Security of democratic nations do not indicate peace

By illuminating the rich context in which a state of peace emerges between nations, this article has demonstrated that the care ethic can provide a broader, more complete foundation for the observed democratic peace, one within which “considerations of rights and justice constitute a subset— though admittedly an important one.”47 More specifically, peace, like war, begins “in the mind,” according to Kenneth Waltz. This attribution of the root cause of peace to attitudes and intentions of individuals is evident in Arnold Wolfers’s early and controversial defense of the importance of moral ity in international politics. The main point of his essay on “Statesmanship and Moral Choice” is that national leaders are morally obliged to “establish bonds of friendship.”48 The explicit connection here between moral obligations in international relations, easily derived from, say, a human right to peace, and care as it is prac ticed in friendship holds a twofold significance for the purposes of this article. First, this connection intimates the ethically prior position of care. Indeed, especially as women and members of other traditionally under-represented groups enter the political process, the practice of care associated most closely with them influences local and national policy. While this relationship has been widely confirmed for the world’s democratic, industrialized nations, it has more recently been evidenced in non-democratic and less-developed nations. Womenpiece-workers in Bangladesh, for example, successfully formed a labor union as a platform for legalizing the economic independence women there need to care and provide for their families.49 The international political process increasingly respects such domestic laws and policies, in part due to personal and diplomatic relationships among individuals committed to humanitarian The “Democratic Peace” norms. That is, in order for the leader of a sovereign nation to fulfill his or her recognized role, he or she must be sensitive to and appreciate fully the array of details and contexts associated with friendship in international relations.50 Second, the connection between the traditional, rights-based ethic and the alternative ethic of care raises the issue of how to delimit the exercise of friendship in international relations so that the practice of care therein may be widely regarded as necessary and judicious. This issue reflects a concern that care has and might conceivably continue to engender a dependency characterized by paternalism and the privileging of those in power.51 Discus sions relevant to the dangers actually and potentially inherent in the practice of care are wide-ranging and perhaps tangential to the focus of this article. Still, the recognition here of the importance of relationships to human exis tence and, by extension, international peace would support ongoing feminist and critical re-evaluations of participation, deliberation, and communication in democratic politics. Central to this research agenda is the idea that democ racy may well have less to do with securing individual rights than with honor ing the individual as a particular person “with social connections and commitments, but also autonomy.”52 Consider, for instance, the extension of the right to vote to women in most Western industrialized nations during the first half of the twentieth cen tury. It took decades even in the most progressive nations for universal adult suffrage to generate policies intended to secure women’s access to productive employment and to protect their reproductive role in family and society.53 Now voting, as a means of participating in government, is considered a human right and thus a partial justification for international recognition and acceptance into the international community of nation-states.54 Of course, this history may be regarded as an indication that it may be a very long time yet before the practice and politics of care domestically affects the foreign policies of nation-states sufficiently to yield a lasting peace among them. Alternatively, it might be understood as a sign that peace really is, as contemporary visionaries suggest, only as far away as we permit it to be.55