliance was not limited to the mass media.
Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin attributed the friendship between Russia
and America to the compatibility of their fundamental values and their socio-
cultural similarity 137 Harvard philosopher Ralph Barton Perry found that the
Soviets were moving away from Marxism “in the direction of ideas that we
can call, in very broad terms, democratic.” And theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
echoed Schuman’s view when he wrote that “we have, on the whole, more
liberty and less equality than Russia has. Russia has less liberty and more
equality Whether democracy should be defined primarily in terms of liberty
or equality is a source of unending debate.”138 The “unending debate” ended
abruptly with the outbreak of the Cold War. Not surprisingly, it was resolved
in favor of American liberty, against socialist equality, thus opening the door
to a historic reconciliation between the formerly contentious ideas of democ-
racy and free market capitalism.139
After the end of the Cold War, Americans again rushed to embrace Russia’s
“transition” toward American democratic ideals (now wedded to free market
ideals). American economists hurried to advise the Russians how to dismantle
their previously admired planned economy, while lawyers and political scien-
tists were eager to help remake Russian legal and political institutions. In those
euphoric days Americans widely agreed that if Russia were not a mature
democracy yet, it surely was a nascent one. At the present moment, however,
many Americans are far less certain of Russia’s democratic credentials. Why?
Has the Russian Parliament been shut down or the constitution suspended?
Has the president been violently overthrown? No, what has changed is not the
objective nature of the Russian political system as much as Russia’s external
behavior. The recent change in the American perception of the Russian polity
has been driven by an erosion of trust in Russia’s commitment to political
136. Ibid., pp. 109-110.
137. Pitirim Sorokin, Russia and the United States (New York: E. Dutton, 1944).
138. Quotations are from pp. 39 and 37 respectively in John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and
the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-47 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972).
139. Maier, “Democracy Since the French Revolution,” pp. 146-147.
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The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace | 183
cooperation more than by a genuine erosion of Russian “democracy” Another
Chechnya, another demonstration of Russian foreign policy assertiveness, and
those voices that currently invoke the “nascent democracy” image of Russia
might also turn silent.140
The practical moral of the story is straightforward. If history is any guide,
the American view of the democratic or non-democratic identity of Russia (or
the other formerly communist countries of Europe) will continue to depend on
the peacefulness of their foreign policies more than their foreign policies will
depend on their democratic identity The current American policy of “democ-
ratization” may be good for other reasons, but as a pillar of international peace
and security it is extremely shaky, for it lacks solid historical foundations.
As for Japan, given that in the late nineteenth century its leaders emulated
the Prussian model, and that it later fought alongside Germany against Amer-
ica, it is not surprising that Japan’s image in America underwent a transforma-
tion similar to Germany’s. As noted above, Japan’s adoption of Prussian
constitutionalism was hailed by Woodrow Wilson in 1889 as proof of her
“singular sagacity.” As Japan turned to external aggression, the notion of her
distinctiveness lingered but the moral sign attached to it shifted from positive
“singularity” to negative peculiarity This view is echoed, for example, by
Barrington Moore, a prominent social scientist who assigned Imperial Japan
(with Germany) to the “capitalist and reactionary” category of political devel-
opment.141 As Japan was remade by the American victors after 1945, a distinc-
tion was drawn between its deviant past and its more normal present.142
Indeed, by the coding rules used by students of the democratic peace, Japan is
presently a democracy, which is reflective of the mainstream view of Japan in
America today But there is also a dissenting account of Japan, depicting it as
democratic in form only (like France in Wilson’s eyes). Proponents of this
minority view stress the enormous power wielded by unelected Japanese
bureaucrats and argue that in Japan “the idea of ‘citizen’ as distinct from
‘subject’ is hardly understood. Pluralist representation exists on paper, of
course, but to believe that this informs Japanese practice is taking very much
140. Russian diplomats appear to understand this logic better than their Western counterparts.
Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev stated recently that “if Russia agrees with the West it is assumed
to be a new democracy. If not, it is assumed to be going back to the old days.” Quoted in “Foreign
Minister Defends Russia’s Policies,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, April 29, 1995, p. B7.
141. Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, p. 433.
142. On the postwar transformation of Japan’s image in America, see Akira Iriye, “War, Peace and
U.S.-Japanese Relations,” in Akira Iriye and Warren Cohen, The United States and Japan in the Postwar
World (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989), pp. 191-208.
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International Security 20:2 | 184
on faith.”‘143 Which of the competing views is more accurate, I do not know.
But what I do know is that if America ever fights Japan again, the current
mainstream and the minority views will trade places. This is what happened
to Imperial Germany (and probably to Japan itself). If, however, America and
Japan ever find themselves fighting a common enemy, Japan will be happily
vindicated from the charge that it is democratic in form only. This is exactly
what happened to France. Either way, the theory that “our kind do not fight
each other” will be safely salvaged.
143. Karel van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation (New
York: Knopf, 1989), p. 22. See also Chalmers Johnson and E.B. Keehn, “A Disaster in the Making:
Rational Choice and Asian Studies,” The National Interest, No. 36 (Summer 1994), pp. 14-22.
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- Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
p. 147
p. 148
p. 149
p. 150
p. 151
p. 152
p. 153
p. 154
p. 155
p. 156
p. 157
p. 158
p. 159
p. 160
p. 161
p. 162
p. 163
p. 164
p. 165
p. 166
p. 167
p. 168
p. 169
p. 170
p. 171
p. 172
p. 173
p. 174
p. 175
p. 176
p. 177
p. 178
p. 179
p. 180
p. 181
p. 182
p. 183
p. 184
International Security, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall, 1995) pp. 1-192
Front Matter [pp. 1-2]
Editors’ Note [pp. 3-4]
Exploding the Powder Keg Myth: Preemptive Wars Almost Never Happen [pp. 5-34]
Is the Environment a National Security Issue? [pp. 35-62]
Start II and the Politics of Arms Control in Russia [pp. 63-91]
Going Just a Little Nuclear: Nonproliferation Lessons from North Korea [pp. 92-122]
Democratic Peace Revisited
Polities and Peace [pp. 123-146]
The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace: Changing U.S. Perceptions of Imperial Germany [pp. 147-184]
Correspondence
Realism and the End of the Cold War [pp. 185-187]
Books Received [pp. 188-192]
Back Matter
The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory
Author(s): Sebastian Rosato
Source: The American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 4 (Nov., 2003), pp. 585-602
Published by: American Political Science Association
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American Political Science Review Vol. 97, No. 4 November 2003
The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory
SEBASTIAN ROSATO The University of Chicago
Democratic peace theory is probably the most powerful liberal contribution to the debate on the causes of war and peace. In this paper I examine the causal logics that underpin the theory
to determine whether they offer compelling explanations for the finding of mutual democratic
pacifism. Ifind that they do not. Democracies do not reliably externalize their domestic norms of conflict
resolution and do not trust or respect one another when their interests clash. Moreover, elected leaders
are not especially accountable to peace loving publics or pacific interest groups, democracies are not
particularly slow to mobilize or incapable of surprise attack, and open political competition does not
guarantee that a democracy will reveal private information about its level of resolve thereby avoiding
conflict. Since the evidence suggests that the logics do not operate as stipulated by the theory’s proponents,
there are good reasons to believe that while there is certainly peace among democracies, it may not be
caused by the democratic nature of those states.
emocratic peace theory-the claim that democ- them.2 An evaluation of democratic peace theory, then,
racies rarely fight one another because they rests on answering two questions. First, do the data sup-
share common norms of live-and-let-live and port the claim that democracies rarely fight each other?
domestic institutions that constrain the recourse to Second, is there a compelling explanation for why this
war–is probably the most powerful liberal contribu- should be the case?
tion to the debate on the causes of war and peace.1 If Democratic peace theorists have discovered a pow-
the theory is correct, it has important implications for erful empirical generalization: Democracies rarely go
both the study and the practice of international poli- to war or engage in militarized disputes with one an-
tics. Within the academy it undermines both the realist other. Although there have been several attempts to
claim that states are condemned to exist in a constant challenge these findings (e.g., Farber and Gowa 1997;
state of security competition and its assertion that the Layne 1994; Spiro 1994), the correlations remain ro-
structure of the international system, rather than state bust (e.g., Maoz 1998; Oneal and Russett 1999; Ray
type, should be central to our understanding of state 1995; Russett 1993; Weart 1998). Nevertheless, some
behavior. In practical terms democratic peace theory scholars argue that while there is certainly peace among
provides the intellectual justification for the belief that democracies, it may be caused by factors other than the
spreading democracy abroad will perform the dual task democratic nature of those states (Farber and Gowa
of enhancing American national security and promot- 1997; Gartzke 1998; Layne 1994). Farber and Gowa
ing world peace. (1997), for example, suggest that the Cold War largely
In this article I offer an assessment of democratic explains the democratic peace finding. In essence, they
peace theory. Specifically, I examine the causal logics are raising doubts about whether there is a convinc-
that underpin the theory to determine whether they ing causal logic that explains how democracies inter-
offer compelling explanations for why democracies do act with each other in ways that lead to peace. To
not fight one another. resolve this debate, we must take the next step in
A theory is comprised of a hypothesis stipulating an the testing process: determining the persuasiveness of
association between an independent and a dependent the various causal logics offered by democratic peace
variable and a causal logic that explains the connec- theorists.
tion between those two variables. To test a theory fully, A causal logic is a statement about how an inde-
we should determine whether there is support for the pendent variable exerts a causal effect on a depen-
hypothesis, that is, whether there is a correlation be- dent variable. It elaborates a specific chain of causal
tween the independent and the dependent variables mechanisms that connects these variables and takes the
and whether there is a causal relationship between following form: A (the independent variable) causes
B (the dependent variable) because A causes x, which
causes y, which causes B (see, e.g., Elster 1989, 3-10). In
the case at hand, democratic peace theorists maintain
Sebastian Rosato is Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Sci- that democracy has various effects, such as support for
ence, The University of Chicago, 5828 South University Avenue, peaceful norms of conflict resolution, which, in turn,
Chicago, IL 60637 (srosato@uchicago.edu).
I would like to thank Alexander Downes, John Mearsheimer, increase the prospect for peace.
Susan Pratt, Duncan Snidal, and three anonymous reviewers for their I adopt two strategies for testing the persuasiveness
helpful comments and suggestions and the Smith Richardson Foun- of the causal logics that underpin democratic peace
dation for financial support. A previous version of this paper was theory. First, I take each logic at face value and ask
presented at The University of Chicago’s Program on International
Politics, Economics and Security (PIPES).
1 The democratic peace research program has generated several ad-
ditional empirical regularities. See, for example, Bueno de Mesquita 2 On correlation versus causation see Dessler 1991 and Waltz 1979,
et al. 1999, 791. 1-13.
