Never Say Never: Wishful Thinking on Democracy and War
By Stephen M. Walt

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1999

Since the mid-1980s, scholars of international politics have debatedwhether democratic states are strongly inclined to keep peace with oneanother. Apart from its academic interest, the "democratic peace"thesis has the greatest possible policy relevance. If democracies arein fact hardwired to treat each other benignly and if we can devisenonviolent means of encouraging democratic rule, we may have finallydiscovered a recipe for lasting peace.

The idea that democracies do not fight one another is undeniablyattractive for those who happen to live in them. It would be wonderfulif spreading our preferred form of government were also a reliablemeans of promoting peace, and one can hardly imagine a strongerjustification for exporting republican ideals. Since war between themajor democratic powers is extremely unlikely at present, thedemocratic peace is also intuitively plausible.

Yet the inherent attractiveness of this proposition is precisely whyAmericans should view it with some caution. Because the idea of ademocratic peace is so flattering to our own values, we may embrace iteven when the evidence is ambiguous and its long-term validityuncertain. Since many scholarly works have cast doubt on thehypothesis, a healthy sense of skepticism seems warranted.

GIVE PEACE A CHANCE?

The latest entrant into this burgeoning debate is Spencer R. Weart.Drawing a critical distinction between "democratic" and "oligarchic"republics, he argues in Never at War that well-established republics ofthe same type almost never fight one another. Although history offersup a number of near misses and potential exceptions, Weart concludesthat none of them seriously damages his basic claim. For Weart,therefore, spreading democracy remains the most promising path to worldpeace.

Weart's central argument rests on two empirical propositions. First,truly democratic republics -- which he defines as states where at leasttwo-thirds of the citizens enjoy full political rights -- have simplynever fought one another. Second, so-called oligarchic republics --states where less than a third of adult males hold full politicalrights -- have almost never fought one another. Wars do occur

between democracies and oligarchies and between republics anddictatorships, but they do not occur between republics of the sametype. This claim does not apply if a republic is brand new, but Weartargues that it is virtually 100 percent reliable once a republic hasbeen consolidated over at least three years.

For Weart, the key to the "republican peace" lies in a broad conceptionof political culture. A state's political culture consists of "thebeliefs that a group's members hold about how people ideally ought todeal with another, and their beliefs about how people actually do dealwith one another in practice, when groups are in conflict." He suggeststhat tolerance and compromise are central to republican politicalculture and argues that political elites will apply lessons learned athome to foreign policy. As a result, republican diplomats will prefernegotiated settlements and eschew the use of force, especially whendealing with one another.

Most importantly, Weart believes that republican states "draw thecrucial boundary around one's in-group to include everyone, evenforeigners, who shares one's political culture." Political culture thusforms the critical dividing line between those who are part of the"in-group" and those outside it. Democratic republics regard otherdemocracies as part of their own "in-group" and reject the use of forceagainst them, but see oligarchies and dictatorships as illegitimateoutsiders who do not merit the same restraint. Similarly, whileoligarchic republics view democracies as a source of subversive ideasand readily use force against them, they refrain from attacking otheroligarchies.

Weart bases these sweeping claims on a survey of the Greek and Italiancity-state systems, the Swiss Confederation, the Hanseatic League, andmore recent cases such as the American Civil War, the Anglo-Boer War,and World War I. Although his historical treatments are brief and hissupporting documentation seems intended more to dazzle than persuade,the pattern of evidence is at least suggestive. Wars between similartypes of republics appear to have been relatively rare, and Weartargues that virtually all the apparent exceptions occurred eitherbecause the antagonists were not really the same sort of republic orbecause the level of violence was trivial.

Weart lays out his case in clear, readable prose and livens hisnarrative with entertaining anecdotes. His distinction betweendemocratic and oligarchic republics and his emphasis on their being"well-established" is a useful qualification to the democratic-peacehypothesis, helping to account for several historical anomalies. Weartalso acknowledges that the spread of democratic principles is not anunalloyed good -- both because democracies are prone to using force toexport their ideals and because autocrats' fear of democratic rule isitself a potent source of insecurity and conflict. For these reasons,Never at War is in many ways the most accessible and comprehensivebrief for the democratic peace available. But by limiting hisdiscussion primarily to evidence that supports the democratic-peacehypothesis, Weart tells only one side of the story.

