Democratic Peace — Democratic War: Three Reasons Why Democracies Are War-prone

Abstract

I am afraid that Immanuel Kant might have been mistaken. In his treatise on ‘Perpetual Peace’ he claimed that democracies are peaceful because citizens, ‘if their consent is required in order to decide that war should be declared (…) would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decreeing for themselves all the calamities of war’ (Kant, 1795, pp. 12–13). Yet the events of early 2003 are pointing in another direction: a number of democracies argued for war and attacked Iraq while the majority of their citizens had spoken out against military action (Gallup, 2003). Such blatant discrepancy between government and citizens had not been foreseen in Kant’s democratic peace plan. Thus, it is in need of explanation just like other anomalies and antinomies of the democratic peace proposition which indicate that democracies are not inherently peaceful (Muller, 2002a). The famous ‘double finding’, that democracies do not wage war against each other but are intolerant and sometimes bellicose towards non-democracies, is still unexplained (see Muller and Wolff, Chapter 3 in this volume).