The Threat of a Democratic Peace

Forum on the Future of the Presidency 455 The Threat of a Democratic Peace Robert L. Ivie The U.S. presidency—a site of intense rhetorical activity that shapes public affairs more directly than the nation s founders wished or anticipated—enters the twenty-first century dangerously predisposed toward imposing a democratic peace on the post-Cold War world.1 The question of immediate concern is not whether the United States will succeed in what would appear, at best, to be a quixotic quest to achieve universal and permanent peace by transforming all nation-states into democracies. Such an outcome seems unlikely given the inherent limits of even the greatest powers to impose their will so definitively on a global scale. Instead, the matter I wish to call into question is the attitude advanced in presidential and scholarly discourse which represents "democratic peace" as a truism of our time. In the words of one scholar typical of others working in this area, "The absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations."2 This "fact" that democracies do not fight one another, which is derived from a body of scholarship in international relations, has become a commonplace of presidential rhetoric and centerpiece of the present administration's foreign policy.3 Observing early in his first term that "democracies rarely wage war on one another" and again, even more definitively, in his 1994 State of the Union address that "democracies don't attack each other," President Clinton has proceeded to make democratization a foundation of U.S. security policy—what he calls the "third pillar" of his foreign policy.4 This democratic peace theorem, I wish to suggest, is highly problematic and should become the object of close scrutiny, both because it exacerbates the problem of war and exposes a fundamental distrust of democracy itself. The present notion of a democratic peace is traced to Kant's essay on "Perpetual Peace," published in 1795, in which he envisions a zone of peace among liberal republics, not democratic states.5 Scholars in the last two decades have spent considerable energy attempting to demonstrate empirically the existence of this liberal zone of peace, but (with the notable exception of Michael Doyle's seminal essay) they have advanced their findings under the sign of democracy rather than liberalism , inspired by Samuel Huntington's vision of a "third wave" of democratization Robert L. Ivie is professor and department chair of communication and culture at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 3, No. 3, 2000, pp. 455-59 ISSN 1094-8392 456 Rhetoric & Public Affairs in the late twentieth century.6 Accordingly, the distinction between the two discourses of power combined within the American system of liberal democracy is blurred in this line of research such that the symbolic capital of democracy is deployed to legitimize the continuing dominance of a liberal political philosophy that contains self rule and minimizes participatory politics.7 It comes as no surprise, therefore, that issues of definition are among the first in a series of questions that can be raised about the validity of the democratic peace theorem. The question of what counts as a democracy has plagued researchers attempting to establish an empirical relationship between regime type and proclivities toward war and peace. Some definitions, for example, eliminate the requirement of civil liberties while others factor in the stability of a given democratic regime, excluding from the data any wars that occur between new or fledgling democracies.8 The empirical findings of researchers supporting the theorem can also be questioned on methodological grounds for using the "dyad year" as the basic unit of analysis. David Spiro argues, for instance, that the absence of war between pairs of democratic states is statistically insignificant in any given year because for most of time there have been too few democracies with too little chance to fight one another.9 Moreover, Henry Färber and Joanne Gowa have achieved empirical results that challenge the democratic peace theorem by counting only once any dyad of warring countries fighting one another for multiple years, instead of deploying the typical strategy of counting...