Review: The Invisible Hand of Peace Capitalism, the War Machine, and International Relations Theory

Abstract

THE INVISIBLE HAND OF PEACE Capitalism, The War Machine, and International Relations Theory Patrick J. McDonald Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 338pp, US$26.99 doth ISBN 978-0-521-76136-9Patrick McDonald's argument in The Invisible Hand of Peace is clear and succinct: First, liberal economic institutions promote peace. Second, these economic institutions have historicaUy played a stronger role in promoting than (281). His principal claim is the bold assertion that [p]ublic property heightens the likelihood of military conflict for aU regime types (276). This is an important and interesting book, and McDonald has undertaken significant research and organized it in a methodologically sophisticated manner. His point of entry is the peace debate, which has become a touchstone for international relations theory in the US. Its proponents maintain that democracies are less warlike than other political regimes. McDonald is not convinced by this claim, and subjects it to a set of longitudinal regression analyses that reveal that its supporting arguments face considerable problems: not only is the data time-bound and historically controversial, but the democratic thesis runs up against the empirical counterexample of World War I. Most critically, he argues that this debate obscures the key role played by economic institutions in promoting peace. It is capitalism, rather than democracy, that is the cornerstone of peaceful interstate relations.McDonald pursues this argument in sophisticated and imaginative ways. His research design mixes quantitative and qualitative research strategies in a manner that is methodologically engaging and theoretically stimulating. Beth Simmons, Andrew Sobel, and Layna Mosley were early pioneers in this endeavour, but McDonald takes their work to the next stage by carefully incorporating narrative forms of scholarship into his research. What is particularly striking here is the seamless way in which he deploys sophisticated statistical techniques to establish the parameters of his general claim about the importance of liberal economic institutions, and then uses archival and historical investigations to uncover how such statistical correlations actually operate to inform the decisions that officials make under concrete historical circumstances. For example, once McDonald establishes the statistical significance of liberal economic institutions for the that prevailed during the 19th century - the first era of globalization - he then combs meticulously through the historical record of the Oregon and Venezuelan boundary disputes to illustrate precisely how those societal forces in Britain and the US that benefited from free trade swung their support behind policies that resulted in rather than war.In a similar vein, McDonald squarely confronts the Achilles heel of the democratic thesis, namely that it is compromised by the outbreak of World War I. Here he suggests that war came about not because of the authoritarian nature of the political regimes involved, but rather because Russia was organized economically in a manner that strangled its emergent capitalist formation. In a nutshell, McDonald is concerned to establish that regimes that hold large amounts of public property - his proxy for a command economy - are predisposed to pursue conflictual rather than pacific foreign policies. The Russian state held large amounts of public property, which insulated it from the influence of commercial interests. For McDonald, the outbreak of war in 1914 confirms the link between capitalism and by demonstrating how economies organized along commandand-control lines of authority incline states to warlike postures. Ultimately this leads him to argue that the US should make the expansion of capitalism rather than democracy the lodestone of its current foreign policy. …