President Bush continues to bastardize our knowledge of history.

[Daz]

I have a feeling that the common right-wing way of thinking is that invading a non-democracy is nothing bad. They see it as "liberating" the poor people...

(TM) since Vietnam...

[Imran Siddiqui]

But no one is saying democracy make peace, except W and no one has agreed with him. The contention is that democracies tend not to fight wars against each other (I'm not going to make an absolute statement because who knows what the future holds).

[Mao]

Ah...the return of liberalism and democratic peace theory. It really always annoys the hell out of realists when you pull this one up because they can't point out any historical points that contradict the strict contraints of democratic peace theory. Many do, however, point out that no countries starting with the letter "k" have ever been at war with each other either... and other such nonesense to discredit the theory.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Mao sighting!

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Mao
Many do, however, point out that no countries starting with the letter "k" have ever been at war with each other either... and other such nonesense to discredit the theory.

I'd wager that the main problem that they have with the theory is that war and democratic dyads are such a rare phenomena in the international system that it is an insufficent sample size to draw any meaningful conclusions from.

[KrazyHorse]

Since democracies have fought wars allied with each other it makes your contention unlikely.

[DinoDoc]

What contention?

[Mao]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
I'd wager that the main problem that they have with the theory is that war and democratic dyads are such a rare phenomena in the international system that it is an insufficent sample size to draw any meaningful conclusions from.

Absolutely true. However, it really irks realists because they can't come up with a counter-argument other than effectively saying, "We'll have to wait!" while liberals can dance around this theory and throw it in their faces because it would prove realists wrong in their underlying assumption that states are black boxes and that it doesn't matter what's inside them.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
What contention?

That the sample size is too small

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Mao
However, it really irks realists because they can't come up with a counter-argument ...

The 1st and 2nd World War seem to be seem to be fun counter-arguements to me at least.

[Fake Boris]

The basic idea is that

a) prior to WW2, there were so few democracies that the sample size is really too small to claim that democracies don't go to war against each other;

b) right after WW2, if you look at the geopolitical state of the world, you see: a Western block of the winning democracies, which includes the defeated fascist countries as new satellites, a Communist block, lots of colonies, and unstable, semi-authoritarian third world countries.
It's only after decolonization and the fall of the SU that you really begin to see a significant number of relatively transparent democratic regimes. Given that the first occured in the 70s, and the second in the 90s, you would have to be a moron to extrapolate an "historical" trend out of 40 years.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui


It's a bit of a streach to call Germany and Austria 'democracies'. The Kaiser wielded great power, and he was unelected.

The German parliament had power over revenues. They could have refused to fund his little war, but it just so happened that people were ecstatic over the possibility of a glorious little war to the extent that even the Socialists voted overwhelmingly in favor of it. The Kaiser had veto power, but he couldn't veto a parliamentary decision to not declare war.

Our Presidents OTOH seems to have the power to go to war on a whim.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
The German parliament had power over revenues. They could have refused to fund his little war, but it just so happened that people were ecstatic over the possibility of a glorious little war to the extent that even the Socialists voted overwhelmingly in favor of it. The Kaiser had veto power, but he couldn't veto a parliamentary decision to not declare war.

Our Presidents OTOH seems to have the power to go to war on a whim.

Our Presidents are elected.

[Colon™]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove


The German parliament had power over revenues. They could have refused to fund his little war, but it just so happened that people were ecstatic over the possibility of a glorious little war to the extent that even the Socialists voted overwhelmingly in favor of it. The Kaiser had veto power, but he couldn't veto a parliamentary decision to not declare war.

Our Presidents OTOH seems to have the power to go to war on a whim.

In Germany the Reichstag had only control over the military budget. In the UK, Belgium and others, they had control over the entire gov't budget. And even this little control was already lost in 1883, well before WWI.

[snoopy369]

Mao, I'd argue more specifically that DPT's "Strict" definition has been refined every time people find a counterexample ... so it's the standard 'moving target' argument, which is far worse than most realist counters to it.

Basically, if you take the probability of any two modern nations going to war, and then take the percentage of democratic dyads that fit, you end up with a fairly decent chance of no two democracies going to war, simply because so few nations go to war at all ...

More specifically:

Pre-1945, there were simply far too few democracies to meaningfully suggest the DPT, and most of those were aligned for geopolitical reasons (UK and US, for example, opposed to Germany). The US nearly aligned *against* the UK in WWI, and eventually aligned with them primarily because we wanted in on the winning side; however, early support for the UK was likely a result of our preference that no one power dominate Europe, and Germany's winning would likely have led to that moreso than England's winning.

Post-1945, the problem is that most of what we define as "democracies" were such either because of our intervention, or were in the US "bloc" due to non-internal-political reasons; the fact that the USSR essentially required bloc states to be socialist/communist forced non-communist states to align with us, as they had to choose a side ... and DPT folks define out any Stalinist or Maoist state, even those that could marginally be considered Democratic.

So you're left with the post-1990 world, which has existed for a whopping 15 years, and has had basically two major wars between world powers; Serbia etc., and Iraq. Neither was democratic ... shock of all shocks ... but both were, more or less, instigated by local powers attempting to increase their regional hegemony (or to maintain it, in Serbia's case); Iraq arguably was instigated by the U.S. anyway, and Iraq was theoretically a democracy (albeit i'll agree wasn't in actuality).

So, 15 years of meaningful data, most of which was dominated by a single superpower ... and two whole wars to evaluate. Doesn't sound like you have nearly enough meaningful data to me, to support DPT; and before you return with "that's a silly argument", I'd say that it's the most critical one; DPT folks have an obligation to supply meaningful data to support their hypothesis, and they haven't, plain and simple.