Bush and the Theory of the Democratic Peace

Omar G. Encarnación is associate professor of politics at Bard College and the author of The Myth of Civil Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). This essay draws on two earlier articles: “The Follies of Democratic Imperialism”, World Policy Journal 22, no. 1 (spring 2005), and “Coming to Terms with Iraq”, Ethics & International Affairs 19, no. 3 (autumn 2005).

Looming large over George W. Bush’s rationalisation for going to war in Iraq and for the ensuing effort to implant democracy in the very heart of the Middle East is the idea that promoting democracy has the salutary effect of advancing peace around the world. “Democracy and the hope and progress it brings are the alternative to instability and to hatred and terror. Lasting peace is gained as justice and democracy advance,” the American president asserted in a speech at London’s Whitehall Palace in November 2003 following the fall of Baghdad.

Behind Bush’s lofty words rests the provocative theory of the “democratic peace”, which contends, in a nutshell, that democracy is the best guarantor of world peace because democracies do not fight one another. Bush himself has trumpeted the apparent aversion that democracies have towards war in selling his Iraq policy to the American people. An August 2005 rally honouring Idaho’s National Guard provided one of many occasions for Bush’s embrace of the main claim of the theory of the democratic peace. In remarks intended to highlight the strategic purpose of promoting democracy abroad, even by force if necessary, Bush noted: “History has proven that free nations are peaceful nations, that democracies do not fight their neighbours.”

In giving robust lip service to the notion that democracies are inherently pacifist, Bush joins a long and disparate list of notable politicians who made the theory of the democratic peace the linchpin of their policies of democracy promotion. “Democracies don’t go to war with one another,” pronounced Margaret Thatcher in 1990 in rationalising why it was in the interest of the United States and western Europe to see the rise of democratic regimes in Russia and central and eastern Europe in the wake of the demise of communism. Another enthusiastic defender of the theory of the democratic peace was Bill Clinton, whose military interventions in Haiti, Somalia and the former Yugoslavia were justified as part of a global effort to create a “community of democracies”. His 1994 State of the Union address included the claim that “ultimately, the best strategy to ensure our security and stability and build a durable peace is to advance the spread of democracy because democracies don’t attack each other”.

At first glance, Bush’s reliance on the theory of the democratic peace to justify his policy of democracy promotion appears to rest on a solid footing. This theory is, after all, a virtual truism in the study of international relations. Although it is inaccurate to state, as American presidents have repeatedly done over the years, that democracies do not go to war with one another (they do, as well as against non-democratic states), it is an irrefutable fact that democracies seldom go to war with other democracies. According to “The Politics of Peace”, a 1995 report by the Economist, of the 416 wars between sovereign states recorded between 1816 and 1980, only 12 were fought between democracies. Yet the aversion that democracies appear to have for war, however real and compelling, is a very problematic and even dangerous assumption upon which to build policies of democracy promotion, especially those favoured by Bush, which rely on coercion and military force.

Lurching towards Irrelevancy

The philosopher Immanuel Kant is widely regarded as the intellectual father of the theory of the democratic peace. His classic 1795 essay, “To Perpetual Peace”, argued that a world dominated by republics was likely to be more peaceful than one dominated by monarchies. According to Kant, although “peace among men living side by side is not the natural state”, the checks and balances of republican systems prevent adventurous rulers from committing their nations to war. In particular, he contended that war was a very difficult proposition for republican governments because of the constraints on executive authority placed by the national legislature and a vigilant public generally weary of the costs and sacrifices of war. The ensuing result of the worldwide spread of republicanism, Kant predicted, would be the emergence of a “pacifist” union of nations.

A lot about the world has changed since Kant’s day that makes many of his arguments about war and peace largely obsolete. It is questionable whether the fact that democracies seldom go to war with one another has any real relevance to promoting peace around the world at the present time. While the end of wars between states may at one point in history have given hope for world peace, this is hardly the case today considering the changing nature of war itself and the factors that cause it. For starters, the classic view of war prevalent in Kant’s time as an epic struggle between rival great powers has been out of date for many decades now. Oddly, nothing suggests this better than the ongoing war on terror declared by the Bush administration following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. It suggests that the enemy is not another state but rather an assortment of cells sprinkled around the globe. These cells, as in the case of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organisation (the principal target of Bush’s campaign to eradicate international terrorism), operate not only in autocratic states such as Pakistan and Afghanistan under the Taliban but also in democratic countries such as the United States, Britain and Spain.

