Democratic peace theory is flawed – the use of a rights-based ethic assumes the government is “responsible” for peace rather than the people

That democracies, though just as belligerent as non-democracies, are unlikely to fight one another is practically law in the study of international relations. Yet prevailing liberal explanations for this democratic peace, which focus primarily on democratic political institutions and culture, remain incomplete. Most importantly, these explanations emphasize a rights-based ethic, which has significantly limited our comprehension of the link between domestic politics and international relations to empirical generalizations. International relationships, however, are intrinsically interdependent and therefore thoroughly knowable only in the context in which they occur and are experienced. In this article I interpret the “democratic peace” as a single thread, albeit a highly visible and important one, in the dense fabric of international relations. More specifically, I enlarge the context in which domestic politics is connected to international relations to include the politics of care—itself a practice that is usually understood to be private, i.e., particular, often emotional, and contextually moral. The result is a more refined understanding of the conditions for peace among all nations—democratic or not.

We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order, a world where the rule of law. . .governs the conduct of nations. —U.S. President George Bush, January 17, 1991

The unprecedented coalition of twenty-eight nations united in opposition to Iraq’s 1990 occupation of Kuwait, the participation of the former Soviet Union and sympathetic Middle East nations notwithstanding, is symbolic of the value Western industrialized democracies associate with individual rights, international law, and open markets. Indeed, it is the manifestation of these prerogatives in an array of long-standing trade arrangements, military alliances, and other multinational institutions that supports a widespread belief in the existence of a liberal peace: “democracies rarely wage war on one another.”

The so-called “democratic peace” is more than a matter of faith, though. Empirical support for the absence of war between democratic nation-states is overwhelming.2 Despite the existence of a handful of wars between democracies, statistical analyses and detailed case studies alike provide evidence that a special peace began to emerge between democratic nation-states at least as early as the second half of the nineteenth century. Proponents of the democratic peace proposition even go so far as to claim it is “as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.”3

The origins of liberal support for the democratic peace proposition lie in Kant’s philosophical prescription for a perpetual peace among republican governments. According to Kant, the self-interest inherent to nations as well as to the individuals who inhabit them will propel them from an “inter national, lawless state of nature” into a federation of sovereign republics to be secured by economic exchange and interdependence.4 Contemporary academic interpretations of this argument maintain that the representative governments, legal equality of all citizens, protection of private property, and operation of market-oriented economies associated with democracy enable individuals to exercise their rational opposition to the costs of war as a powerful domestic constraint on the use of force. A derivative democratic institutions argument suggests that “open” domestic institutions make it difficult for the leaders of democracies to gain the widespread support necessary for war. The alternative democratic culture argument suggests instead that leaders of democracies share democratic norms that facilitate mutual accommodation and the avoidance of all but the most restrained conflict.5

More recently, scholars have relocated the emergence of the democratic peace phenomenon within a more general process of international integra tion. Such a process arguably culminates in a security community whose members agree that change must occur peacefully, with a set of institutions and practices strong enough to assure peace among its populations for a “long time.” This approach draws upon the work of Karl Deutsch and his col leagues, Political Community in the North Atlantic Area, on the post–World WarII establishment of economic stability and military security in the North Atlantic region. According to Deutsch, shared peaceful decision-making val ues, multiple reliable means of communication, and predictable patterns of behavior are central to the expectation of peace among the members of a security community.6

There are three sorts of criticisms generally leveled at this literature as a whole. The first two of these primarily concern conceptual and technical issues associated with the large body of quantitative studies of the relationship between “regime type” and “war,” asking: (1) How do we define the concepts “democracy” and “war”; and (2) Considering wars are statistically rare events, should we be surprised by the observed absence of war between democracies? The third and more immediately relevant criticism suggests that liberal scholars have yet to produce a theoretically convincing explanation for the democratic peace phenomenon. This position is largely consistent with arguments such as Blainey’s on commerce and conflict, which suggests that if trade, democracy, and any number of other common influences could foster peace between nations, “then the First World War was a tragic accident.”7 Yet a number of important historical case studies do illuminate the process by which democracies’ mutual recognition as friends appears to have contributed significantly to their capacity to resolve conflicts between them peacefully.8 What gives?

The disparity between the tendency of democratic nation-states to resolve conflicts between themselves short of war and actual instances of war and peace between democracies can be attributed to scholars’ general failure to recognize war and peace as phases in the inconstant expression of naturally fluctuating relationships between nations.9 I would argue, moreover, that a peaceful international relationship might range from a state in which there exists a barely perceptible threat of conflict to a “special and more stable condition in which the threat itself of conflict is effectively lacking.”10 This state of unequivocal peace is more than the absence of war. Consistent with the United Nations’ definition of a “culture of peace,” it reflects the enduring commitment of nation-states to transcend particular and localized disputes in the interest of greater communication and a more equitable distribution of resources at every level of government.11 Achieving such a state of peace requires: (1) a mutual decision by nation-states that war will no longer be considered an appropriate mechanism for resolving disputes that arise between them, and (2) the formulation of policies designed specifically to promote rapprochement.12 The 1994 agreement between the United States and Russia to cease targeting one another with nuclear weapons is a recent and important example of nation-states intentionally entering into a permanent peace.

