Democratic Peace in Theory and Practice

Steven W. Hook

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781631011245
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A collection of scholarly essays on democratic peace theory

Historical patterns suggest that democratic governments, which often fight wars against authoritarian regimes, maintain peaceful relationships with other governments that uphold political freedoms and empower their civil societies—a concept known as "democratic peace." Democratic Peace in Theory and Practice is a timely collection of essays by leading scholars that examines how democracies maintain relationships and how democracies are spread throughout the world.

Along with two articles by Michael W. Doyle that brought widespread attention to the concept of democratic peace in the 1980s, the essays in this volume explore the application of democratic peace theory in the Middle East, the importance of peace and prosperity in developing democracy, the contradiction between democracy and capitalism present today in the process of globalization, and democratization in Africa. The contributors also consider the contradictions of promoting democracy by force, the necessity of educating and mobilizing citizens in democratic countries, economic sanctions as policy tools, and the relationship between democracy promotion and terrorism, among other topics.

The latest volume in The Kent State University Press's Symposia on Democracy series, Democratic Peace in Theory and Practice will be welcomed by political scientists and valued by students of democracy, diplomacy, and peace studies.

Part One
Democratic Peace in Theory

1
Kant, Liberal Legacies,
and Foreign Affairs

MICHAEL W. DOYLE

I

What difference do liberal principles and institutions make to the conduct of the foreign affairs of liberal states? A thicket of conflicting judgments suggests that the legacies of liberalism have not been clearly appreciated. For many citizens of liberal states, liberal principles and institutions have so fully absorbed domestic politics that their influence on foreign affairs tends to be either overlooked altogether or, when perceived, exaggerated. Liberalism becomes either unself-consciously patriotic or inherently “peace-loving.” For many scholars and diplomats, the relations among independent states appear to differ so significantly from domestic politics that influences of liberal principles and domestic liberal institutions are denied or denigrated. They judge that international relations are governed by perceptions of national security and the balance of power; liberal principles and institutions, when they do intrude, confuse and disrupt the pursuit of balance-of-power politics.¹

Although liberalism is misinterpreted from both these points of view, a crucial aspect of the liberal legacy is captured by each. Liberalism is a distinct ideology and set of institutions that has shaped the perceptions of and capacities for foreign relations of political societies that range from social welfare or social democratic to laissez faire. It defines much of the content of the liberal patriot’s nationalism. Liberalism does appear to disrupt the pursuit of balance-of-power politics. Thus its foreign relations cannot be adequately explained (or prescibed) by a sole reliance on the balance of power. But liberalism is not inherently “peace-loving”; nor is it consistently restrained or peaceful in intent. Furthermore, liberal practice may reduce the probability that states will successfully exercise the consistent restraint and peaceful intentions that a world peace may well require in the nuclear age. Yet the peaceful intent and restraint that liberalism does manifest in limited aspects of its foreign affairs announces the possibility of a world peace this side of the grave or of world conquest. It has strengthened the prospects for a world peace established by the steady expansion of a separate peace among liberal societies.

Putting together these apparently contradictory (but, in fact, compatible) pieces of the liberal legacy begins with a discussion of the range of liberal principle and practice. This article highlights the differences between liberal practice toward other liberal societies and liberal practice toward nonliberal societies. It argues that liberalism has achieved extraordinary success in the first and has contributed to exceptional confusion in the second. Appreciating these liberal legacies calls for another look at one of the greatest of liberal philosophers, Immanuel Kant, for he is a source of insight, policy, and hope.

II

Liberalism has been identified with an essential principle—the importance of the freedom of the individual. Above all, this is a belief in the importance of moral freedom, of the right to be treated and a duty to treat others as ethical subjects, and not as objects or means only. This principle has generated rights and institutions.

A commitment to a threefold set of rights forms the foundation of liberalism. Liberalism calls for freedom from arbitrary authority, often called “negative freedom,” which includes freedom of conscience, a free press and free speech, equality under the law, and the right to hold, and therefore to exchange, property without fear of arbitrary seizure. Liberalism also calls for those rights necessary to protect and promote the capacity and opportunity for freedom, the “positive freedoms.” Such social and economic rights as equality of opportunity in education and rights to health care and employment, necessary for effective self-expression and participation, are thus among liberal rights. A third liberal right, democratic participation or representation, is necessary to guarantee the other two. To ensure that morally autonomous individuals remain free in those areas of social action where public authority is needed, public legislation has to express the will of the citizens making laws for their own community.