585
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The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory November 2003
FIGURE 1. Democratic Peace Theory’s Causal Logics
Logic Independent Causal Mechanisms Dependent
Variable Variable
Normative Democracy – Externalization – Trust and Respect – Peace
Institutional Democracy – Accountability – Public Constraint — Peace
Institutional Democracy Accountability – Group Constraint – Peace
Institutional Democracy — Accountability – Slow Mobilization – Peace
Institutional Democracy – Accountability -+ No Surprise Attack – Peace
Institutional Democracy – Accountability – Information — Peace
whether the hypothesized causal mechanisms oper-
ate as stipulated by the theory’s proponents (George
and McKeown 1985, 34-41; King, Keohane, and Verba
1994, 226-28; Van Evera 1997, 64-66). In other words,
does the available evidence support the claims that A
causes x, that x causes y, and that y causes B? If it
does, then the theory must be considered compelling
because, as mentioned above, it is widely agreed that
there is strong correlational support for its main hy-
pothesis. If not, there is good reason to be skeptical of
the theory.
Second, I use the logics to generate additional
testable propositions about the effects of democracy on
state behavior. If we accept that A does cause x, that
x causes y, and that y causes B, then logical deduction
can yield other propositions that should also be true.
These too can be checked against the historical record,
and the theory will be strengthened or weakened to
the extent that they find empirical support. Before per-
forming these tests, however, a brief summary of the
causal logics is in order.
CAUSAL LOGICS
Normative Logic
Proponents of the normative logic argue that one im-
portant effect of democracy is to socialize political elites
to act on the basis of democratic norms whenever pos-
sible. In essence, these norms mandate nonviolent con-
flict resolution and negotiation in a spirit of live-and-
let-live.3 Because democratic leaders are committed
to these norms they try, as far as possible, to adopt
them in the international arena. This in turn means that
democracies both trust and respect one another when a
conflict of interest arises between them. Sentiments of
respect derive from a conviction that the other state ad-
heres to the same norms and is therefore just and wor-
thy of accommodation. Trust derives from the expecta-
tion that the other party to the dispute is also inclined
to respect a fellow democracy and will be proscribed
normatively from resorting to force. Together these two
causal mechanisms-norm externalization and mutual
trust and respect-make up the normative logic and ex-
plain why democracies rarely fight one another (e.g.,
Dixon 1994, 16-18; Russett 1993, 31-35; Weart 1998,
77-78, 87-93) (Fig. 1).
While mutual trust and respect generally ensure that
conflicts of interest between democracies are resolved
amicably, there will be some situations in which osten-
sibly democratic states do not perceive each other to
be democratic and therefore fight one another. In par-
ticular, a democracy may not be recognized as such if
it is in the early stages of democratization or if it does
not meet the criteria that policymakers in another state
have adopted to define democracy (e.g., Russett 1993,
34-35; Weart 1998, 90-92, 132-34).
This logic also explains why democracies have of-
ten been prepared to go to war with nondemocracies.
Simply put, nondemocracies are neither trusted nor re-
spected. They are not respected because their domestic
systems are considered unjust, and they are not trusted
because neither do they respect the freedom of self-
governing individuals, nor are they socialized to resolve
conflicts non-violently. Large-scale violence may there-
fore occur for one of two reasons. First, democracies
may not respect nondemocracies because they are con-
sidered to be in a state of war against their own citizens.
War may therefore be permissible to free the people
from authoritarian rule and introduce human rights or
representative government. Second, because democ-
racies are inclined toward peaceful conflict resolution,
nondemocracies may be tempted to try and extract con-
cessions from them by attacking or threatening to use
force during a crisis. In such circumstances democra-
cies may either have to defend themselves from attack
or launch preemptive strikes (e.g., Doyle 1997, 30-43;
Russett 1993, 32-35).
3 Strictly speaking, liberal and democratic norms are not equivalent
and may be contradictory. With some notable exceptions, however,
democratic peace theorists have tended to equate the two. I therefore
use the terms “liberal state,” “democracy,” and “liberal democracy”
interchangeably throughout my discussion of the normative logic to
mean states based on both liberal and democratic norms. On liberal
theory and norms see Doyle 1997, 4-7, and Owen 1997, 32-37. On
democratic theory and norms as defined by democratic peace theo-
rists see Dixon 1994, 15-16; Russett 1993, 31; and Weart 1998, 59-61.
586
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American Political Science Review Vol. 97, No. 4
Institutional Logic
According to the institutional logic, democratic insti-
tutions and processes make leaders accountable to a
wide range of social groups that may, in a variety
of circumstances, oppose war. Accountability derives
from the fact that political elites want to remain in of-
fice, that there are opposition parties ready to capitalize
on unpopular policies, and that there are regular op-
portunities for democratic publics to remove elites who
have not acted in their best interests. Moreover, several
features of democracies, such as freedom of speech and
open political processes, make it fairly easy for voters
to rate a government’s performance. In short, monitor-
ing and sanctioning democratic leaders is a relatively
straightforward matter (e.g., Lake 1992, 25-26; Owen
1997, 41-43; Russett 1993, 38-40).
Because they are conscious of their accountability,
democratic leaders will only engage in large-scale vio-
lence if there is broad popular support for their actions.
This support is essential both because they may be re-
moved from office for engaging in an unpopular war
and because society as a whole, or subsets of it, can
be expected to oppose costly or losing wars. There are
several social groups that may need to be mobilized to
support a war including the general public, those groups
that benefit from an open international economy, op-
position political parties, and liberal opinion leaders.
The idea that publics generally oppose wars because of
the costs they impose can be traced back to Kant’s Per-
petual Peace and continues to inform democratic peace
theorists today (Doyle 1997, 24-25; Russett 1993, 38-
39). Another established intellectual tradition argues
that economic interdependence creates interest groups
that are opposed to war because it imposes costs by
disrupting international trade and investment (Doyle
1997, 26-27). Still other scholars have argued that op-
position parties can choose to support a government if
it is carrying out a popular policy or to oppose it for ini-
tiating domestically unpopular policies (Schultz 1998,
831-32). Finally, Owen has focused on the role of lib-
eral opinion leaders in foreign policy decisions. These
elites oppose violence against states they consider to be
liberal and can expect the general public to share their
views in times of crisis (Owen 1997,19, 37-39, 45-47; see
also Mintz and Geva 1993). In short, domestic groups
may oppose war because it is costly, because they can
gain politically from doing so, or simply because they
deem it morally unacceptable.
Five causal mechanisms, and therefore five variants
of the institutional logic, flow from elite accountability
and the need to mobilize social groups for war. Each
outlines a different path to peace between democra-
cies. Two of them claim that democracies will often be
unwilling to resort to force in an international crisis.
According to the public constraint mechanism, this re-
luctance arises because leaders respond to the general
public’s aversion to war. The group constraint mecha-
nism is similar; democratic leaders carry out the wishes
of antiwar groups. In a crisis involving two democra-
cies, then, the leaders of both states are constrained
from engaging in large-scale violence, perceive their
counterparts to be similarly constrained, and will be
inclined to come to an agreement short of war (e.g.,
Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman 1992, 155-58; Russett
1993, 38-40).4
Two other causal mechanisms focus on the claim that
democracies are slow to use force. The slow mobiliza-
tion mechanism holds that democracies cannot mobi-
lize quickly because persuading the public and poten-
tial antiwar groups to support military action is a long
and complex process. The surprise attack mechanism
shares this insight but also notes that mobilization takes
place in the public domain, thereby precluding the pos-
sibility of a surprise attack by a democracy. In purely
democratic crises, then, both sides will have the time to
come to a mutually acceptable agreement and be able
to negotiate in good faith without fearing attack (e.g.,
Russett 1993, 38-40).
Finally, the information mechanism suggests that
democracies provide information that can avert wars.
Because democratic elites are accountable to their cit-
izens and can expect opposition parties to oppose un-
popular policies, they will be cautious about deciding to
escalate a crisis or commit the country to war. Indeed,
they will only select themselves into conflicts if they
place a high value on the outcome of those conflicts, if
they expect escalation to be popular at home, if there
is a good chance that they will emerge victorious, and if
they are prepared to fight hard. This sends a clear signal
to other parties: If a democracy escalates or stands firm,
it is highly resolved. In democratic crises, then, both
states will have good information about the resolve of
the other party, will be unlikely to misrepresent their
own resolve, and will therefore be able to reach a ne-
gotiated solution rather than incur the risks and costs
associated with the use of force (Bueno de Mesquita
et al. 1999, 802-03; Schultz 1998, 840-41; see also Reiter
and Stam 1998 and Fearon 1994).
These mechanisms also explain why democracies will
often fight nondemocracies even as they remain at
peace with one another. Nondemocratic leaders cannot
be easily sanctioned or monitored and consequently do
not need to enlist broad support when deciding to go to
war. This means that they are, in general, more likely to
act aggressively by either initiating military hostilities
or exploiting the inherent restraint of democracies by
pressing for concessions during a crisis. Alternatively,
they may be unable to signal their true level of resolve.
Wars between democracies and nondemocracies can
therefore occur for three reasons. First, democracies
may have to defend themselves from the predatory ac-
tions of nondemocracies. Second, they may have to pre-
empt nondemocracies that could become aggressive in
the future or attack rather than give in to unacceptable
negotiating demands during a crisis. Third, they may
decide to fight nondemocracies in the mistaken belief
that peaceful bargains are not available (e.g., Bueno de
Mesquita and Lalman 1992, 158-60; Lake 1992, 26-30;
Russett 1993, 39-40).
4 It may not be necessary for two states to perceive each other to be
constrained. The fact that they are both constrained may in itself be
sufficient to ensure that war does not break out.
587
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The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory November 2003
FLAWS IN THE NORMATIVE LOGIC
The causal mechanisms that comprise the normative
logic do not appear to operate as stipulated. The avail-
able evidence suggests that, contrary to the claims of
democratic peace theorists, democracies do not reliably
externalize their domestic norms of conflict resolution,
nor do they generally treat each other with trust and
respect when their interests clash. Moreover, existing
attempts to repair the logic are unconvincing.
Norm Externalization
The historical record indicates that democracies have
often failed to adopt their internal norms of conflict
resolution in an international context. This claim rests,
first, on determining what democratic norms say about
the international use of force and, second, on estab-
lishing whether democracies have generally adhered
to these prescriptions.
Liberal democratic norms narrowly circumscribe the
range of situations in which democracies can justify the
use of force. As Doyle (1997, 25) notes, “Liberal wars
are only fought for popular, liberal purposes.” This does
not mean that they will go to war less often than other
kinds of states; it only means that there are fewer rea-
sons available to them for waging war.
