Democratization and the Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy: Turkey in the 1974 Cyprus Crisis

Abstract

The claim that democracies do not go to war with one another has become one of the most widely accepted propositions in the field of international relations. This proposition may be true for stable and highly institutionalized democracies but to what extent is the claim generalizable to the full range of regime types around the globe? Recent research that examines the relationship between democratization and war has argued that a number of boundary conditions must be placed on the general proposition that democracies do not fight each other. Since fully half of the new democracies in todays world can be classified as and most democratizing regimes are composed of a variety of and undemocratic liberal and illiberal elements the relationship between domestic processes of democratization and their foreign policy outcomes is worth exploring in more detail through structured case studies. In this article I take up this task by examining Turkish foreign policy making during the 1974 Cyprus crisis. I argue that evidence from the Turkish case lends support to much of the causal logic of the democratization and war argument and it further demonstrates that both structural and normative explanations for the democratic peace may only be valid under limited sets of conditions. (excerpt)