REASONABLE DOUBTS

Critics of the democratic-peace hypothesis make two maincounterarguments. Their first line of attack holds that the apparentpacifism between democracies may be a statistical artifact: becausedemocracies have been relatively rare throughout history, the absenceof wars between them may be due largely to chance. Evidence for ademocratic peace also depends on the time periods one examines and onhow one interprets borderline cases like the War of 1812 or theAmerican Civil War. Critics also note that strong statistical supportfor the proposition is limited to the period after World War II, whenboth the U.S.-led alliance system and the Soviet threat to WesternEurope's democracies discouraged conflict between republics.

A second challenge focuses on the causal logic of the theory itself.Democratic-peace proponents often attribute the absence of war betweenrepublics to a sense of tolerance and shared values that makes usingforce against fellow republics illegitimate. (As noted above, Weart'sversion of this argument emphasizes the tendency for republics to seesimilar states as part of their own "in-group.") If this theory istrue, however, there should be concrete historical evidence showingthat democratic leaders eschewed violence against each other primarilyfor this reason. But critics like Christopher Layne have shown thatwhen democratic states have come close to war, they have held back forreasons that had more to do with strategic interests than sharedpolitical culture. These cases suggest that even if democracies havetended not to fight each other in the past, it is not because they weredemocracies.

Instead of meeting these challenges head-on, Weart assembles his ownbody of supporting evidence and devises his own explanation for theapparent lack of war between republics. Although his arguments shouldnot be dismissed lightly, Never at War illustrates many of thelimitations that have marred this debate since its inception.

To begin with, Weart's treatment of historical materials is hardlyevenhanded. He is quick to embrace evidence that supports his argumentand even quicker to reject evidence that challenges it. Thus, hedismisses in a single footnote the claim that the democratic peace maybe a statistical artifact and treats the work of other skeptics withequal disdain. He also excludes the various wars between the Romanrepublic and its neighbors, including the brutal Punic Wars withCarthage, on the grounds that "no primary sources nor reliablesecondary sources survive." Yet he does not hesitate to use otherancient sources that buttress his claim, such as Thucydides andXenophon, even though they are by no means perfectly reliable. Modernclassicists generally agree that both Carthage and Rome were oligarchicrepublics, which suggests that excluding them was a largely arbitraryjudgment that just happened to leave Weart's central claim intact.

Second, Weart's historical accounts focus almost entirely on the roleof political culture and pay little attention to more plausiblealternative explanations. His cases show that political culture mightaccount for the absence of war between similar republics, but he rarelyasks whether other factors were more important -- either in keeping thepeace between similar republics or in causing wars between states whosedomestic regimes were different. As presented, his case studies createthe impression that political culture is the key to explaining war andpeace, but Weart offers scant direct evidence for this.

Weart's interpretation of Anglo-American relations illustrates thisproblem nicely. His account of the War of 1812 emphasizes England's"arrogant" and "imperious" maritime policies (including its impressmentof U.S. seamen and embargo on trade with France) and highlights thedifferences in English and American diplomatic styles. Thisinterpretation implies that war occurred because England was anaristocratic republic and the United States a democracy, but itoverlooks the fact that England's maritime policies were a directoutgrowth of its protracted war with Napoleonic France. What Weartportrays as a clash of cultures was at bottom a clash of nationalinterests. Similarly, Weart attributes the peaceful resolution of theVenezuelan crisis of 1896 to the growing similarities between the tworepublics, especially the shared Anglo-American preference fornegotiation and compromise. In fact, U.S. statesmen were interested notin compromise but in reaffirming U.S. primacy in the westernhemisphere. War was averted not because both sides were republics, butbecause England lacked the strength to oppose the United States in itsown backyard and England's leaders knew it. Weart also sees thesubsequent rapprochement between England and the United States as theresult of their shared democratic character, but he fails to mentionthat England was mending fences with imperial Japan and czarist Russiaduring the same period. A similar political culture may havefacilitated the Anglo-American rapprochement, but strategiccalculations -- especially the rise of Germany -- were much moreimportant.