Democracies are certainly justified in fighting wars of
self-defense. Locke ([1690] 1988), for example, argues
that states, like men in the state of nature, have a right
to destroy those who violate their rights to life, liberty,
and property (269-72). There is considerable disagree-
ment among liberal theorists regarding precisely what
kinds of action constitute self-defense, but repulsing an
invasion, preempting an impending military attack, and
fighting in the face of unreasonable demands all plausi-
bly fall under this heading. Waging war when the other
party has not engaged in threatening behavior does
not. In short, democracies should only go to war when
“their safety and security are seriously endangered by
the expansionist policies of outlaw states” (Rawls 1999,
90-91).
Another justification for the use of force is inter-
vention in the affairs of other states or peoples, either
to prevent blatant human rights violations or to bring
about conditions in which liberal values can take root.
For Rawls (1999, 81), as for many liberals, human rights
violators are “to be condemned and in grave cases may
be subjected to forceful sanctions and even to inter-
vention” (see also Doyle 1997, 31-32, and Owen 1997,
34-35). Mill ([1859] (1984)) extends the scope of inter-
vention, arguing that “barbarous” nations can be con-
quered to civilize them for their own benefit (see also
Mehta 1990). However, if external rule does not ensure
freedom and equality, it will be as illiberal as the system
it seeks to replace. Consequently, intervention can only
be justified if it is likely to “promote the development
of conditions in which appropriate principles of justice
can be satisfied” (Beitz 1979, 90).
The imperialism of Europe’s great powers between
1815 and 1975 provides good evidence that liberal
democracies have often waged war for reasons other
than self-defense and the inculcation of liberal values.
Although there were only a handful of liberal democra-
cies in the international system during this period, they
were involved in 66 of the 108 wars listed in the Cor-
relates of War (COW) dataset of extrasystemic wars
(Singer and Small 1994). Of these 66 wars, 33 were “im-
perial,” fought against previously independent peoples,
and 33 were “colonial,” waged against existing colonies.
It is hard to justify the “imperial” wars in terms of
self-defense. Several cases are clear-cut: The democ-
racy faced no immediate threat and conquered sim-
ply for profit or to expand its sphere of influence. A
second set of cases includes wars waged as a result of
imperial competition: Liberal democracies conquered
non-European peoples in order to create buffer states
against other empires or to establish control over them
before another imperial power could move in. Thus
Britain tried to conquer Afghanistan (1838) in order
to create a buffer state against Russia, and France in-
vaded Tunisia (1881) for fear of an eventual Italian
occupation. Some commentators describe these wars
as defensive because they aimed to secure sources of
overseas wealth, thereby enhancing national power at
the expense of other European powers. There are three
reasons to dispute this assessment. First, these wars
were often preventive rather than defensive: Russia
had made no move to occupy Afghanistan and Italy
had taken no action in Tunisia. A war designed to avert
possible action in the future, but for which there is no
current evidence, is not defensive. Second, there was
frequently a liberal alternative to war. Rather than
impose authoritarian rule, liberal great powers could
have offered non-European peoples military assistance
in case of attack or simply deterred other imperial
powers. Finally, a substantial number of the preventive
occupations were a product of competition between
Britain and France, two liberal democracies that should
have trusted one another and negotiated in good faith
without compromising the rights of non-Europeans if
democratic peace theory is correct.
A third set of cases includes wars waged directly
against non-Europeans whose territory bordered the
European empires. Because non-Europeans some-
times initiated these wars contemporaries tended to
justify them as defensive wars of “pacification” to pro-
tect existing imperial possessions. Again, there are
good reasons to doubt the claim that such wars were
defensive. In the first place, non-Europeans often at-
tacked to prevent further encroachment on their lands;
it was they and not the Europeans that were fighting in
self-defense. Moreover, there is considerable evidence
that the imperial powers often provoked the attacks or
acted preventively and exploited local instabilities as a
pretext for imposing control on the periphery of their
empires (Table 1).
Nor were any of the extrasystemic wars fought to
prevent egregious abuses of human rights or with the
express purpose of replacing autocratic rule with a
more liberal alternative. The “colonial” wars, by defini-
tion, were conflicts in which imperial powers sought to
perpetuate or reimpose autocratic rule. The “imperial”
wars simply replaced illiberal indigenous government
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American Political Science Review Vol. 97, No. 4
TABLE 1. Imperial Wars Involving Liberal Democracies
War Description
British-Zulu, 1838 Zulus retaliated against territorial encroachment. Suppressed.
British-Afghan, 1838 Preventive war to create buffer against Russia. No Russian action.
First Opium, 1839 British attempt to force open Chinese markets.
British-Baluchi, 1843 Annexation to control southern route to Afghanistan and border regions.
Uruguayan Dispute, 1845 British intervention in local conflict.
British-Sikh, 1845 Attempt to control Sikhs. Massed troops on border. Sikhs preempted.
British-Kaffir, 1846 Kaffirs retaliated against territorial encroachment. Suppressed.
British-Sikh, 1848 Revolt against British control. Suppressed and annexed.
British-Burmese, 1852 Annexation after Burmese court insulted British merchants.
Second Opium, 1856 British attempt to force open Chinese markets.
British-Maori, 1860 Maoris retaliated against territorial encroachment. Suppressed.
British-Bhutanese, 1865 Expedition to eliminate Bhutanese threat to control on empire’s periphery.
British-Ethiopian, 1867 Invasion in retaliation for imprisonment of British subjects.
Franco-Tonkin, 1873 Disorder in Tonkin used as pretext for expanding influence.
Dutch-Achinese, 1873 Dutch demanded control of ports. Aceh refused, so Dutch invaded.
British-Afghan, 1878 Preventive war to establish control before Russia attempted to do so.
British-Zulu, 1879 Provoked Zulu attack to establish control and prevent growth of Zulu power.
Franco-Tunisian, 1881 Preventive war: fear Italy would seek control. No Italian action.
Franco-Indochinese, 1882 Attempt to impose control.
Franco-Madagascan, 1883 Attempt to consolidate sphere of influence.
British-Burmese, 1885 Preventive war: fear France would seek control. No French action.
Mandigo, 1885 French attempt to establish control.
Franco-Dahomeyan, 1889 Conquest to provide access to Niger River and evade British customs.
Franco-Senegalese, 1890 Attempt to control and exploit resources of West Africa.
Belgian-Congolese, 1892 Attempt to control and exploit resources of Congo.
British-Ashanti, 1893 Attempt to establish control and preempt France. No French action.
Franco-Madagascan, 1894 Conquest to consolidate control.
Mahdi Uprising, 1896 British attempt to control Nile and preempt France. No French action.
British-Nigerian, 1897 Attempt to establish control. Punitive expedition for killings of Europeans.
Boer, 1899 British preventive war to destroy growing power of Boers.
First Moroccan, 1911 French attempt to establish control: feared German action. No such action.
British-Afghan, 1919 Afghan attempt to escape British control.
Franco-Syrian, 1920 Attempt to establish influence. Syria declared independence in 1918.
Note: I use Przeworski et al. 2000, 18-29 throughout to code states as democratic or nondemocratic. Where they do not provide a coding
I use their criteria to determine regime type. (1) The chief executive must be directly elected or responsible to an elected legislature.
(2) The legislature must be elected. (3) There must be more than one party. If there were no parties, there was only one party, the
incumbents established nonparty or one-party rule, or the incumbents unconstitutionally closed the legislature and rewrote the rules
in their favor, then the regime was nondemocratic. (4) Incumbents must allow the possibility that they will lose an election and allow a
lawful alternation of office if defeated in elections. These criteria precisely replicate the features that democratic peace theorists claim
are characteristic of democracy (e.g., Dixon 1994, 15-16; Russett 1993, 14-16, 31; Weart 1998, 59-61). A complete dataset based on
these criteria and covering all states from 1800 to 1999 is available upon request. I use Doyle 1997 to code states as liberal or illiberal.
To be a liberal democracy, then, a state must be both liberal as defined by Doyle and democratic as defined by Przeworski et al.
Sources: Farwell 1972; Featherstone 1973; Haythornthwaite 1995; Hernon 2000.
with authoritarian rule. When imperial rule was not
imposed directly, the European powers supported lo-
cal elites but retained strict control over their actions,
thereby underwriting unjust political systems and ef-
fectively implementing external rule. In short, despite
protestations that they were bearing the “white man’s
burden,” there is little evidence that liberal states’ use
of force was motivated by respect for human rights
or that imperial conquest enhanced the rights of non-
Europeans.s
There are, then, several examples of liberal states
violating liberal norms in their conduct of foreign pol-
icy and therefore the claim that liberal states generally
externalize their internal norms of conflict resolution
is open to question.
Proponents of the democratic peace have down-
played the importance of these findings in three ways.
First, they have restated their argument and claimed
that democracies remain at peace because they trust
and respect one other and fight nondemocracies be-
cause they neither trust nor respect them. As Doyle
(1997, 32) notes, “Extreme lack of public respect or
trust is one of the major features that distinguishes re-
lations between liberal and nonliberal societies from
relations among liberal societies.” According to this re-
statement, we should not be surprised to observe Euro-
pean democracies fighting non-Europeans and the nor-
mative logic can therefore accommodate the imperial
evidence. This alternative presentation of the logic is,
5 An analysis of decolonization is beyond the scope of this paper, but
some preliminary comments are in order. According to Russett (1993,
35), decolonization came about at least in part because Western forms
of self-rule took root in the colonies and the European powers there-
fore “lost confidence in their normative right to rule.” The evidence
suggests otherwise. Of the 67 states that gained their independence
between 1950 and 1980, 50 had autocratic governments (Przeworski
et al. 2000, 59-69).
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The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory November 2003
however, ad hoc. A more satisfying logic, and the one
put forward by most democratic peace theorists, is more
complex: Democracies rarely fight each other because
they trust and respect one another, and they are able to
do so because they know that their democratic coun-
terparts will act on the basis of democratic norms, that
is, they will only fight in self-defense or to democra-
tize others. The key to this logic is that democracies
must reliably externalize democratic norms. If they do,
then trust and respect will prevail; if they do not, then
we cannot be confident that peace will obtain between
them. The history of imperialism suggests that they do
not and therefore casts doubt on the normative logic’s
explanatory power.
Second, democratic peace theorists have claimed
that Britain, France, and the United States were not
sufficiently liberal in the period under review and thus
cannot be expected to reliably externalize their internal
norms (e.g., Rawls 1999, 53-54). If this claim is true, the
normative logic cannot tell us a great deal about inter-
national politics. Britain, France, and the United States
are generally considered to be classic liberal democra-
cies; if they cannot be expected to behave in a liberal
fashion, then few, if any, states can.
