Against Democratic Peace Theory

Will Inboden writes a long screed on Obama and the prospects for democracy promotion during his administration. Like pretty much everything on Shadow Government, it’s very much worth reading.

He lists several reasons why Obama should make it a priority, among them:

International peace. The reasons behind the “democratic peace” theory — that democracies do not go to war against each other — continue to inspire endless debate and countless political science dissertations. But the facts are hard to dispute: mature democracies do not fight each other.

Democratic Peace theory is a fascinating area of study, but is far from conclusive. The facts are only hard to dispute if you carefully bound your parameters both chronologically and using qualifiers such as “mature”. Fair enough, the War of 1812 was fought by an “immature” United States, but the proximate cause of war—the British using their clout as the dominant global empire to dictate whether the United States should trade with France—could easily be a proximate cause of conflict between more mature democracies today.

Why hasn’t it been recently? Things can get academic here. But suffice it to say for a blog discussion that there’s something utopian that really rankles in the suggestion that we as a human race will be able to transcend the one and only constant through our history—war—through merely the proper institutional arrangement.