Third, Weart's analysis rests on the same sort of arbitrary codingprocedures that marred earlier democratic-peace research, and he relieson a number of familiar loopholes whenever a case does not fit histhesis. The most obvious escape hatch is the admission that republicsof the same type may fight one another if either side believes that itsopponent is not the "right" kind of republic. Thus, Weart explains awaythe Athenian expedition to Syracuse in 415 B.C. by saying that therepublican regime in Syracuse "was probably not perceived by theAthenians as a full democracy" (even though it was actually nearly asdemocratic as Athens) and accounts for France's 1923 invasion of theRuhr by noting that past clashes had convinced the French that theGermans were "an innately authoritarian people" (no matter what theWeimar Constitution said). The Anglo-Boer War is similarly excluded onthe grounds that the Boers' treatment of the native population allowedthe English to portray their opponents as less than fully democratic.But England's leaders were equally willing to deny full politicalrights to any imperial subjects they regarded as inferior, whichsuggests that the political cultures of the antagonists were not sovery different after all.

These fudges mean that the republican peace depends less on sharedpolitical culture than on each side's perception of what the otherstate is like. If either side has even flimsy grounds for believingthat the other does not fully share its political values or has otherreasons to fight and simply wants to portray the other side as somehowfundamentally different, Weart's recipe for peace loses most of itspower.

A WORLD OF DEMOCRACIES

Weart does recognize that shared political culture can be an unreliablebarrier to war when serious conflicts of interest arise because stateswill simply use other criteria to exclude rivals from their "in-group."Thus, he acknowledges that religious differences drove the Swissrepublics of Lucerne and Bern to war in the seventeenth century. Hefurther admits that republics have had little difficulty justifyingimperial expansion against less-developed but essentially democraticsocieties simply by declaring the victims "ignorant savages" andplacing them outside the "civilized" in-group. Similarly, democracieslike the United States overthrew freely elected governments inGuatemala and Chile because American suspicion that they might "gocommunist" was enough to exclude them from the circle of "acceptable"democracies. Weart, however, does not seem to realize how damning theseadmissions are to his argument and instead relies on ad hocrationalizations to paper over the holes.

This brings us to a final gap in Weart's case. Even if its historicaljudgments are accurate, Never at War cannot tell us how republics wouldbehave in a world in which they were the only type of government. Sucha world has never existed, of course, and we simply do not know if thehistorical affinity among democracies would persist withoutauthoritarian states. The struggle between authoritarian and democraticideals has been a critical fault line for the past two millennia, andit is easy to understand why like-minded regimes have been inclined tocooperate when confronted by states whose ideals posed a direct threatto their own security. But were this basic distinction to evaporate,cleavages between democracies would probably become more salient. Onecan easily imagine republican states making invidious distinctionsamong themselves as conflicts of interest grew more acute, particularlyif they no longer needed to join forces against monarchs and dictators.At the height of the Cold War, after all, Americans tended to see Japanas a liberal democracy molded largely in their own image. But as soonas Americans began to fear that Japan was overtaking them economically,they began to "discover" that Japanese politics were less liberal thanthey had previously thought. This episode suggests that if the UnitedStates were to face a democracy of roughly equal capabilities, bothsides would find ways to place the other outside its own democratic"in-group." Republics may have tended to band together in the past, buta world composed solely of them might employ different criteria toidentify friends and foes. Not only is Weart's interpretation ofhistory problematic, its relevance for the future may be quite limited.

Despite its shortcomings, Never at War is a useful contribution to thisimportant debate. Readers who want to make up their own minds will wantto compare it with Miriam Elman's recent Paths to Peace and JoanneGowa's forthcoming Ballots and Bullets. Democracies may or may notfight each other, but these works suggest that the scholarly struggleis far from over.

Some Americans find these academic debates frustrating. But askyourself which you would prefer: a world where some great powers weredemocratic and others were not but where the United States was clearlynumber one, or a world where all the major powers were democracies butthe United States was number three, four, or perhaps even lower.Reasonable people can disagree about which world would be preferable,but how you answer this question will tell you which side of thedemocratic-peace debate you are on.

Copyrightby the Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.