Finally, democratic peace theorists assert that they do
not claim that liberal norms are the sole determinant of
decisions for war; factors such as power and contiguity
matter as well (e.g., Russett 1995). This defense would
be convincing if I were claiming that liberal norms were
not the only factors that went into decision making or
that they were not as important in the decision making
process as other factors. However, the claim made here
is quite different: Liberal states have consistently vio-
lated liberal norms when deciding to go to war. It is not
that liberal norms only matter a little; they have often
made no difference at all.
In sum, there are good reasons to believe that one of
the normative logic’s key causal mechanisms does not
operate as advertised. Liberal democratic great powers
have frequently violated liberal norms in their deci-
sions for war, thereby casting doubt on the claim that
democracies generally externalize their internal norms
of conflict resolution.
Trust and Respect
The available evidence suggests that democracies do
not have a powerful inclination to treat each other with
trust and respect when their interests clash. Instead,
they tend to act like any other pair of states, bargaining
hard, issuing threats, and, if they believe it is warranted,
using military force.
Cold War Interventions. American interventions to
destabilize fellow democracies in the developing world
provide good evidence that democracies do not always
treat each other with trust and respect when they have
a conflict of interest. In each case, Washington’s com-
mitment to containing the spread of communism over-
whelmed any respect for fellow democracies. Although
none of the target states had turned to communism
or joined the communist bloc, and were led by what
were at most left-leaning democratically elected gov-
ernments, American officials chose neither to trust nor
to respect them, preferring to destabilize them by force
and replace them with autocratic (but anticommunist)
regimes rather than negotiate with them in good faith
or secure their support by diplomatic means (Table 2).
TABLE 2. American Cold War Interventions Against Democracies
Target Description
Iran (1953) Mossadeq’s foreign policy aimed at disengagement from superpower rivalry. Domestically,
allied with or suppressed communists as necessary. United States assisted coup that
overthrew him.
Guatemala (1954) Four communists in government and hardly any in general population. Army, the key
institution in politics, was anticommunist. Arbentz undertook a number of leftist reform
programs. United States financed and directed invasion that replaced him.
Indonesia (1957-) Sukarno’s “guided democracy” only way simultaneously to democratize Indonesia and
prevent civil war. Communists performed well in 1955 elections. United States assisted
rebels seeking to oust Sukarno.
British Guyana (1961-) Jagan consistently sought American support. Washington convinced he was leftist and
sponsored terrorist efforts to subvert him, then changed election laws to remove him.
Brazil (1961, 1964) American role in Quadros’s resignation (1961) unclear. Goulart’s foreign policy neutral. At
home made no effort to legalize communist party or extend term illegally. Accepted East
European aid and undertook some leftist reforms. United States assisted in red scare
and coup that overthrew him.
Chile (1973) Allende a socialist, but legislature controlled by center-right. United States approved
Chilean military coup that overthrew him.
Nicaragua (1984-) Sandinistas were more democratic than American-backed Somoza dynasty. Held elections
in 1984 and bowed to international pressure in respecting a number of civil rights. United
States sought to roll back apparent communist threat.
Note: Democratic Britain assisted the United States in Iran and British Guyana. For regime coding see Table 1. Iran had not yet experienced
a peaceful transfer of power in 1953. The American-backed coup meant that Mossadeq was not given an opportunity to prove that he
would hand over power were he to lose an election. He was, however, democratically elected and committed to future elections.
Sources: Barnet 1968; Bill 1988; Forsythe 1992; Gardner 1997; Gleijeses 1991; Gurtov 1974; Leacock 1990; Ryan 1995; Sater 1990;
Tillema 1973; Weis 1993.
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American Political Science Review Vol. 97, No. 4
Three features of these cases deserve emphasis. First,
all the regimes that the United States sought to un-
dermine were democratic. In the cases of Guatemala,
British Guyana, Brazil, and Chile democratic pro-
cesses were fairly well established. Iran, Indonesia, and
Nicaragua were fledgling democracies but Mossadeq,
Sukarno, and the Sandinistas could legitimately claim
to be the first proponents of democracy in their re-
spective countries. Every government with the excep-
tion of the Sandinistas was replaced by a succession of
American-backed dictatorial regimes.
Second, in each case the clash of interests between
Washington and the target governments was not par-
ticularly severe. These should, then, be easy cases for
democratic peace theory since trust and respect are
most likely to be determinative when the dispute is
minor. None of the target governments were commu-
nist, and although some of them pursued leftist policies
there was no indication that they intended to impose
a communist model or that they were actively court-
ing the Soviet Union. In spite of the limited scope of
disagreement, respect for democratic forms of govern-
ment was consistently subordinated to an expanded
conception of national security.
Third, there is good evidence that support for democ-
racy was often sacrificed in the name of American
economic interests. At least some of the impetus for
intervention in Iran came in response to the national-
ization of the oil industry, the United Fruit Company
pressed for action in Guatemala, International Tele-
phone and Telegraph urged successive administrations
to intervene in Brazil and Chile, and Allende’s efforts
to nationalize the copper industry fueled demands that
the Nixon administration destabilize his government.
In sum, the record of American interventions in the
developing world suggests that democratic trust and
respect has often been subordinated to security and
economic interests.
Democratic peace theorists generally agree that
these interventions are examples of a democracy using
force against other democracies, but they offer two rea-
sons why covert interventions should not count against
the normative logic. The first reason is that the target
states were not democratic enough to be trusted and
respected (Forsythe 1992; Russett 1993, 120-24). This
claim is not entirely convincing. Although the target
states may not have been fully democratic, they were
more democratic than the regimes that preceded and
succeeded them and were democratizing further. In-
deed, in every case American action brought more au-
tocratic regimes to power.
The second reason is that these interventions were
covert, a fact believed by democratic peace theorists
to reveal the strength of their normative argument. It
was precisely because these states were democratic that
successive administrations had to act covertly rather
than openly initiate military operations. Knowing that
their actions were illegitimate, and fearing a public
backlash, American officials decided on covert action
(Forsythe 1992; Russett 1993, 120-24). This defense
fails to address some important issues. To begin with, it
ignores the fact that American public officials, that is,
the individuals that democratic peace theory claims are
most likely to abide by liberal norms, showed no respect
for fellow democracies. Democratic peace theorists will
respond that the logic holds, however, because these
officials were restrained from using open and massive
force by the liberal attitudes of the mass public. This
is a debatable assertion; after all, officials may have
opted for covert and limited force for a variety of rea-
sons other than public opinion, such as operational
costs and the expected international reaction. Simply
because the use of force was covert and limited, this
does not mean that its nature was determined by public
opinion.
But even if it is true that officials adopted a covert
policy to shield themselves from a potential public
backlash, the logic still has a crucial weakness: The
fact remains that the United States did not treat fellow
democracies with trust or respect. Ultimately, the logic
stands or falls by its predictive power, that is, whether
democracies treat each other with respect. If they do,
it is powerful; if they do not, it is weakened. It does not
matter why they do not treat each other with respect,
nor does it matter if some or all of the population wants
to treat the other state with respect; all that matters
is whether respect is extended. To put it another way,
we can come up with several reasons to explain why
respect is not extended, and we can always find social
groups that oppose the use of military force against
another democracy, but whenever we find several ex-
amples of a democracy using military force against
other democracies, the trust and respect mechanism,
and therefore the normative logic, fails an important
test.6
Great Powers. Layne (1994) and Rock (1997) have
found further evidence that democracies do not treat
each other with trust and respect in their analyses of
diplomatic crises involving Britain, France, Germany,
and the United States. Layne examines four prominent
cases in which rival democracies almost went to war
with one another and asks whether the crises were re-
solved because of mutual trust and respect. His con-
clusion offers scant support for the normative logic:
“In each of these crises, at least one of the democratic
states involved was prepared to go to war….. In each
of the four crises, war was avoided not because of the
‘live and let live’ spirit of peaceful dispute resolution at
6 We cannot conclusively reject the trust and respect mechanism on
the basis of these cases since the United States may have been sig-
nificantly more likely to intervene covertly against nondemocracies
during the Cold War. Creating a comprehensive dataset of covert in-
terventions to test this claim is, however, unlikely to be a simple task.
Moreover, a chi-square test indicates that we would have to find in
excess of 30 American covert interventions against nondemocracies
before we could claim that it was significantly more likely to inter-
vene covertly against nondemocracies than democracies (p < .05).
This calculation rests on (a) the fact that there were 1,682 years of
democracy and 3,007 years of nondemocracy between 1950 and 1990
(Przeworski et al. 2000, 29); (b) the fact that there were eight covert
interventions against democracies in this period; and (c) the assump-
tion that the United States had the capacity to intervene anywhere
in the world in any given year.
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The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory November 2003
TABLE 3. American Perceptions of Liberal Status of Foreign Powers
Party Status Party Status Level of Consensus
Britain 1794-96 Federalists Liberal Republicans Illiberal No across-party agreement
France 1796-98 Federalists Illiberal Republicans Liberal No across-party agreement
Britain 1803-12 Federalists Liberal Republicans Illiberal No across-party agreement
Britain 1845-46 Whigs Liberal Democrats Illiberal No across-party agreement
Mexico 1845-46 Whigs Liberal Democrats Illiberal No across-party agreement
Britain 1861-63 Republicans Liberal Democrats Illiberal No across-party agreement
Spain 1873-73 Republicans Mixed Democrats Mixed No within-party agreement
Chile 1891-92 Republicans Mixed Democrats Mixed No within-party agreement
Britain 1895-96 Republicans Mixed Democrats Mixed No within-party agreement
Spain 1896-98 Republicans Illiberal Democrats Illiberal Consensus-illiberal
Source: Owen 1997.
democratic peace theory’s core, but because of realist
factors” (Layne 1994, 38).7
Similarly, Rock finds little evidence that shared lib-
eral values helped resolve any of the crises between
Britain and the United States in the nineteenth cen-
tury. In addition, his analyses of the turn-of-the-century
“great rapprochement” and naval arms control during
the 1920s show that even in cases where liberal states re-
solved potentially divisive issues in a spirit of accommo-
dation, shared liberal values had only a limited effect.
In both cases peace was overdetermined and “liberal
values and democratic institutions were not the only
factors inclining Britain and the United States toward
peace, and perhaps not even the dominant ones” (Rock
1997, 146).8
In sum, the trust and respect mechanism does not
appear to work as specified. Shared democratic values
provide no guarantee that states will both trust and
respect one another. Instead, and contrary to the nor-
mative logic’s claims, when serious conflicts of interest
arise between democracies there is little evidence that
they will be inclined to accommodate each other’s de-
mands or refrain from engaging in hard line policies.