The present study explores the implications of understanding the democratic peace as the attrition of even the prospect of warfare between nations, rather than simply the observed absence of war between them. Of course the decision not to wage war, in principle, is related to the peaceful resolution of international conflicts. However, it is the intention to reconcile inherent in the decision not to wage war that I regard as significant because it renders international peace the almost certain outcome of deliberate choice in a relationship, rather than the potential result of an intractable evolutionary process. Without this intention, “perpetual” peace is reduced to a truce.13

Reconceptualizing peace as an aspect of international relationship requires a “different point of view,” one that is able to perceive “tantrums, betrayals, and rages” as well as instances of “persistence, trust, and commitment” as paths to rapprochement.14 Thus I argue here that international peace may be more fully understood within an ethics of care that privileges our human, emotional connectedness and social interdependence rather than within the rights-based ethic on which the democratic peace is conventionally premised. Indeed, peaceful international relationships do embody the vital emotional and social ties that bind individuals and peoples. Literally, the quintessential Anglo-American peace is often attributable in part to the proliferation of marriages between British nobles and the daughters of American elites at the turn of the twentieth century.15 Yet prevailing accounts of the democratic peace are premised on an ethic that sanctions only the rational behavior of autonomous individuals.16 The remainder of this article begins with a discussion of the ethical foundations of the democratic peace that illuminates the limitations of a Kantian framework for extending “democratic politics within states generally, and... immediate interpersonal relations” to the international level.17 I follow this discussion with a summary of an alternative, feminist ethical approach designed to broaden the normative, and so also the empirical, foundation for international peace. Most importantly, I introduce the practices of “caring about,” “taking care of,” and “giving and receiving care,” which engender emotions such as empathy and compassion that are arguably requisite for lasting, international peace. I then develop the implications for the concept of a special democratic peace that might be associated with incorporating care into the moral environment of international relations.18 The conclusion provides a summary and thoughts on the domestic politics of peace.

THE ETHICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR PEACE

The ethical foundation for peace understood as a forbearance from war as a means of conflict resolution lies not in the morality of international politics but rather in the moral choices of the individuals inhabiting the world’s nations. The dominant voice in this respect regards humans as innately aggressive, and champions human reason as the foundation for international peace.19 This voice originated with the Enlightenment, a nineteenth-century intellectual movement that put its faith in science and the power of reason as the future of human progress. Kant in particular distinguished himself among his peers in the movement by reasoning that a (nation-) state organized to ensure “justice to the rights of man” might naturally foster peace via federation with like-minded nations. More specifically, he argued that republican forms of government best constrain their citizens to “behave in such a way that [their] choices are compatible with the greatest amount of external freedom for everyone,” and thereby impart the “moral culture” that would underlay international principles of justice, common understandings and peace.20

Here Kant is quite clear on the intrinsic connection between morality and government—private morality can only exist where it is protected by a kind of public morality in the form of republican government. Arguably it is only a republican government that would be consistent with Kant’s funda mental ethical norm, the Categorical Imperative. The Categorical Imperative essentially compels an individual to behave in the manner in which he or she would wish everyone to behave (autonomy of universal law), and to treat others always as ends and never as means (respect for the dignity of persons).21 Yet he formally recognizes philosophical tradition and practicality by distinguishing between the laws that should govern public life and the moral rules that must be cultivated privately or at home—i.e., compassion, integrity and religious devotion. The upshot of this distinction is to separate a person’s process of moral choice from, and render it secondary to, his or her society’s ethical system. On the one hand this moral hierarchy provides a sensible basis for justifying a government’s preoccupation with the survival of its nation. On the other hand, however, it excuses government from attending to the everyday activities and myriad relationships that give meaning to the lives of its citizens and serve as the purpose for the government’s very existence.22 This inattention is problematic because peace breaks out much as life is lived, that is, “by one person at a time, amid particular events, and [having] genuine importance only where it imparts this distinctiveness to the one who lives it.”23 The Anglo-American rapprochement to which I previously alluded, for example, was established by ordinary British and American citizens as well as their governmental leaders during a time in which Britain and the United States acknowledged distinct imperial interests in the old and new worlds, respectively; established complementary trading patterns; and came to regard one another as “best friends.” This international friendship was based on the large number of similarities between the British and American societies, including language, literature, religion, culture, and political ideology and institutions.24 Moreover, it was experienced alike by British and American publics and influential decision-makers, including the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, U.S. Ambassador to England, John Hay, and U.S. Secretary of State Theodore Roosevelt. Thus it would be difficult, if not impossible, to understand peace in this case outside of the particularities of diplomatic and personal friendships.