These three sets of rights, taken together, seem to meet the challenge that Kant identified:

To organize a group of rational beings who demand general laws for their survival, but of whom each inclines toward exempting himself, and to establish their constitution in such a way that, in spite of the fact their private attitudes are opposed, these private attitudes mutually impede each other in such a manner that [their] public behavior is the same as if they did not have such evil attitudes.²

But the dilemma within liberalism is how to reconcile the three sets of liberal rights. The right to private property, for example, can conflict with equality of opportunity and both rights can be violated by democratic legislation. During the 180 years since Kant wrote, the liberal tradition has evolved two high roads to individual freedom and social order; one is laissez-faire or “conservative” liberalism and the other is social welfare, or social democratic, or “liberal” liberalism. Both reconcile these conflicting rights (though in differing ways) by successfully organizing free individuals into a political order.

The political order of laissez-faire and social welfare liberals is marked by a shared commitment to four essential institutions. First, citizens possess juridical equality and other fundamental civic rights such as freedom of religion and the press. Second, the effective sovereigns of the state are representative legislatures deriving their authority from the consent of the electorate and exercising their authority free from all restraint apart from the requirement that basic civic rights be preserved³ Most pertinently for the impact of liberalism on foreign affairs, the state is subject to neither the external authority of other states nor to the internal authority of special prerogatives held, for example, by monarchs or military castes over foreign policy. Third, the economy rests on a recognition of the rights of private property, including the ownership of means of production. Property is justified by individual acquisition (for example, by labor) or by social agreement or social utility. This excludes state socialism or state capitalism, but it need not exclude market socialism or various forms of the mixed economy. Fourth, economic decisions are predominantly shaped by the forces of supply and demand, domestically and internationally, and are free from strict control by bureaucracies.

In order to protect the opportunity of the citizen to exercise freedom, laissez-faire liberalism has leaned toward a highly constrained role for the state and a much wider role for private property and the market. In order to promote the opportunity of the citizen to exercise freedom, welfare liberalism has expanded the role of the state and constricted the role of the market.⁴ Both, nevertheless, accept these four institutional requirements and contrast markedly with the colonies, monarchical regimes, military dictatorships, and communist party dictatorships with which they have shared the political governance of the modern world.

The domestic successes of liberalism have never been more apparent. Never have so many people been included in, and accepted the domestic hegemony of, the liberal order; never have so many of the world’s leading states been liberal, whether as republics or as constitutional monarchies. Indeed, the success of liberalism as an answer to the problem of masterless men in modern society is reflected in the growth in the number of liberal regimes from the three that existed when Kant wrote to the more than forty that exist today. But we should not be complacent about the domestic affairs of liberal states. Significant practical problems endure: among them are enhancing citizen participation in large democracies, distributing “positional goods” (for example, prestigious jobs), controlling bureaucracy, reducing unemployment, paying for a growing demand for social services, reducing inflation, and achieving large scale restructuring of industries in response to growing foreign competition.⁵ Nonetheless, these domestic problems have been widely explored though they are by no means solved. Liberalism’s foreign record is more obscure and warrants more consideration.

Table 1

Period	Liberal Regimes and the Pacific Union (By date “liberal”)^a	Total Number
18th century	Swiss Cantons^b	3
	French Republic 1790–1795
	the United States^b 1776–
1800–1850	Swiss Confederation, the United States	8
	France 1830–1849
	Belgium 1830–
	Great Britain 1832–
	Netherlands 1848–
	Piedmont 1848–
	Denmark 1849–
1850–1900	Switzerland, the United States, Belgium, Great Britain, Netherlands	13
	Piedmont—1861, Italy 1861–
	Denmark—1866
	Sweden 1864–
	Greece 1864–
	Canada 1867–
	France 1871–
	Argentina 1880–
	Chile 1891–
1900–1945	Switzerland, the United States, Great Britain, Sweden, Canada	29
	Greece—1911, 1928–1936
	Italy—1922
	Belgium—1940;
	Netherlands—1940;
	Argentina—1943
	France—1940
	Chile—1924, 1932
	Australia 1901–
	Norway 1905–1940
	New Zealand 1907–
	Colombia 1910–1949
	Denmark 1914–1940
	Poland 1917–1935
	Latvia 1922–1934
	Germany 1918–1932
	Austria 1918–1934
	Estonia 1919–1934
	Finland 1919–
	Uruguay 1919–
	Costa Rica 1919–
	Czechoslovakia 1920–1939
	Ireland 1920–
	Mexico 1928–
	Lebanon 1944–
1945^c–	Switzerland, the United States, Great Britain, Sweden, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Ireland, Mexico	49
	Uruguay—1973;
	Chile—1973;
	Lebanon—1975
	Costa Rica—1948, 1953–
	Iceland 1944–
	France 1945–
	Denmark 1945–
	Norway 1945–
	Austria 1945–
	Brazil 1945–1954, 1955–1964
	Belgium 1946–
	Luxemburg 1946–
	Netherlands 1946–
	Italy 1946–
	Philippines 1946–1972
	India 1947–1975, 1977–
	Sri Lanka 1948–1961, 1963–1977, 1978–
	Ecuador1948–1963, 1979–
	Israel 1949–
	West Germany 1949–
	Peru 1950–1962, 1963–1968, 1980–
	El Salvador 1950–1961
	Turkey 1950–1960, 1966–1971
	Japan 1951–
	Bolivia 1956–1969
	Colombia 1958–
	Venezuela 1959–
	Nigeria 1961–1964, 1979–
	Jamaica 1962
	Trinidad 1962–
	Senegal 1963–
	Malaysia 1963–
	South Korea 1963–1972
	Botswana 1966–
	Singapore 1965–
	Greece 1975–
	Portugal 1976–
	Spain 1978–
	Dominican Republic 1978–