A more pertinent point about the growing irrelevance of democratic peace theory is that it does not apply to civil wars, which today are more common than international ones. Civil wars are also more lethal and harder to contain, making them the most visible source of conflict, violence and instability in the world. In recent decades, inter-state wars have become virtually extinct while intra-state conflicts have proliferated. According to a 1995 study by political scientist Ted Gurr, of the fifty-eight significant armed conflicts under way that year only one, a border dispute between Ecuador and Peru, was a conventional inter-state conflict. The others were intra-state disputes fought over ethno-political issues: wars of independence or regional autonomy, contention among ethnic rivals for control of state power, and communal or clan warfare. The study further states that about three-quarters of the world’s refugees, estimated at nearly twenty-seven million people in 1995, were in flight or had been displaced by ethnic conflicts and that eight of the United Nations’ thirteen peacekeeping missions were tasked with separating the protagonists in ethno-political conflicts.

The virtual disappearance of inter-state wars, contrary to what democratic peace theory would have us believe, is not the result of the worldwide spread of democracy. Far more compelling factors are decolonisation, economic interdependence, globalisation, the creation of multilateral organisations of co-operation and conflict resolution (such as the United Nations), and the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower. In fact, as suggested by Gurr’s work, the worldwide spread of democracy is a major cause behind the spike in ethnic and communal conflict in the last decades of the twentieth century. Democratic openings have been used by previously repressed ethnic groups to launch rebellions for individual and collective rights, while ultra-nationalist groups have used the advent of democracy to clamp down on the rights of minorities, justifying this action as the will of the majority. These dynamics featured prominently in the spectacular eruption of ethno-political conflict that followed the break-ups of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. They can also be observed in post-war Iraq, where the American attempt to introduce democracy by toppling the Saddam Hussein dictatorship has triggered a low-grade civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites.

Given the association of transitions to democracy with internal conflicts, it is hardly surprising that the dramatic spread of democratic governance in recent decades appears to have to done little to diminish the global incidence of violence and indeed war. According to the US research institute Freedom House, whose annual surveys of the state of civil and political rights around the world are considered the empirical baseline for judging the quality of democracy internationally, the number of democratic countries increased from forty-one (covering 27 per cent of the world’s population) in 1974; to seventy-six (covering 40 per cent of the world’s population) by 1994; to ninety-eight (covering 46 per cent of the world’s population) by 2004. During this same timeframe, ethno-political conflicts and wars have mushroomed. The data from Gurr shows that the number of ethno-political conflicts worldwide rose from twenty-six between 1945 and 1949, to fifty-five between 1970 and 1979, to seventy between 1993 and 1994.

In sum, the nature and causes of war in the contemporary period pointedly call into question the assumption that the passing of inter-state wars will have a significant impact on the expansion of peace and order around the world. This would appear to suggest that American administrations interested in advancing world peace would be better off devising ways to ameliorate the causes of intra-state wars—from poverty to repression to ethnic and religious conflict—rather than promoting democratic elections and constitutions.

Emerging Democracies

The use of the theory of the democratic peace to rationalise democracy promotion also reveals a very impoverished understanding of the theory itself. American presidents who, in order to justify their democratic crusades, herald the thesis that democracies do not attack one another or breed hate and murderous ideologies, fail to appreciate a crucial point: it applies only to mature democracies. Only stable and well-established democracies possess the structural and normative requirements that make democracies averse to going to war with other democracies.

This is a core argument of neo-Kantian scholars such as Michael Doyle, who is generally credited with reviving interest in Kantian thinking about democracy as a source of peace among nations. Doyle’s analysis emphasises the norms and values that shape political life in democratic nations—another aspect of the Kantian legacy. He has argued that there is indeed a “zone of peace” among liberal states that are characterised by a common political culture subscribing to three types of rights: freedom from arbitrary authority, protection and promotion of freedoms, and democratic participation. Adherence to this culture of liberalism makes war against other democratic states a rarity, although as Doyle and others are quick to point out, this does not make democracies less inclined to go to war with non-democratic regimes.

Sadly, in many of today’s democracies, the liberal political culture highlighted by Doyle is sorely missing. It is telling that an uncomfortably high number of new democracies are aptly called “illiberal democracies”, precisely because they lack the very underpinnings that make democracies averse to war, including governmental transparency, adherence to the rule of law, and respect for civil and human rights. Not surprisingly, the proposition that democracies do not attack one another is especially weak when applied to societies undertaking to democratise. New or emerging democratic states have proved to be not only highly vulnerable to civil wars and ruthless in their treatment of their own citizens, but also quite bellicose in their relations with other states. This has led international relations scholars to theorise about an apparent link between democratisation and war.

