The Impact of External Threat on States and Domestic Societies1

Abstract

I begin with the premise, amply validated, that liberal democracy is the best form of government for the avoidance of ethnic conflict. And by ethnic conflict, I mean violence to persons or property committed by members of one ethnic group against those of another, or by the state (often controlled by an ethnic majority) against members of any ethnic minority. Events occurring in the international arena that negatively influence democratic governance also can increase the probability of ethnic conflict. State security, which frequently is highly dependent on the state's immediate environment, is critically important in the maintenance of liberal democracy. The concept of state security has been at the core of international relations (IR) theorizing, at least in the post-World War II period, if not earlier. The security dilemma as developed by Robert Jervis (1978) and Jack Snyder (1985), of course, has been at the heart of IR theory, as has the related concept of threat in Stephen Walt's (1987) transformation of the balance of power into the balance of threat. But in most IR applications, state security was deemed a function of interstate relations, without necessarily having an impact on either the state itself or on domestic societies. Quantitative analyses of arms races were exemplars of this interstate emphasis. Several years ago I found that state security had an impact on the inner workings of the state itself, particularly on the extent of its democratic governance. Diminished state security is associated with less democracy cross-nationally, and with the overthrow of democracy in favor of autocratic government (Midlarsky 1995, 1998, 2002). These findings are related to the “reversal of the causal arrow” in democratic peace theory suggested by me, and others such as William Thompson (1996) and Patrick James and his colleagues (1999). Of course, the …