Repaired Normative Logic
Given that democracies have not treated each other as
the normative logic predicts, democratic peace theo-
rists have tried to repair the logic by introducing a new
causal factor: perceptions. In the revised version of the
logic, democracies will only trust and respect one an-
other if they consider each other to be democratic. This
adjustment can only improve the logic’s explanatory
power if we can predict how democracies will catego-
rize other states with a high level of confidence and if
this categorization is relatively stable. The available ev-
idence suggests, however, that policymakers’ personal
beliefs and party affiliations, or strategic interest, often
preclude coherent, accurate, and stable assessments of
regime type, thereby lessening our confidence that joint
democracy enables democracies to remain at peace.
Elusive Consensus. There is rarely agreement, even
among well-informed policymakers, about the demo-
cratic status of a foreign power and we are, there-
fore, unlikely to be able to predict how democracies
will classify other states’ regime type with a high level
of confidence.9 Owen (1997) has examined the views
of liberal elites in 10 war-threatening crises involving
the United States and another state between 1794 and
1898. In six of the cases, the major political parties in
the United States disagreed about the liberal status of
France, Britain, Chile, and Spain. In three other cases,
these disagreements extended both across and within
parties. In only one case, the Spanish American Crisis,
was there a consensus within the American elite regard-
ing the liberal status of the foreign power (Table 3).
In sum, the evidence from Owen’s cases suggests that
we are unlikely to be able to predict how states will
perceive one another’s regime type: Opinion is almost
always divided, even for cases that look easy to outside
observers. This being the case, the repaired normative
logic can only tell us if liberal states will view each other
as such after the fact: If they treat each other with trust
and respect, then they must have viewed each other as
liberal; if they do not, then they must have viewed each
other as illiberal.
In these circumstances, the only way to create a more
determinate logic is to predict whose opinions will win
out in the domestic political game. If, for example, we
can predict that doves, republicans, or business inter-
ests will generally get their way, then we may be able
to predict policy outcomes. Such predictions have, how-
ever, eluded democratic peace theorists (see Autocratic
Restraint, below).
Inaccurate Assessment. Democracies will also often
simply get another state’s regime type wrong, thereby
lessening our confidence that objectively democratic
states will not fight one another. In five of the nine
cases where Owen evaluates how other states per-
ceived America, foreign liberal elites either classified
the United States as illiberal or were unsure as to its
7 Layne 1997 examines three further cases and comes to the same
conclusion.
8 Rock’s analysis of the naval arms control agreements of the 1920s
misses an important critique of the normative logic. It is not clear, if
we accept the logic, why the United States should be so concerned
about a naval alliance between democratic Britain and a democra-
tizing Japan. See, for example, P. Kennedy 1983, 267-98.
9 Hartz (1955) argues that although America is a thoroughly liberal
state, there have always been violent disagreements about the mean-
ing of liberalism.
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American Political Science Review Vol. 97, No. 4
status. In 1873, Spanish liberals, most of whom identi-
fied with the Spanish Republican party, disagreed over
the status of the United States. All Chilean elites and
all Spanish elites, regardless of their party affiliation,
regarded the United States as illiberal in the 1890s.
Finally, British opinion leaders, who had agreed that
the United States was liberal for over a century, were
divided over its liberal status in 1895-96. The paradig-
matic liberal state was, then, often perceived as any-
thing but. Even more surprising is the fact that as the
nineteenth century wore on, and the United States be-
came more liberal by most objective standards, other
states increasingly viewed it as illiberal.
Regime Type Redefined Not only are perceptions of
other regimes often contested or inaccurate, but they
are also subject to redefinition, and this redefinition
does not always reflect the actual democratic attributes
of those states. Oren (1995) conducts an in depth study
of the United States’ changing relationship with Im-
perial Germany prior to World War I and finds that
American opinion leaders stopped defining Germany
as a democracy as the two countries’ strategic relation-
ship began to deteriorate. This observation leads him to
conclude that democracy is not a determinant as much
as it is a product of America’s foreign relations: “The
reason we do not to fight ‘our kind’ is not that ‘likeness’
has a great effect on war propensity, but rather that
we from time to time subtly redefine our kind to keep
our self image consistent with our friends’ attributes
and inconsistent with those of our adversaries” (Oren
1995, 147). In other words, contrary to the expectations
of the normative logic, perception of regime type is an
outcome rather than a causal factor.
Liberal states appear especially prone to this practice
of reinterpreting who should be trusted and respected.
In the nineteenth century, non-European peoples could
be put under autocratic imperial rule for their own
good. In the early twentieth century, as Oren has noted,
the bar was raised higher and Imperial Germany was
judged worthy of neither trust nor respect. By the end
of the century, even liberal democratic Japan could not
count on unquestioning American friendship. In each
case, prestige, security concerns, or economic interests
shaped perceptions of regime type.10
These examples raise serious problems for any causal
logic based on perceptions. Discerning whether percep-
tions matter inevitably becomes a question of sifting
through the statements of policymakers and opinion
leaders during a crisis or war. At the same time, public
figures will try to distinguish their own state from the
enemy in these situations, both for their own cogni-
tive consistency and to rally the public. Since people
in the modern world generally identify themselves as
members of a nation state, these distinctions will tend
to focus on political structures. Scholars will therefore
always be able to find “evidence” that the other state
was not perceived to be sufficiently “democratic” as
leaders go about demonizing the enemy. I am not argu-
ing that this represents a misreading of the evidence-
perceptions of another state are bound to change in
crisis situations-I am only suggesting that these per-
ceptions are caused by factors other than the objective
nature of foreign regimes.
In sum, proponents of the normative logic have done
little to strengthen their case by introducing percep-
tions as an independent variable. Often states do not
have a unified perception of the liberal attributes of
a foreign power and it is therefore difficult to argue
that perceptions of regime type affect policy. More-
over, these perceptions may change independently of
the objective nature of the other regime, suggesting
that it is entirely possible for liberal states to fight one
another.
FLAWS IN THE INSTITUTIONAL LOGIC
The causal mechanisms that make up the institutional
logic do not appear to operate as stipulated. There are
good reasons to believe that accountability, a mech-
anism common to all five variants of the institutional
logic, does not affect democratic leaders any more than
it affects their autocratic counterparts. Nor does the
available evidence support the claims of the institu-
tional logic’s other causal mechanisms. Pacific publics
and antiwar groups rarely constrain policymakers’ deci-
sions for war, democracies are neither slow to mobilize
nor incapable of launching surprise attacks, and open
political competition provides no guarantee that a state
will be able to reveal its level of resolve in a crisis.
Accountability
Each variant of the institutional logic rests on the claim
that democratic institutions make leaders accountable
to various groups that may, for one reason or another,
oppose the use of force. I do not dispute this claim but,
instead, question whether democratic leaders are more
accountable than their autocratic counterparts. Since
we know that democracies do not fight one another
and autocracies do fight one another, democrats must
be more accountable than autocrats if accountability
is a key mechanism in explaining the separate peace
between democracies. On the other hand, if autocrats
and democrats are equally accountable or autocrats are
more accountable than democrats, then there are good
reasons to believe that accountability does not exert the
effect that democratic peace theorists have suggested.11
Following Goemans (2000a) I assume that a leader’s
accountability is determined by the consequences as
well as the probability of losing office for adopting an
unpopular policy. This being the case, there is no a priori
reason to believe that a leader who is likely to lose office
for fighting a losing or costly war, but unlikely to be
10 Oren notes that American perceptions of the democratic nature
of Japan and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century have tended
to reflect their behavior rather than their domestic institutions and
values. Similarly, Blank (2000) argues that strategic factors influenced
British and American perceptions of each other’s liberal status in the
nineteenth century.
1 Evaluations of the effects of war on the tenure of leaders include
Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson 1995 and Goemans 2000a.
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The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory November 2003
TABLE 4. Consequences of Engaging in
Losing or Costly Wars
Wars Removed Punished
Democratic losers 4 3 (75%) 0 (0%)
Autocratic losers 89 31 (35%) 26 (29%)
Democrats in costly wars 15 4 (27%) 1 (7%)
Autocrats in costly wars 77 27 (35%) 21 (27%)
exiled, imprisoned, or killed in the process, should feel
more accountable for his policy choices than a leader
who is unlikely to lose office but can expect to be pun-
ished severely in the unlikely event that he is in fact
removed.
Therefore, determining whether autocrats or demo-
crats are more accountable and, consequently, more
cautious about going to war rests on answering three
questions: Are losing democrats or losing autocrats
more likely to be removed from power? Are losing
democrats or losing autocrats more likely to be pun-
ished severely? and Are democrats or autocrats more
likely to be removed and/or punished for involvement
in costly wars, regardless of the outcome?
To answer these questions I have used a modified
version of Goemans’s (2000b) dataset. Our analyses
differ in one fundamental respect: While he counts the
removal of leaders by foreign powers as examples of
punishment, I do not. This decision is theoretically in-
formed. The purpose of the analysis is to determine
whether leaders’ decisions for war are affected by their
domestic accountability, that is, if there is something
about the domestic structure of states that affects their
chances of being punished. Punishment by foreign pow-
ers offers no evidence for or against the claim that
democrats or dictators have a higher or lower expecta-
tion of being punished by their citizens for unpopular
policies, and these cases are therefore excluded. I have
also made two minor changes to the data that do not
affect the results: I have added 19 wars that appear
in the COW dataset but not in Goemans’s dataset and
coded 11 regimes that Goemans excludes.12 The results
appear in Table 4.
Although democratic losers are two times more
likely to be removed from power than autocratic losers,
this evidence is not strong. This is because there are only
four cases of democratic losers in the entire dataset,
making it impossible to draw any firm conclusions
about the likelihood that losing democrats will be re-
moved. Prime Minister Menzies of Australia, for exam-
ple, resigned early in the Vietnam War, but his resig-
nation may have had more to do with the fact that he
was in his seventies than the expectation of defeat in
South East Asia a decade later. If this case is recoded,
as it probably should be, democratic losers have only
been removed from power 50% of the time and the
distinction between democrats and autocrats is small.
Losing autocrats are more likely to suffer severe pun-
ishment than their democratic counterparts. None of
the four losing democrats was punished, whereas 29%
of autocratic losers were imprisoned, exiled, or killed.
Thus, while democratic and autocratic losers have sim-
ilar chances of being removed from office, autocrats
seem to be more likely to suffer severe punishment in
addition to removal.
The evidence from costly wars, regardless of whether
the leader was on the winning or losing side, confirms
these findings. Costly wars are defined as wars in which
a state suffered one battle fatality per 2,000 population,
as the United States did in World War I.13 Historically,
autocrats have been more likely both to lose office and
to be punished severely if they become involved in a
costly war. Autocrats have been removed 35% of the
time and punished 27% of the time, while democrats
have only been removed 27% of the time and punished
7% of the time.14
In short, there is little evidence that democratic lead-
ers face greater expected costs from fighting losing or
costly wars and are therefore more accountable than
their autocratic counterparts. This being the case, there
is good reason to doubt each variant of the institutional
logic.