Extensive research on the subject of democratisation and war by Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder finds that during the phase of democratisation countries become more aggressive and war-prone, not less, and they fight wars with democratic states. Mansfield and Snyder add that, in fact, formerly authoritarian states are more likely to fight wars than are stable democracies or autocracies. Key among the conditions that make democratising states likely to attack other states is rising nationalism, which often goes hand in hand with rising democracy. Mansfield and Snyder contend that the intoxicating brew of nationalism and incipient democratisation creates a dangerous syndrome of weak central authority, unstable domestic coalitions and high-energy mass politics. It brings new groups and social classes into politics and forces political elites to embrace shortsighted bargains, reckless gambles and nationalist appeals in an attempt to reconcile incompatible interests and to govern unmanageable political coalitions. In illustrating how these conditions can lead a democratising nation to war, Mansfield and Snyder harness a historical narrative covering the revolutionary upheaval of the eighteenth century, the advent of mass democracy in the nineteenth century, and the demise of communism in the twilight of the twentieth century.

In post-revolutionary France, Napoleon capitalised upon the popular nationalism flowing from the French Revolution—the paradigmatic example of democratic ferment in the eighteenth century—to pursue his project of conquering Europe. In post-Bismarck Germany, democratisation ushered in a type of chaotic and highly polarising mass politics that political institutions could not contain, leading many citizens to organise pressure groups outside electoral politics that pushed vacillating elites towards war. In Japan during the 1920s, as the country was experimenting with the expansion of suffrage and two-party competition, the army developed a populist, nationalistic doctrine featuring a centrally planned economy within an autarkic, industrialised, expanded empire. Following the economic crash of the late 1920s, this nationalistic formula became very persuasive, and the Japanese military had little trouble gaining popular support for imperial expansion and the emasculation of democracy. In post-communist Russia, economic distress exploited by belligerent nationalists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky contributed to the climate that led to war in Chechnya. In Serbia, the political and military elites, facing pressures for democratisation, cynically created a new basis for legitimacy through nationalist propaganda and military action against their neighbours.

In their most recent book, Mansfield and Snyder ominously warn that the risk that a democratising state will turn aggressive is greatest in states making the biggest leap from total autocracy to extensive mass democracy.¹ By most indicators, this would surely include the case of Iraq and virtually the entire Middle East, the focus of Bush’s democracy crusade. This is the area of the world where autocracy is most entrenched and where, not surprisingly, democracy has been most reticent in emerging. It is telling that the recent wave of global democratisation that toppled dozens of autocratic regimes all over the developing world left the Middle East basically untouched.

To be sure, it is highly unlikely that Iraq will attack any of its neighbours while the country is occupied by more than 140,000 American troops. But it is noteworthy how political liberalisation in Iraq has fuelled Shi’ite nationalism and how rapidly the ruling Shi’ite-dominated government has moved to oppress the Sunni minority. Even more suggestive is that although Iraq’s process of democratisation is still in its infancy, by most signs the country is well on its way to constructing an illiberal democracy. The winners of the first democratic elections appear to be using the political process to advance a narrow, ethnic-based political agenda rather than to consolidate democratic governance. Notwithstanding their formal support for democracy, the ruling Shi’ite parties oppose many liberal reforms (such as granting rights to women) and regard America as a purveyor of values that stand in contrast to the cherished traditional order. More revealing yet, these parties have not given up wishing for the joining of religious and secular authority typical of other Middle Eastern societies, most notably Iran. Moqtadah al-Sadr, the rebellious cleric and leader of one of the parties represented in the Iraqi parliament, has remarked, “I think it will be hard to make a completely Islamic state in the near future, but hopefully in the distant future.”

The picture is even more dispiriting at the local level, especially in Shi’ite-dominated areas of Iraq. As reported in the New York Times, “The once libertine oil port of Basra [Iraq’s second-largest city] … is steadily being transformed into a mini-theocracy under Shiite rule.”² Paradoxically, this process of desecularisation has been accelerated since the advent of democratic elections, which have enabled religious parties to put more radical politicians into office. The aim of parties with names like “God’s Vengeance” and “Master of Martyrs”, which work under the umbrella of more established Shi’ite groups, is the enforcement of shari’a or Islamic law. Their strategy is not to make shari’a dictates the law of the land (which in any case would not be permitted by national leaders and the American representatives in Iraq). Rather, the approach is to intimidate the population into accepting shari’a. It is reported that women who just after the end of the Saddam regime were free to move around Basra without wearing Islamic dress no longer feel comfortable doing so today.

