The Threat of a Democratic Peace

Abstract

U.S. presidency—a site of intense rhetorical activity that shapes public affairs more directly than the nation s founders wished or anticipated—enters the twenty-first century dangerously predisposed toward imposing a on the post-Cold War world.1 question of immediate concern is not whether the United States will succeed in what would appear, at best, to be a quixotic quest to achieve universal and permanent by transforming all nation-states into democracies. Such an outcome seems unlikely given the inherent limits of even the greatest powers to impose their will so definitively on a global scale. Instead, the matter I wish to call into question is the attitude advanced in presidential and scholarly discourse which represents democratic peace as a truism of our time. In the words of one scholar typical of others working in this area, The absence of war between comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.2 This fact that do not fight one another, which is derived from a body of scholarship in international relations, has become a commonplace of presidential rhetoric and centerpiece of the present administration's foreign policy.3 Observing early in his first term that democracies rarely wage war on one another and again, even more definitively, in his 1994 State of the Union address that democracies don't attack each other, President Clinton has proceeded to make democratization a foundation of U.S. security policy—what he calls the third pillar of his foreign policy.4 This theorem, I wish to suggest, is highly problematic and should become the object of close scrutiny, both because it exacerbates the problem of war and exposes a fundamental distrust of democracy itself. present notion of a is traced to Kant's essay on Perpetual Peace, published in 1795, in which he envisions a zone of among liberal republics, not states.5 Scholars in the last two decades have spent considerable energy attempting to demonstrate empirically the existence of this liberal zone of peace, but (with the notable exception of Michael Doyle's seminal essay) they have advanced their findings under the sign of democracy rather than liberalism, inspired by Samuel Huntington's vision of a third wave of democratization