Public Constraint
Pacific public opinion does not appear to place a fun-
damental constraint on the willingness of democracies
to go to war. If it did, then democracies would be more
peaceful in their relations with all types of states, not
just other democracies. However, instead of being more
peaceful, on average democracies are just as likely to
go to war as nondemocracies (Farber and Gowa 1995).
There are three reasons why publics are unlikely to
constrain democratic war proneness. First, the costs of
war typically fall on a small subset of the population
12 Nondemocracies: Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Hesse Grand Ducal,
Hesse Electoral, and Hanover in the Seven Weeks War; Germany
in the Franco-Prussian War; Greece in the war of 1919 with Turkey;
Ethiopia, Bulgaria, and Italy in World War II; and Cyprus in 1974.
Democracy: Israel in 1948.
13 The results do not change with alternative definitions of costly
wars (one fatality per 1,000 population and one fatality per 500
population).
14 Proponents could still interpret the evidence as supporting demo-
cratic peace theory. The very fact that democratic leaders rarely lose
wars suggests that they know that they will be punished for losing
wars and therefore only select themselves into wars they can win.
There are good reasons to dispute this selection effects argument.
Desch (2002) estimates the probability that a state will start a war,
then win it, and finds that democracy has one of the smallest effects
of any variable. Stam (1996) reaches a similar conclusion. Reiter and
Stam (2002) find that democracies are more likely to win wars they
initiate but do not report the relative effect of democracy compared
to other variables. Desch also notes that if democratic leaders are
more selective about choosing wars, and only start easy ones, then
they should engage in fewer wars than autocratic leaders since war is
inherently risky and few wars are sure bets. The evidence, however,
suggests that democracies are just as war prone as other types of
states. It is also worth noting that if democrats are more selective
about the wars they get involved in, then we should see them en-
gage in fewer costly wars since they know that costly wars threaten
their incumbencies. However, there is little difference between the
propensity for democracies and that for autocracies to incur high
costs. Democracies incur high costs in 34% of cases, while autocracies
do so 42% of the time.
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American Political Science Review Vol. 97, No. 4
that will likely be unwilling to protest government pol-
icy. Excluding the two World Wars, democratic fatal-
ities in war have exceeded 0.1% of the population in
only 6% of cases. In 60% of cases, losses represented
less than 0.01% of the population or one in 10,000
people. Most democratic citizens, then, will never be
personally affected by war or know anyone affected
by military conflict. Adding the many militarized dis-
putes involving democracies strengthens this finding.
Both the United States and Britain have suffered fewer
than 100 battle casualties in approximately 97% of the
militarized disputes in which they have been involved
(Singer and Small 1994). Moreover, modern democra-
cies have tended to have professional standing armies.
Members of the military, then, join the armed forces
voluntarily, accepting that they may die in the service
of their countries. This in turn means that their families
and friends, that is, those who are most likely to suffer
the costs of war, are unlikely to speak out against a
government that chooses to go to war or are at least
less likely to do so than are the families and friends of
conscripts. In short, the general public has little at stake
in most wars and those most likely to suffer the costs
of war have few incentives to organize dissent.
Second, any public aversion to incurring the costs of
war may be overwhelmed by the effects of nationalism.
In addition to the growth of democracy, one of the most
striking features of the modern period is that people
have come to identify themselves, above all, with the
nation state. This identification has been so powerful
that ordinary citizens have repeatedly demonstrated a
willingness to fight and die for the continued existence
of their state and the security of their co-nationals.
There are, then, good reasons to believe that if the
national interest is thought to be at stake, as it is in
most interstate conflicts, calculations of costs will not
figure prominently in the public’s decision process.
Third, democratic leaders are as likely to lead as to
follow public opinion. Since nationalism imbues peo-
ple with a powerful spirit of self-sacrifice, it is actively
cultivated by political elites in the knowledge that only
highly motivated armies and productive societies will
prevail in modern warfare (e.g., Posen 1993). Demo-
cratically elected leaders are likely to be well placed
to cultivate nationalism, especially because their gov-
ernments are often perceived as more representative
and legitimate than authoritarian regimes. Any call to
defend or spread “our way of life,” for example, is likely
to have a strong resonance in democratic polities, and
indeed the historical record suggests that wars have of-
ten given democratic leaders considerable freedom of
action, allowing them to drum up nationalistic fervor,
shape public opinion, and suppress dissent despite the
obligation to allow free and open discussion.
Events in the United States during both World Wars
highlight the strength of nationalism and the ability
of democratic elites to fan its flames. Kennedy (1980,
46) notes that during the First World War, President
Wilson lacked “the disciplinary force of quick coming
crisis or imminent peril of physical harm” but turned
successfully to “the deliberate mobilization of emotions
and ideas.” At the same time his administration turned
a blind eye to, or actively encouraged, the deliberate
subversion of antiwar groups within the United States.
The Roosevelt administration was equally successful
at generating prowar sentiment during World War II.
Early in the war the president spoke for the nation in
asserting that the German firebombing of population
centers had “shocked the conscience of humanity,” and
yet, remarkably, there was no sustained protest in the
United States against the bombing of Japanese cities
that killed almost a million civilians a few years later.
This abrupt transformation, notes Dower (1986), was
made possible by a massive propaganda campaign, con-
doned by the political elite, describing the Japanese as
subhuman and untrustworthy “others.” In stark con-
trast, America’s allies were forgiven all their faults
“Russian Communists were transformed into agrarian
reformers, Stalin into Uncle Joe…” (Ambrose 1997,
150).
Sentiments like these are not aroused only in the
victims of aggression. Although Lord Aberdeen’s gov-
ernment was reluctant to go to war with Russia over the
Crimea in 1854, “There was no doubt whatever about
the enthusiasm of British public opinion, as expressed
by every conduit open to it.” The protests of Cobden
and Bright, leaders of the British Peace Movement,
“were howled down in the House of Commons, in the
Press, and at meeting after public meeting…. [They]
were thus the first liberal leaders, and by no means the
last, to discover that peace and democracy do not go
hand in hand; that public opinion is not an infallible
specific against war; and that ‘the people,’ for whatever
reasons, can be very bellicose indeed.” The next gener-
ation of pacifists, the opponents of the Boer War, “were
vilified in the popular press, had their meetings broken
up, [and] were subjected to physical attack” (Howard
1978, 45-46, 68).
These are not isolated examples. The world’s most
militarily active democracies-Britain, France, India,
Israel, and the United States-have gone to war 30
times since 1815. In 15 cases, they were the victims of
attack and therefore we should not be surprised that
publics reacted in a nationalistic fashion or were per-
suaded to support decisions for war. There are, how-
ever, 15 other cases in which one could plausibly argue
that it was not obvious to the public that war was in
the national interest because there was no immediate
threat to the homeland or vital national assets. In 12
of these cases, the outbreak of war was greeted by a
spontaneous and powerful nationalistic response or,
in the absence of such a reaction, policymaking elites
successfully persuaded a previously unengaged public
to acquiesce to, and in some cases support, the use of
force. In only three cases-the French and British at-
tack on Egypt (1956) and the Israeli attack on Lebanon
(1982)-did publics not spontaneously support the war
and remain opposed to it despite policymaking elites’
best efforts to influence their opinions.15
15 Democratic victims: the United States in World War II; Israel in
the Palestine War, War of Attrition, and Yom Kippur War; Britain in
both World Wars and the Falklands War; France in both World Wars;
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The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory November 2003
One way to try and rescue the public constraint
mechanism would be to combine constraints with re-
spect for fellow democratic polities (e.g., Mintz and
Geva 1993). This new argument would hold that
democracies have formed a separate and joint peace
because democratic citizens are only averse to costs
in their relations with other democracies. There are,
however, several cases that belie this claim.16
There are, then, good reasons to believe that pacific
public opinion does not significantly reduce the likeli-
hood that democracies will go to war. In the majority
of cases, the public is likely to be unaffected by war
and therefore adopt a permissive attitude towards the
use of force. Moreover, in those cases where the na-
tional interest or honor is at stake, democratic publics
are as likely as any other to disregard the costs of war
and democratic leaders have considerable opportuni-
ties both to encourage and to exploit nationalistic fer-
vor.
Group Constraint
There are two problems with the group constraint
mechanism. First, there is little evidence for the claim
that antiwar groups will, more often than not, capture
the democratic policymaking process. Second, if the
mechanism is to explain why democracies do not fight
one another but also account for wars in other kinds of
dyads, then group constraints must be weaker in autoc-
racies than democracies, but this does not appear to be
the case.
Capturing the State. States are “representative insti-
tution[s] constantly subject to capture and recapture,
construction and reconstruction by coalitions of so-
cietal actors” (Moravcsik 1997, 518). Moreover, they
are imperfect representative institutions, more likely
to represent those groups that are better organized
and have more at stake in a given issue. Based on this
insight, there is no reason to believe that pacific inter-
est groups will generally win out over prowar groups.
While liberal elites, for example, may be well organized
and have a powerful incentive to avoid war with other
democracies, other more bellicose actors such as the
military industrial complex are likely to have just as
much at stake and be equally proficient at furthering
their own interests.
Indeed, the historical record suggests that propo-
nents of foreign aggression can often prevail in domes-
tic debates. Owen (1997) examines four cases of the
United States going to war in the nineteenth century.
In three of his cases, one of the two major political
parties was opposed to war but failed to avert it. In the
fourth case, the antiwar group was smaller and also lost
out to the prowar group. Similarly, Snyder (1991) finds
that both Britain and the United States have adopted
aggressive foreign policies in the past as prowar groups
have effectively captured the state. Britain’s expan-
sionist policy in the middle of the nineteenth century
owed much to the fact that imperialist groups were able
to influence policymaking: “Imperial ideologists were
able to have a large impact because of their apparent
monopoly on expertise and effective organization, and
because of the ambivalent interest of the audience.”
In the American case, despite a Cold War consensus
against involvement in “high-cost, low benefit endeav-
ors,” the United States became involved in both Korea
and Vietnam as a result of coalitional logrolling (Snyder
1991, 206, 209).17 In sum, there are good reasons to
believe that pacific interest groups may not generally
influence the foreign policies of democratic states.
Autocratic Constraint. Autocratic leaders typically
represent themselves or narrow selectorates and these
groups have powerful incentives to avoid war.
The first reason for avoiding war is that wars cost
money and solving the problem of war finance ulti-
mately poses a threat to an autocrat’s hold on power.
The argument here is straightforward. The costs of war
have risen exponentially since the middle of the nine-
teenth century and governments have had to figure out
how to meet these costs. Although the money can theo-
retically be raised with or without the consent of those
from whom it is demanded, in practice “non-consensual
sources of revenue have generally proved less elastic
than taxation based on consent.” Participation in war
has, therefore, tended to go hand in hand with expan-
sion of the franchise (Ferguson 2001, 32-33, 77, 80; see
also Freeman and Snidal 1982). This being the case,
autocrats have a powerful incentive not to go to war
for fear of triggering social and political changes that
may destroy them.