In Wilson’s Footsteps

Finally, there is a very dark side to the theory of the democratic peace when used to rationalise policies of democracy promotion, especially when backed by military force. For good reason, the theory itself does not prescribe the use of force to turn autocracies into democracies. The aggressive pursuit of global democratisation is likely to put the United States in a perpetual state of war, since new democracies would have to be established and re-established, often by violent means. In turn, this situation casts the United States in the rather odd and unflattering role of a “peace-loving aggressor” which uses the pretext of spreading democracy to attack and invade other countries. Among the obvious consequences of this behaviour are the inducing of terror, violence and war in the country being targeted for democratisation, and the undermining of the capacity of the United States to engender peace, order and co-operation around the world. Long feared by friends and foes of democratic peace theory, this scenario was first realised under Woodrow Wilson, whose multiple Latin American interventions on behalf of “making the world safe for democracy” render him the patron saint of democracy promotion, and is currently being recreated by Bush in Iraq.

Wilson’s invasion of the Mexican port city of Veracruz in 1914 to force strongman Victoriano Huerta to hold free elections plunged Mexico deeper into civil war and eventually required another American military intervention that brought the United States and Mexico quite close to war. In March 1916, Wilson dispatched an American battalion that eventually grew to ten thousand soldiers to enter Mexico and capture the revolutionary rebel Pancho Villa, who had staged an attack on a US town that had resulted in the killing of eighteen Americans. Wilson also mobilised 130,000 national guardsmen in expectation of a full invasion of Mexico, the largest concentration of American troops since the Civil War. This show of force failed to capture Villa, and after a particularly violent clash in June 1916 that resulted in multiple American losses and hostages, Wilson began to recall US forces from Mexico, admitting to Congress that he might have made “an error in judgement”. This proved to be his last military excursion into Mexico.

The 1914 US intervention in Mexico also threw inter-American relations into chaos. Clashes occurred along the US–Mexican border. Anti-American riots broke out in Mexico City and spread to Costa Rica, Guatemala, Chile, Ecuador and Uruguay. US imperialism was denounced in the Latin American press. This crisis eventually required ambassadors from Argentina, Brazil and Chile to step in to mediate some type of settlement between the Huerta government and the Wilson administration. At the Niagara Falls, Ontario, mediation conference of May–June 1914, Wilson insisted on the complete removal of the Huerta government, a stand that shocked the South American ambassadors and led to the conference’s failure.

Although Wilson eventually succeeded in driving Huerta from office, his intransigence doomed his plans for a Pan-American Treaty to organise co-operation across the Americas. Having shown himself to be quite the aggressor in his dealings with Mexico, Wilson caused constitutional democracies like Argentina and Chile to fear US military aggression and meddling in their domestic affairs. Argentine and Chilean leaders believed the United States aimed to control the Latin American countries and were suspicious that the US requirement for democracy across the continent was a cover for a new form of imperialism.

President Bush has already encountered the unintended consequences for peace and order of his democracy-promotion policies. Post-war Iraq, in the apt words of New York Times reporter David E. Sanger, has become “a jobs program for jihadists worldwide”, a direct reference to the way in which the invasion of Iraq has emboldened terrorists throughout the Middle East, many of whom have flocked to Iraq to fight the Americans. The US State Department’s annual report on terrorist activities for the year 2005 dramatically underscores this point. It indicates that the 8,300 deaths attributed to insurgent attacks in Iraq represent more that 50 per cent of those killed in terrorist attacks worldwide. The report notes that the number of terrorist attacks recorded last year (eleven thousand) was four times higher than the one reported in 2004.

Having turned Iraq into a terrorist haven has hardly helped make the country a positive model for the Middle East. Among ordinary Arabs, Iraq’s example has been more alarming than inspiring. They view Iraq as a chaotic and violent land where thousands of innocent people have been killed because of the actions of the Americans. They also regard the United States not as a purveyor of freedom and democracy, as Washington had hoped, but as the latest in a string of foreign powers attempting to subjugate the region. This negative perception has been hardened by the human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and the protection accorded to the Iraqi oil fields during the invasion while the country’s cultural assets were left vulnerable to looters and robbers.

The consequences of the US-led war in Iraq extend beyond the Middle East. Most notable is the damage done to international bodies such as the United Nations and to long-standing US relationships with other democracies such as France and Germany (which opposed the war in Iraq), prompting analysts of US foreign policy, such as the late James Chace, to lament “the death of American internationalism”. Anti-Americanism abroad, virtually extinct in the aftermath of 9/11, has reached unprecedented heights and is currently thwarting efforts by the Bush administration to secure international support for the reconstruction of Iraq.

