Democracy doesn’t stop war

But something happened in the early 2000s. The unfolding of history as liberalism had been disrupted. The attacks of September 11, the subsequent bungling of intelligence regarding WMDs, the United States’ decision to drag its NATO allies into a series of embarrassing and ultimately ineffectual wars in the Middle East, numerous botched attempts at regime change and nation-building, and aggressive ideological demands as pre-conditions for diplomacy, have devastated the credibility of the U.S.-driven, Western liberal order. In some areas, history is now forking from the liberal path with a surprising confidence. Axios declared 2018 the year of the strongman, but it can also be called the year of liberalism in crisis. Russia, Egypt, China, Poland, Hungary, the Philippines, and Turkey—among others—have gained a renewed sense of self and conviction in their opposition to liberalism, as opposed to merely carving out for themselves an unprincipled exception to liberalism and ceding it the moral high ground. Even in Europe, where liberal democracy claims some of its greatest accomplishments, liberalism is beginning to unravel on the periphery in countries like Poland, Hungary, and Italy. Jair Bolsonaro, who notably expressed sympathy for a military dictatorship, has done tremendously well so far in the Brazilian presidential election. Neither soft, nor hard evangelism of liberalism is working the way it used to. For liberal theorists, the prospect of a liberal democratic world peace is now questionable. The Economist has put out a call to arms to defend liberalism as the most successful idea of the last 400 years. Whether this call results in anything substantial remains to be seen. But there is a palpable sense that liberalism is facing a serious new opposition. Despite this trend, liberalism’s theorists have a hope encapsulated by Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry’s 2009 pronouncement that “liberal states should not assume that history has ended, but they can still be certain that it is on their side.” And yet, in the nine years following this bold pronouncement, history has not been especially kind to liberalism. Texas A&M political science professor Christopher Layne, writing in early 2018, has summed up the current situation aptly, namely that China as an increasingly self-aware superpower is already reshaping the world order away from Pax Americana: The US foreign policy establishment does not grasp this, and, instead, has invested the idea of a ‘rules-based, institutionalized’ international order with a talismanic quality. It claims that rules and institutions are politically neutral, and, ipso facto, beneficial for all. However, in international politics, who rules makes the rules. Rules and institutions reflect the distribution of power in the international system. A power transition is taking place in the early twenty-first century: US power is in relative decline and China is rising quickly. No international order—not even the Pax Americana—lasts forever. The liberal world order cannot survive the erosion of US hegemonic power. It is this structural change, not Donald Trump, that threatens the post-Second World War international order’s survival. It requires a huge leap of faith to believe that a risen China will continue to subordinate itself to the Pax Americana. Which brings us to the question: given that the prospect of an expanded democratic peace is starting to hit some hard limits, how well does liberal democratic peace theory actually explain the peace that has existed among liberal democratic states? Although LDP theory is taken as an empirical law in international relations, it has picked up a number of qualifications, making the theory far less interesting than first presented. Here are various renditions of the theory since its modern inception in the 1960s: Claim 1: liberal democracies go to war less than non-liberal democracies. The most significant abandonment in the field has been of the monadic hypothesis: that liberal democratic states are less likely to go to war compared to non-liberal democratic states. Henry Farber and Joanne Gowa have convincingly shown that, statistically, democracies on average have the same probability of going to war as non-democracies. At this point, no one holds the monadic hypothesis. Claim 2: no liberal democracy has fought another liberal democracy since 1816 (notably after 1812) This claim from Michael Doyle has increasingly fallen out of favor. There weren’t many democracies prior to 1945, and so the number of dyadic pairs of liberal democratic countries that could have gone to war was extremely limited. For example, Doyle excludes Great Britain from counting as a liberal democracy until 1832 and denies that the Spanish-American War of 1898 should count, even though the Polity II data set lists Spain as a democracy in 1898. Others have argued that the Second Philippines War of 1899 shouldn’t count either, as at the time the Philippines hadn’t held an election yet. This strong claim has largely been dropped because of a) exception cases that require new qualifications to explain, and b) the fact that there weren’t enough existing liberal democracies to achieve significance. All totaled, there are around 50 exception cases suggested in the literature. Claim 3: mature liberal democracies tend not to go to war/don’t go to war with one another Although Peru and Ecuador fought while both were liberal democracies, some maintain that the war occurred before the “pacifying effects” of liberal democracy had enough time to work, meaning maturity was lacking. Yet another qualification. Interestingly, the U.S. intervened militarily to topple Salvador Allende after he was democratically elected in Chile. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1981, but at the time, Lebanon’s government was in disarray. R.J. Rummel states that the Israeli attack on the United States’ USS Liberty in 1967 counts as conflict below the level of war, but argued that Israel at the time was “only partially free.” That Finland joined up with the fascists from 1941 to 1944 apparently shouldn’t count, as no Finnish troops attacked troops from a liberal democratic country, though Great Britain bombed Finland in 1941. Claim 4: mature liberal democracies in the post-1945 era don’t go to war with one another The addition of the ‘post-1945 era’ qualification came later in the development of LDP theory, and while it may be a disappointing qualification, it may be necessary, given the small-N universe of liberal democracies before 1945. Bruce Russett admits that “the absence of murderous quarrels between democracies was not too surprising, and may need—at least for the pre-1945 era—little further explanation.” Claim 5: mature liberal democracies in the post-1945 era don’t go to war with one another, but for normative reasons, not structural reasons It’s claimed that the structural elements of liberal democratic states, namely separation of powers, checks and balances, elections, the free press, etc. should result in less war in general, but this is essentially equivalent to the monadic hypothesis, which has been largely abandoned. So, it might be possible to explain the absence of war through the normative mechanisms of liberal democratic states, as opposed to structural elements. Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett argue that while there is some support for the structural model, the normative model has more support and better consistency. The above examples illustrate continuing iterations of the theory. This trajectory is by no means perfectly linear, nor is there consensus on how many qualifications are required, but the fact that these qualifications have continued to pile on is evidence that LDP theory is now much closer to triviality than when first introduced.