The nature of civil military relations in civilian-
led authoritarian states provides another incentive for
India in the Sino-Indian, Second Kashmiri, and Bangladesh Wars;
and Britain, France, and the United States in the Boxer Rebellion.
Wars supported by public or to which public acquiesced even though
they were not clearly in the national interest: the United States in the
Mexican-American, Spanish-American, Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf
Wars and World War I; Israel in the Sinai and Six Day Wars; Britain
in the Crimean and Anglo-Persian Wars; France in the Roman Re-
public and Sino-French Wars. I only consider the major protagonists
in any given war and, therefore, exclude cases like Britain’s decision
to support the United States in the Gulf War. Also, I only consider
public opinion early in a war since it is presumably this initial reaction
that concerns policymakers the most.
Democratic peace theorists could still claim that these examples
do not invalidate the public constraint mechanism because there are
many more examples where democracies have not escalated a crisis
or have pulled back from the brink because leaders anticipated public
opposition. These nonevents are difficult to observe but if there are
a lot of them, then 12 examples of public constraints not operating
do not provide conclusive proof that the mechanism generally fails
to operate. Proponents of the democratic peace have not, however,
uncovered a large number of such non-events.
16 Britain and France over Belgium (1830-32), the Near East (1838-
41), Tahiti and Tangier (1844), and Fashoda (1898); Britain and the
United States in the Oregon Crisis (1845-46), the Trent Affair (1861),
and the Venezuelan Crisis (1895-96); Britain and the Boers in the
Boer War (1899-1902); France and Germany in the Ruhr Crisis
(1923); arguably France, Britain, and Germany before World War I;
Peru and Ecuador in the Amazon in the 1980s and 1990s; and India
and Pakistan over Kashmir in the 1990s. See Howard 1978; Layne
1994, 1997; and Rock 1997.
17 Snyder argues that democracies are moderate overexpanders
rather than extreme overexpanders because open debate encourages
quick learning. The fact remains, however, that while they may be
smart about their overexpansion, they are still prone to it.
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American Political Science Review Vol. 97, No. 4
ruling groups to avoid war. Since civilian control of the
military is often more tenuous in autocracies than in
democracies, nonmilitary leaders of autocratic states
have a powerful incentive to maintain weak militaries
for fear of domestic coups. The problem, from a foreign
policy standpoint, is that states with weak militaries are
vulnerable to foreign aggression. Thus an absolute ruler
faces a “dual problem” according to Gordon Tullock
(1987, 37): “[H]e may be overthrown by his neigh-
bor’s armies, or by the armies he organizes to defend
him against his neighbors.” Because they recognize this
problem, civilian authoritarian leaders will generally
prefer to avoid rather than wage war.
A different set of factors can inhibit the war prone-
ness of military dictators. First, since they must devote
considerable time and energy to repressing popular
dissent at home, they have fewer military resources to
devote to external wars. Second, because the military
is used for internal repression it is unlikely to have a
great deal of societal support and will be ill equipped
to deal with external enemies. Third, leaders who as-
sume control of the army run the risk of being held
personally responsible for any subsequent failures and
may not be prepared to take that risk. Finally, time
spent organizing military campaigns is time away from
other governmental duties on which a dictator’s tenure
also depends (Andreski 1980; Tullock 1987, 37; see also
Dassel 1997).
In sum, it is not clear that states behave as the group
constraint mechanism suggests. Although democracies
and autocracies have selectorates of differing size and
allow social groups different levels of access to the poli-
cymaking process, they may nevertheless adopt similar
policies. Not only are democratic governments able to
resist the influence of antiwar groups, but they are in
fact subject to capture by prowar groups. Autocracies,
on the other hand, often represent groups that have
a vested interest in avoiding foreign wars (see, e.g.,
Peceny, Beer, and Sanchez-Terry 2002).
Slow Mobilization
The historical record offers scant support for the claim
that the complexity of mobilizing diverse groups in
democracies slows decisions to use force.
American presidents have often circumvented or ig-
nored checks and balances, thereby speeding up the war
decision process.18 The United States has taken military
action abroad more than 200 times during its history,
but only five of these actions were wars declared by
Congress, and most were authorized unilaterally by the
president (Rourke 1993, 11). Circumventing the demo-
cratic process has taken several forms. Some presidents
have simply claimed that matters of national security
are more important than observing the constitution.
Jefferson was the first to assert that obeying the con-
stitution was the mark of a good president, but that
“the law of necessity, of self preservation, of saving our
country when in danger, are of the higher obligation”
(75). Another common tactic has been to redefine the
action as anything but a war, thereby obviating the
need for consultation or debate. Washington added hot
pursuit and preemption to the president’s prerogatives,
Jackson popularized reprisals, and Wilson unilaterally
authorized interventions, most notably in Russia af-
ter World War I. Alternatively, presidents have used
their powers to put troops in harm’s way in order to
precipitate wider conflicts. Both Polk’s actions prior
to the Mexican American War and Roosevelt’s tactics
prior to America’s official entry into World War II fit
this pattern. Finally, incumbents of the White House
have often simply ignored Congress. Truman ordered
forces into Korea without even asking Congress for
retroactive support, and at the height of the “Imperial
Presidency,” Nixon rejected the need for congressional
authority when he invaded Cambodia.
While efforts have been made to ensure that choices
for war and peace are subject to open debate-
notably with the passage of the War Powers Resolution
(1972)-checks and balances have generally failed to
operate and there have been frequent violations of the
spirit if not the letter of the Resolution (Rourke 1993,
119-38). The Gulf War provides a recent example. Bush
administration officials decided to launch Operation
Desert Shield without consulting Congress and repeat-
edly put off a congressional vote fearing that it might
go against them. The decision for Desert Storm was
also made unilaterally. Bush argued that he did not
need a congressional resolution and was determined
to avoid asking for authorization lest this imply that
the Executive did not have the final say on matters of
war. His reaction to Congress’s authorization of the
use of force is instructive: “In truth, even had Congress
not passed the resolution I would have acted and or-
dered our troops into combat. I know it would have
caused an outcry, but it was the right thing to do. I was
comfortable in my own mind that I had constitutional
authority. It had to be done” (Bush and Scowcroft
1998, 446).
In sum, the slow mobilization mechanism does not
appear to function as claimed. Democratic leaders fre-
quently decide that protecting what they deem to be
the national interest requires swift and decisive ac-
tion. When they believe such situations have arisen
they have been able and willing simply to bypass the
democratic imperative of open debate and consensus
decision making.
Surprise Attack
Democracies are no less capable of carrying out sur-
prise attacks than other kinds of states.19 The main
reason for this is that an attacker’s regime type is
largely unrelated to the success or failure of an attack.
18 The focus here is on American foreign policy. Other democratically
elected leaders have adopted similar tactics to initiate military action
with only minimal legislative input. This paragraph relies on Reveley
1981, 135-69, and Rourke 1993, 63-106.
19 A surprise attack is an attack against a target that is not prepared
for it due to mistaken estimates of whether, when, where, and how
the enemy will strike (Betts 1982, 11).
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The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory November 2003
“Analysis of surprise attacks,” notes Kam (1988, 37),
“suggests that the intelligence community seldom fails
to anticipate them owing to a lack of relevant informa-
tion. In most cases the victim possesses an abundance
of information indicating the imminence of the attack.”
Instead, the common wisdom holds that attacks achieve
surprise because defenders cannot identify the relevant
signals amidst the “noise,” and because of cognitive or
organizational shortcomings (Betts 1982, 87-149; Kam
1988, 7-212). In short, regardless of whether attackers
are democratic or autocratic, they do not appear to
be able to keep their attacks secret; attacks achieve
surprise because defenders are poor at evaluating in-
formation.
Even if we accept that the achievement of surprise is
a function of the transparency of the attacker, there is
little historical support for the claim that democracies
are less able to conceal their intentions or impending
actions. There have been approximately 10 cases of sur-
prise attack since the beginning of World War II.20 Two
of these attacks, the British-French-Israeli coalition’s
attack on Egypt (1956) and the Israeli initiation of the
Six Day War (1967), were carried out by democracies.
There are not enough cases to make any statistical
claims but we should note that democracies have made
up approximately one third of state-years since 1939,
and therefore, one would expect on the basis of chance
alone to see three surprise attacks by democracies in
this period. Therefore, democracies do not appear to
be less likely than nondemocracies to launch surprise
attacks.
Israel, France, and Britain planned the Suez War of
1956 in such secrecy that even Eisenhower was sur-
prised by the attack when it came (Betts 1982, 63-65).21
Dayan, the Israeli Chief of Staff, engaged in a success-
ful campaign of deliberate deception leading outside
observers to believe that any attack would merely be
an extended reprisal campaign. Meanwhile, the rele-
vant decision makers in Britain justified secrecy in stark
terms: “It is never agreeable to have to refuse, in the na-
tional interest, information to the House of Commons.
But it has to be done from time to time” (Lloyd 1978,
250). If democratic government officials believe that
the national interest is at stake, they will sacrifice dis-
closure to military necessity. Similarly, Israel achieved
surprise through deception in launching the Six Day
War (1967). Dayan, then the defense minister, publicly
stated that Israel was in no position to reply to the
blockade of the Strait of Tiran, that the Israeli army
could not remain mobilized for an extended period,
that the army could fight successfully after suffering a
first strike, and that diplomacy must be given a chance,
all in a successful attempt to lull the Arabs into a false
sense of security. Only 38 hours later Israel attacked
(Betts 1982, 65-68; Van Evera 1999, 66-67). Nor does
the ability of democratic governments to maintain se-
crecy appear to be restricted to extreme cases of sur-
prise attack. The United States kept its decisions for
war from the British before the War of 1812, Lord
Grey did not publicize his agreement to defend French
Channel ports prior to World War I, and Roosevelt did
not reveal his agreements with Churchill prior to World
War II.
Democratic politics are typically marked by the open
discussion of differing opinions in multiple public fo-
rums, but this characterization does not appear to hold
when democratic leaders perceive a threat to the na-
tional interest. In such circumstances the requirement
for transparency and consensus can be decisively sub-
ordinated to the twin requirements of military success:
secrecy and speed.
Information
The available evidence suggests that democracies can-
not clearly reveal their levels of resolve in a crisis.
There are two reasons for this. First, democratic pro-
cesses and institutions often reveal so much informa-
tion that it is difficult for opposing states to interpret
it. Second, open domestic political competition does
not ensure that states will reveal their private infor-
mation.
