Some social science theories have remarkable staying power; others turn out to have a more limited shelf life. Sometimes a once-promising idea just doesn’t seem to lead anywhere—Talcott Parsons’s structural-functionalist approach to sociology might be one example—and eventually most scholars abandon it and move on. Or a novel theoretical argument can sound compelling when it first appears, but subsequent research reveals its logical or empirical limitations. In other cases, the real world delivers a harsh verdict on a bold claim—remember the “end of history” thesis?—although some discredited theories can survive, zombie-like, because powerful interests find it useful to keep them alive.
Why do I bring this up? Because I have recently found myself wondering what exactly has happened to democratic peace theory (DPT). As students of international relations all know, DPT was a major intellectual preoccupation for IR scholars from the mid-1980s until well into the 21st century. Beginning with Michael Doyle’s seminal works on the topic (refining arguments originally developed by Immanuel Kant), the idea that “democracies don’t fight each other” inspired a vast outpouring of scholarly articles and books, along with a number of important critiques.
Some social science theories have remarkable staying power; others turn out to have a more limited shelf life. Sometimes a once-promising idea just doesn’t seem to lead anywhere—Talcott Parsons’s structural-functionalist approach to sociology might be one example—and eventually most scholars abandon it and move on. Or a novel theoretical argument can sound compelling when it first appears, but subsequent research reveals its logical or empirical limitations. In other cases, the real world delivers a harsh verdict on a bold claim—remember the “end of history” thesis?—although some discredited theories can survive, zombie-like, because powerful interests find it useful to keep them alive.
Why do I bring this up? Because I have recently found myself wondering what exactly has happened to democratic peace theory (DPT). As students of international relations all know, DPT was a major intellectual preoccupation for IR scholars from the mid-1980s until well into the 21st century. Beginning with Michael Doyle’s seminal works on the topic (refining arguments originally developed by Immanuel Kant), the idea that “democracies don’t fight each other” inspired a vast outpouring of scholarly articles and books, along with a number of important critiques.
In its modern form, DPT rested on the empirical observation that well-established democratic states did not fight wars with each other, a finding that one prominent scholar called “the closest thing we have to an empirical law in the study of international relations.” Proponents developed several competing explanations for this intriguing observation, sometimes married with other factors such as economic interdependence. Unlike many social science theories, DPT quickly left the ivory tower and was seized upon by politicians seeking to justify U.S. efforts to spread democracy around the world or to expand institutions like NATO. The theory’s seductive appeal was obvious, for it implied that a world made up entirely of liberal states would be free from war. As President George W. Bush put it at the beginning of his presidency, “Our goal is to turn this time of American influence into generations of democratic peace.”
Not surprisingly, DPT’s bold claims attracted no shortage of critics. Some scholars pointed out that the causal mechanisms underlying the empirical finding were inconsistent and unconvincing, while others suggested that the observed infrequency of war between democracies might be a statistical artifact, given there were hardly any genuine democracies before 1945. Others suggested that the absence of war between democracies was due to power politics, given that most of the post-World War II democracies were part of America’s Cold War alliance network, or the result of specific coding decisions and shifting definitions of “democracy.” Others pointed out that although well-established democracies might not have fought each other in the past, newly democratizing states seemed to be especially war-prone, which implied that spreading democracy might pay off in the long run, but getting there would be a bumpy process.
This intellectual battle raged on in the pages of scholarly journals and monographs, and eventually reached something of a dead end, as the results of competing large-N studies became increasingly dependent on the assumptions and modeling techniques being employed. My own view, for what it’s worth, is that the more extreme claims for a democratic peace were overblown, but democracies might be somewhat less likely to fight each other because it was somewhat harder, though not impossible, for them to overcome public resistance to a war.
More importantly, I thought that DPT did not tell us very much about what a world composed entirely of democracies would be like, because such a world has never existed and absence of war between democracies had been reinforced by the constant presence of potentially dangerous non-democratic rivals. If all autocracies were replaced by democracies, however, even Kantian republics might view each other with some suspicion and begin to draw invidious distinctions among themselves. Sharing democratic principles does not eliminate all conflicts of interest, and might parliamentary and presidential republics begin to see each other as different and possibly dangerous? If so, then spreading democracy far and wide might not be the panacea that DPT’s most enthusiastic proponents believed. And like some other scholars, I worried that DPT encouraged powerful democracies to launch violent crusades against illiberal states in the name of peace, and that such efforts would gradually erode liberal norms and freedoms at home, which is precisely what has happened.
But where does DPT fit in today’s world? Although it was not part of the theory itself, many of its proponents and the policymakers who invoked it believed liberal democracy was the wave of the future and assumed it would continue to spread following its seeming triumph over the Soviet empire. That prediction was wildly off the mark, however: Democracy has been in retreat around the world for nearly 20 years, and it is rapidly eroding here in the United States, which has long been its principal champion. The world’s most populous democracy—India—is moving in increasingly illiberal directions; Brazil narrowly escaped an autocratic takeover after its last election; and several established democracies in Europe are facing legitimacy crises of their own.
It is entirely possible, therefore, that all the world’s major powers—and a great many medium and smaller powers, too—will soon be neither liberal nor democratic in any meaningful sense of the term. What does DPT have to say about that?
The most obvious point is that even if DPT is true, it would be largely irrelevant in such a world. Its causal mechanisms do not operate between illiberal states or between illiberal states and liberal ones, and so a world with no major democracies lies outside the scope of the theory. A DPT devotee might expect such a world to be even more conflictive, because there would be fewer oases of democratic peace and thus more opportunities for conflict among the more numerous non-democratic dyads. But DPT says little about the frequency of war between non-democracies, and there is no obvious reason to believe that illiberal states would begin fighting more often than they have in the past simply because there were fewer democracies left on the planet.
Moreover, such a world might have one thin silver lining. By removing the ideological competition between democracy and autocracy—where each sees the other as a threat to its legitimacy—it would mitigate the security dilemma between them and reduce the crusading impulse that has led powerful liberal states to launch wars in the past, and that has led autocracies to wage preventive wars to preserve their own system. Competition among the major powers would not end, but it would take on a less ideologically driven and uncompromising character. Ironically, a world where DPT was no longer seen as a useful guide to policymakers might also be more peaceful.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that such a world would be preferable. On the contrary, a world made up entirely of illiberal great powers would have many downsides. Human rights would be gravely endangered, corruption would increase, and unchecked autocrats would be free to launch disastrous initiatives such as Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward or totalitarian nightmares like Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror or the Nazi Holocaust. Because I believe democracy remains “the worst form of government, except for all the others,” and have no desire to live in a dictatorship, I am deeply worried by autocratic trends around the world and especially here in the United States.
Ideally, I’d like to see the United States reverse its current slide and remain a robustly healthy liberal republic, where politicians across the board respect democratic norms, the rule of law, and are held accountable when they violate these principles. I would also like a powerful America to promote those values by setting an example of good, just, and effective governance that other societies would want to emulate in their own way and at their own pace. If putting DPT out to pasture facilitates that more modest and realistic approach and makes it harder to justify trying to impose democracy at the point of a gun, that’s just fine with me.
