From Democratic Peace to Democratic War?

The “democratic peace” is not only a fancy idea of academia, most prominently advanced by the philosopher of Enlightenment Immanuel Kant in his famous essay on “Perpetual Peace” (1795), but two hundred years later, is established as a liberal research program in the U.S. International Relations discipline. The famous statement “democracies do not fight each other” seems so far to represent a real phenomenon, at least if we consider consolidated democracies. The very controversial ideational debate between Realist critics and Liberal proponents of the democratic peace argument reigning during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and questioning whether the phenomenon might be a mere statistical artifact has been settled now. In the meantime, even critics acknowledge the empirical finding that consolidated democracies do not fight each other as quite robust. This has culminated into the striking and tremendous success that the idea of the democratic peace has gained in practical politics. Since the end of the Cold War, the linking of democracy and peace has become part and parcel of official political ideology, informing the foreign policy of Western democracies. Promoting democracy has turned to be the foremost strategy to secure peace and prosperity as, for example, the U.S. National Security Strategy of 2006 makes abundantly clear. As long as democracy is promoted by peaceful means of cooperation and voluntary assistance, one might not object to such a foreign policy strategy. If regime change is to be achieved by force as in the Iraq war 2003, however, the “flip side” of the democratic peace, namely a “democratic war” becomes obvious. Unfortunately, the notion of a democratic peace lends itself to being employed as an ideological underpinning for liberal-expansionist policies. Under the guise of promoting a seemingly “universalist” idea of democracy and freedom, some of the powerful Western democracies arrogate to themselves the right to pursue a “liberal mission.” Not only do such wars by democracies pose a challenge in practical political terms; they also unsettle democratic peace theory (DP). This article briefly outlines how this theoretical challenge might lead to a shift Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 19:157–163 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN 1040-2659 print; 1469-9982 online DOI: 10.1080/10402650701353570