Moreover, in its attempt to spread democracy to some countries, the Bush administration has been willing to undermine it in others, including places where the United States had actively supported democratisation. American officials publicly chastised Turkey, a country the United States hopes will become the model for a Muslim democracy, after its democratically elected parliament voted against allowing US troops to use Turkish territory to launch an attack on Iraq. Mexico and Chile, UN Security Council members that refused to endorse a resolution authorising US military action against Iraq, incurred the wrath of Washington for essentially reflecting the will of their publics, which in both cases was overwhelmingly against the war.

Unexportable by Force

Despite the many problems inherent in the assumption that the spread of democracy and the advancement of peace go hand in hand, American presidents are unlikely to stop proclaiming this association anytime soon. But this, in fact, should continue to be the case. Democracy, however messy and unlovely at times, is mankind’s best hope for peace, prosperity and respect for human rights. The real change needs to come with regard to how American administrations go about promoting democracy abroad. Taking after Wilson, Bush espouses a “crusader” approach to democracy promotion, propelled by belief in the capacity of democracy to guarantee peace and order, and more worryingly yet, by the notion that it is America’s burden to bring democracy to the rest of the world, by force if necessary, since the end more than justifies the means. As Bush observed in defence of his Iraq policy on 13 April 2004, “as the greatest power on the face of the earth we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom.” This statement eerily echoes Wilson’s own that “as the definitive example of democracy”, the United States had “a special obligation to extend its benefits and to instruct backward people in its uses”.

History shows, however, that democracy promotion is most effective in advancing democracy and peace when it is consciously stripped of force, coercion and moralistic posturing. Some of the most successful policies of democracy promotion have come from administrations that have relied on a subtle or indirect encouragement of democracy. Believing that imported democracy is never as meaningful or as viable as the domestic brand, the Kennedy administration waged war on poverty and underdevelopment in Latin America in the hope of making the region more hospitable to the growth of democracy. Prodding autocratic regimes to improve their human rights record, rather than pressuring them to conduct elections and adopt democratic constitutions, dominated Jimmy Carter’s pro-democracy policies. Supporting dissidents in their struggles against tyranny took the lead under presidents Reagan and Bush the elder. Strengthening non-governmental organisations (so-called civil society) became the trademark of Clinton’s democracy-promotion programmes. These policies account in no small degree for the emergence of dozens of new democracies in Latin America and the former communist world during the 1980s and 1990s.

By contrast, democracy promotion has proved most difficult and counterproductive when anchored on military intervention and occupation. Not a single Latin American democracy traces its roots to Wilson’s efforts to advance democracy throughout the region. On the contrary, these democratising expeditions left in their wake anything but democracy. They threw Latin America into political chaos and instability, planted the seeds of anti-Americanism, and served to usher in some of the region’s most enduring and notorious dictatorships.

In the decades that followed the US attempt to bring democracy to Mexico, the country turned not only authoritarian in the hands of a revolutionary government, but also intensely nationalistic and anti-American. In Central America and the Caribbean, a generation of brutal dictatorships consolidated in the wake of American military intervention. Paradoxically, it was the institutions left behind by the Americans to preserve democratic constitutional rule that helped paved the way for the rise to power of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. In all of these cases the Americans, before leaving, created a national constabulary (national guard) designed to safeguard democracy. This strategy, however, dramatically backfired, with the national army becoming the stepping-stone to power for would-be dictators.

It is too early to declare the American mission to democratise Iraq a failure, but recent developments are hardly encouraging. The conflict in Iraq has entered its fourth year, and the carnage that it triggered has claimed the lives of many thousands of Iraqis and nearly three thousand Americans and shows no signs of slowing down. Every step in the process of establishing democracy in Iraq has been followed by greater disappointment and uncertainty. Not surprisingly, once bullish on the prospects of remaking Iraq into a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, the Bush administration is today actively lowering expectations by contending that it is unreasonable to expect a “Jeffersonian” democracy to emerge from the ruins of Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship. Implied in this “warning” is that if any government in Iraq manages to survive the trauma of the US invasion, it is unlikely to be in a form that an ordinary American would recognise as democratic.

Taken together, past efforts by US administrations to promote democracy abroad underscore the lesson that the United States can best assist other countries to achieve their democratic aspirations by playing a supportive rather than a protagonist’s role. Democracy depends for its existence upon a complex set of homegrown conditions, from a pluralistic political culture, to open political institutions, to an independent civil society. The United States can certainly advance the development of these conditions, but it cannot create them at will by forcing other nations into adopting elections and a democratic constitution. Neither guarantees democracy, much less its survival. 

Endnotes

1. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).

2. Edward Wong, “Shiite Morality Is Taking Hold in Iraq Oil Port”, New York Times, 7 July 2005.