Transparency may contribute little to peace be-
cause a lot of information is not always good informa-
tion. Simply because democracies provide a substantial
amount of information about their intentions from a
variety of sources does not mean that their opponents
will focus on the appropriate information or that the
information will be interpreted correctly. In a crisis
with a democracy, the other state will receive signals
not only from the democracy’s appointed negotiators
but also from opposition parties, interest groups, public
opinion, and the media. Deciding which signal is truly
representative is a difficult task. Moreover, individuals
faced with an overwhelming amount of information are
likely to resort to mental shortcuts based on existing
views of the adversary or analogous situations in the
past to make sense of it. Information contradicting the
accepted wisdom is likely to be ignored and confirma-
tory evidence will be highlighted. Additional informa-
tion may, then, have a limited impact on perceptions
(e.g., Jervis 1976). In short, the mistake has been to
equate plentiful information with perfect information.
If the information is plentiful, there is no reason to
believe that states will come to a mutually acceptable
agreement. On the other hand, if the information is
perfect, then states may avoid war.
20 I have compiled the following list using Betts (1982) and Kam
(1988): Germany’s attack in Western Europe (1940); Germany’s at-
tack on the Soviet Union (1941); Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor
(1941); North Korea’s attack on South Korea (1950); China’s entry
into the Korean War (1950); Israel, Britain, and France’s attack on
Egypt (1956); China’s attack on India (1962); Israel’s attack on Egypt
(1967); the Soviet attack on Czechoslovakia (1968); and the Arab
attack on Israel (1973). I have excluded cases of surprise attack in the
context of an ongoing war based on the assumption that, regardless
of their regime type, once they are in a war states will enforce secrecy
and try to achieve surprise as a matter of military necessity. There
are, of course, several instances of democracies achieving surprise
during wars. These include the British bombing of the Italian fleet in
Taranto (1941), the D-day landings (1944), and the American assault
at Inchon (1950).
21 The fact that three democratic governments were involved in suc-
cessful collusion is especially powerful evidence of the ability of
democracies to maintain secrecy.
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American Political Science Review Vol. 97, No. 4
There is good evidence for these claims. Bernard
Finel and Kristin Lord (1999) have highlighted the
negative effects of transparency in seven case studies
of interstate crises between 1812 and 1969. They find
that open political systems do indeed provide a great
deal of information, but its sheer volume either has
confused those who observe it or has merely served to
reinforce their prior misperceptions. In 1967, for exam-
ple, Nasser was “overwhelmed by the ‘noise’ of Israeli
domestic politics” and “had enough information to see
whatever he wanted and confirm existing mispercep-
tions about Israeli intentions” (Finel and Lord 1999,
334-35). Democracies may not be better at signaling
their intentions, and even if they are, these intentions
may be prone to misperception.
In response, proponents of the informational story
argue that it is the signal sent by opposition parties
that provides the most credible evidence of a state’s
intent: If they support the administration, then the state
is committed, otherwise it is not (Schultz 2001, 95-
97). There are two problems with this argument. First,
there is powerful support for the claim that the general
public and opposition generally “rally round the flag”
and support governments during crises. Kenneth Waltz
neatly summarizes this finding: “The first effect of an
international crisis is to increase the President’s popu-
lar standing. One may wonder if this is so only when the
response of the President is firm or he otherwise gives
the impression of being able to deal with the situation
effectively…. It is, in fact, not necessary to add such
qualifications to the statement” (Waltz 1967, 272).22 In-
deed, Schultz notes that democratic governments that
have issued deterrent threats have received opposition
support 84% of the time (Schultz 2001, 167). More-
over, democratic leaders can lead rather than follow
public opinion during international crises by control-
ling what information reaches the public and by ex-
ploiting the media. Reaching high office in a democ-
racy rests, to a large degree, on persuading voters, and
one would therefore expect democratic government
officials to be especially adept at shaping public opin-
ion. What this means is that democracies may often
not be able to signal their private information. Since
publics and oppositions generally rally to the govern-
ment’s side or are persuaded to support the adminis-
tration during crises, and hostile states know this to
be the case, opposition support is not an informative
signal.
Second, in the few cases where opposition par-
ties have spoken out against military action, demo-
cratic governments have been prepared to take ac-
tion nonetheless. In other words, when opposition
statements should lead us to expect that a govern-
ment would not be resolved on war, they have instead
been prepared to escalate disputes. Examples are not
hard to find: (1) The Federalists opposed war with
Britain in 1812, but Madison went to war nonetheless;
(2) Truman went to war in Korea despite the protests
of Senate Republicans; (3) the British Labour Party
publicly opposed action against Egypt in 1956, but the
Eden government plotted and executed an attack on
Egypt with the governments of France and Israel; and
(4) several Democrats publicly opposed the Gulf War in
1990-91, but the Bush administration was determined
to act. In short, there does not appear to be a strong
correlation between declarations by opposition parties
and decisions to avoid war.23
In sum, the purported informational properties of
democratic institutions are unlikely to improve the
prospects for peace. It is not clear that democracies
can reveal private information or that it will be inter-
preted correctly, and even in cases where signaling and
interpretation are accurate there are reasons to doubt
that this will remove the cause of war.
CONCLUSION
The causal logics that underpin democratic peace the-
ory cannot explain why democracies remain at peace
with one another because the mechanisms that make up
these logics do not operate as stipulated by the theory’s
proponents. In the case of the normative logic, liberal
democracies do not reliably externalize their domestic
norms of conflict resolution and do not treat one an-
other with trust and respect when their interests clash.
Similarly, in the case of the institutional logic, demo-
cratic leaders are not especially accountable to peace-
loving publics or pacific interest groups, democracies
are not particularly slow to mobilize or incapable of sur-
prise attack, and open political competition offers no
guarantee that a democracy will reveal private informa-
tion about its level of resolve. In view of these findings
there are good reasons to doubt that joint democracy
causes peace.
Democratic peace theorists could counter this claim
by pointing out that even in the absence of a good ex-
planation for the democratic peace, the fact remains
that democracies have rarely fought one another. In
addition to casting doubt on existing explanations for
the democratic peace, then, a comprehensive critique
should also offer a positive account of the finding.
One potential explanation is that the democratic
peace is in fact an imperial peace based on American
power. This claim rests on two observations. First, the
democratic peace is essentially a post-World War II
phenomenon restricted to the Americas and Western
Europe. Second, the United States has been the dom-
inant power in both these regions since World War II
and has placed an overriding emphasis on regional
peace.
There are three reasons we should expect democratic
peace theory’s empirical claims to hold only in the post-
1945 period. First, as even proponents of the demo-
cratic peace have admitted, there were few democracies
22 On the rally effect see Mueller 1970. Rourke (1993) argues that
the extension of the President’s power over decisions to use force
has owed as much to Congress’s willingness to defer to him during
international crises as to his seizure of such powers.
23 Kirschner (2000) suggests that even if all parties know each others’
private information, there are still good reasons to expect them to go
to war.
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The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory November 2003
in the international system prior to 1945 and even fewer
that were in a position to fight one another. Since 1945,
however, both the number of democracies in the in-
ternational system and the number that have had an
opportunity to fight one another have grown markedly
(e.g., Russett 1993, 20). Second, while members of dou-
ble democratic dyads were not significantly less likely to
fight one another than members of other types of dyads
prior to World War II, they have been significantly
more peaceful since then (e.g., Farber and Gowa 1997).
Third, the farther back we go in history the harder it
is to find a consensus among both scholars and poli-
cymakers on what states qualify as democracies. De-
pending on whose criteria we use, there may have been
no democratic wars prior to 1945, or there may have
been several (see, e.g., Layne 1994; Ray 1995; Russett
1993; Spiro 1994). Since then, however, we can be fairly
certain that democracies have hardly fought each other
at all.
Most of the purely democratic dyads since World
War II can be found in the Americas and Western
Europe. My analysis includes all pairs of democracies
directly or indirectly contiguous to one another or sep-
arated by less than 150 miles of water between 1950 and
1990 (Przeworski et al. 2000; Schafer 1993). This yields
2,427 double democratic dyads, of which 1,306 (54%)
were comprised of two European states, 465 (19%)
were comprised of two American states, and 418 (17%)
comprised one American state and one European state.
In short, 90% of purely democratic dyads have been
confined to two geographic regions, the Americas and
Western Europe.
American preponderance has underpinned, and con-
tinues to underpin stability and peace in both of these
regions. In the Americas the United States has suc-
cessfully adopted a two-pronged strategy of driving
out the European colonial powers and selectively in-
tervening either to ensure that regional conflicts do
not escalate to the level of serious military conflict or
to install regimes that are sympathetic to its interests.
The result has been a region in which most states are
prepared to toe the American line and none have pre-
tensions to alter the status quo. In Europe, the expe-
rience of both World Wars persuaded American poli-
cymakers that U.S. interests lay in preventing the con-
tinent ever returning to the security competition that
had plagued it since the Napoleonic Wars. Major ini-
tiatives including the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic
Treaty, European integration, and the forward deploy-
ment of American troops on German soil should all
be viewed from this perspective. Each was designed
either to protect the European powers from one an-
other or to constrain their ability to act as sovereign
states, thereby preventing a return to multipolarity
and eliminating the security dilemma as a factor in
European politics. These objectives continue to pro-
vide the basis for Washington’s European policy today
and explain its continued attachment to NATO and its
support for the eastward expansion of the European
Union. In sum, the United States has been by far the
most dominant state in both the Americas and Western
Europe since World War II and has been committed,
above all, to ensuring that both regions remain at
peace.24
Evaluating whether the democratic peace finding is
caused by democracy or by some other factor such
as American preponderance has implications far be-
yond the academy. If peace and security are indeed a
consequence of shared democracy, then international
democratization should continue to lie at the heart of
American grand strategy. But if, as I have suggested,
democracy does not cause peace, then American poli-
cymakers are expending valuable resources on a policy
that, while morally praiseworthy, does not make
America more secure.
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- Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
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American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 4 (Nov., 2003), pp. i-viii+501-649
Volume Information [p. 649-649]
Front Matter [pp. i-viii]
The Difference States Make: Democracy, Identity, and the American City [pp. 501-514]
Rethinking Representation [pp. 515-528]
Congressional Enactments of Race-Gender: Toward a Theory of Raced-Gendered Institutions [pp. 529-550]
Useful Fiction or Miracle Maker: The Competing Epistemological Foundations of Rational Choice Theory [pp. 551-565]
Enhancing the Validity and Cross-Cultural Comparability of Measurement in Survey Research [pp. 567-583]
The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory [pp. 585-602]
Security and the Political Economy of International Migration [pp. 603-620]
The Principle of Convergence in Wartime Negotiations [pp. 621-632]
Information, Power, and War [pp. 633-641]
Back Matter [pp. 643-648]
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