a.I have drawn up this approximate list of “Liberal Regimes” according to the four institutions described as essential: market and private property economies; polities that are externally sovereign; citizens who possess juridical rights; and “republican” (whether republican or monarchical), representative, government. This latter includes the requirement that the legislative branch have an effective role in public policy and be formally and competitively, either potentially or actually, elected. Furthermore, I have taken into account whether male suffrage is wide (that is, 30 percent) or open to “achievement” by inhabitants (for example, to poll-tax payers or householders) of the national or metropolitan territory. Female suffrage is granted within a generation of its being demanded; and representative government is internally sovereign (for example, including and especially over military and foreign affairs) as well as stable (in existence for at least three years).

Sources: Arthur Banks and W. Overstreet, eds., The Political Handbook of the World, 1980 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980); Foreign and Commonwealth Office, A Year Book of the Commonwealth 1980 (London: HMSO, 1980); Europa Yearbook, 1981 (London: Europa, 1981); W. L. Langer, An Encyclopedia of World History (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1968); Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1981); and Freedom at Issue, no. 54 (Jan.–Feb. 1980).

b.There are domestic variations within these liberal regimes. For example, Switzerland was liberal only in certain cantons; the United States was liberal only north of the Mason-Dixon line until 1865, when it became liberal throughout. These lists also exclude ancient “republics,” since none appear to fit Kant’s criteria. See Stephen Holmes, “Aristippus in and out of Athens,” American Political Science Review 73, no. 1 (Mar. 1979).

c.Selected list, excludes liberal regimes with populations less than one million.

III

In foreign affairs liberalism has shown, as it has in the domestic realm, serious weaknesses. But unlike liberalism’s domestic realm, its foreign affairs have experienced startling but less than fully appreciated successes. Together they shape an unrecognized dilemma, for both these successes and weaknesses in large part spring from the same cause: the international implications of liberal principles and institutions.

The basic postulate of liberal international theory holds that states have the right to be free from foreign intervention. Since morally autonomous citizens hold rights to liberty, the states that democratically represent them have the right to exercise political independence. Mutual respect for these rights then becomes the touchstone of international liberal theory.⁶ When states respect each other’s rights, individuals are free to establish private international ties without state interference. Profitable exchanges between merchants and educational exchanges among scholars then create a web of mutual advantages and commitments that bolsters sentiments of public respect.

These conventions of mutual respect have formed a cooperative foundation for relations among liberal democracies of a remarkably effective kind. Even though liberal states have become involved in numerous wars with nonliberal states, constitutionally secure liberal states have yet to engage in war with one another.⁷ No one should argue that such wars are impossible; but preliminary evidence does appear to indicate that there exists a significant predisposition against warfare between liberal states. Indeed, threats of war also have been regarded as illegitimate. A liberal zone of peace, a pacific union, has been maintained and has expanded despite numerous particular conflicts of economic and strategic interest.

During the nineteenth century the United States and Britain negotiated the northern frontier of the United States. During the American Civil War the commercial linkages between the Lancashire cotton economy and the American South and the sentimental links between the British aristocracy and the Southern plantocracy (together with numerous disputes over the rights of British shipping against the Northern blockade) brought Great Britain and the Northern states to the brink of war, but they never passed over that brink. Despite an intense Anglo-French colonial rivalry, crises such as Fashoda in 1898 were resolved without going to war. Despite their colonial rivalries, liberal France and Britain formed an entente before World War I against illiberal Germany (whose foreign relations were controlled by the Kaiser and the Army). During 1914–15 Italy, the liberal member of the Triple Alliance with illiberal Germany and Austria, chose not to fulfill its obligations under the Triple Alliance to either support its allies or remain neutral. Instead, Italy, a liberal regime, joined the alliance with France and Britain that would prevent it from having to fight other liberal states, and declared war on Austria and Germany, its former allies. And despite generations of Anglo-American tension and British restrictions on American trade, the United States leaned toward Britain and France from 1914 to 1917. Nowhere was this special peace among liberal states more clearly proclaimed than in President Woodrow Wilson’s “War Message” of 2 April 1917: “Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really fre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Democratic Peace Theory
• Part One: Democratic Peace in Theory
• Part Two: Democratic Peace in Practice
• References
• Contributors
• Index