All International Politics Is Local: The Diffusion of Conflict, Integration, and Democratization

5. Deutschian Integration and the Democratic Peace

CHAPTER 5 Deutschian Integration and the Democratic Peace In chapter 4, I presented evidence indicating that zones of democracy go together with zones of peace. There is also a clear tendency for a decline in the likelihood of conflict following changes toward greater democracy within regions. Taken together, the findings indicate considerable support for the idea that zones of democracy coevolve with zones of peace. In this chapter, I examine the relationship between Deutschian integration and regional conflict and peace. I furthermore address the relationship among integrative flows and interactions, authority structures, and regional conflict and peace. Many have hypothesized that Deutschian integration and the democratic peace may be related, but researchers differ on the relationship between the two. The purpose of the empirical analysis in this chapter is not so much to establish whether Deutschian integration theory or the democratic peace "explains" something in isolation or which of the two explains the greatest amount of variation in regional conflict and peace. Rather, I am interested in how these fit together, that is, whether one proposition can fully accommodate the facts and observations covered by the other or whether each makes an independent contribution supplementary to the other. At this point, we do not know whether Deutschian integration underlies the seeming absence of war between democracies or whether Deutschian integration and the democratic peace are indistinguishable or separate and distinct phenomena. Finally, I use the empirical results to evaluate some recent claims about prospects for security communities and zones of peace between states that are not liberal democracies. Regional Integration, Conflict, and Peace Deutschian integration theory suggests that the element of rivalry of security in a region decreases the more integrated states are. As levels of 119 120 All International Politics Is Local integration become very high, the relations between countries may over time evolve into security communities in which the use of force between states becomes inconceivable as a means of settling disputes. If such processes operate, we should expect to find some covariation between indicators of integration and variations in conflict and peace. A large number of studies have examined linkages between trade and conflict or the evolution of rivalry (see Barbieri 1996; Bennett 1996, 1998; de Vries 1990; Diehl 1998; Goertz and Diehl 1993, 1995; Oneal et al. 1996; Oneal and Russett 1997, 1999; and Sayrs 1988, 1990). Virtually all of these studies, however, are couched exclusively in dyadic terms and research designs. I argued in chapter 2 that the relationship between integration and conflict depends critically upon the actual location of actors. Greater trade linkages with actors elsewhere in the system may not advance a country's security if the extent of integration with neighboring countries remains negligible. The relationship between integration and the prospects for conflict and peace may depend upon third parties and larger regional networks. Relating the density of integration at the regional level to conflict provides a better way to approach the processes emphasized by the Deutschian theory of integration. I measure Deutschian flows or integrative interactions by means of the density of trade relations and the relative extent of cooperative and conflictual interactions between entities in a state's regional context. (See chapter 3 and appendix E for further details on the sources of data and construction of these measures.) Do higher levels of regional trade and a greater density of cooperative interactions predict less conflict and greater prospects for peace? I assess this issue by estimating a logistic regression on the likelihood of conflict as a function of state i's regional trade density and mean regional conflict and cooperation scores as defined in chapter 3. We can represent the model symbolically as (5.1) all the terms as defined in chapter 3 and summarized in appendix E. The estimated results for equation 5.1 using a critical distance threshold of 950 kilometers for samples of interstate wars and all conflicts as the dependent variables are displayed in table 5.1. The available data limit the feasible sample to the period 1948-92. Most notably, the Deutschian Integration and the Democratic Peace 121 Penn World Tables are currently only available for the postwar period and lack values for many polities and time periods. The sample size is thus considerably lower than for the empirical analyses in chapter 4. The results of equation 5.1 in table 5.1 indicate that regional contexts with higher regional trade densities and...