August 28, 2006
More on the Kellogg-Briand Pact Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon posted yesterday noting the anniversary—and what he took to be the absurdity—of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which outlawed war as an instrument of national policy. Since the Kellogg-Briand preceded by only three years a sequence of wars begun by pact signatories Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy, Mr. Gordon is perhaps understandably unsentimental about this anniversary. He goes on to make an astringent remark about treaties generally: “Treaties that ignore the reality of how non-democratic nations all too often act do not ensure the peace. Instead they help to ensure war.”
This remark is itself unexceptionable—after all, what sane person would entrust his country’s security to a document that ignores reality?—but I am less confident about what looks to be one of its underlying premises. The premise, which seems to be an example of some recent thinking about the relationship between democracies and war, is sometimes known as the theory of democratic peace. Baldly put, the claim is that democracies are more pacific than non-democratic regimes. There is a fair amount of evidence suggesting that the claim overstates the case.
Democratic Athens was much more bellicose than anti-democratic Sparta. The Roman Republic was a remarkably warlike polity. Republican (although admittedly not democratic) Venice was aggressive, similarly republican Florence, and the French First Republic was pretty bellicose. The United States did not look pacific to the Cherokees, or to Mexico, or to a number of others. Almost all of the British Empire was constructed by a parliamentary regime, a lot of the post-Napoleonic French Empire was acquired by the Third Republic, and the parliamentary monarchy of post-Risorgimento Italy could also be aggressively imperialist.
Is nineteenth-century imperialism an exception that somehow proves the rule, ditto the ancient world, ditto Renaissance republics, with the theory of democratic peace still holding for modern states? I don’t think so. If China democratizes, many people think it may be more rather than less likely to invade Taiwan, because nationalist passions will be less easily resisted by elites suddenly responsive to a patriotic electorate. New democracies may generally be particularly bellicose, for the same reason, and for that reason a more democratic Egypt may not be as inclined to maintain peace with Israel as the current regime has been, ditto a democratizing Jordan or Saudi Arabia or Syria. This does not mean that mature democracies are as likely to start wars as newly emerging ones can be, but skeptics of democratic peace theory have a lot of interesting evidence on their side.
Some people have argued that democratic regimes are more warlike for a good reason: Democratic regimes have greater legitimacy, and hence are better at concentrating force, so they are likelier to start wars because they are likelier to win them, and win them pretty cheaply; these theorists claim that if you are a democracy, the probable costs of going to war drop very significantly. I am doubtful about that part of the skeptics’ case, and I certainly do not think that possibly heightened risks of war make for an irresistible case against democracy. But the mixed evidence is fascinating, and in some respects disturbing.
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