Clinging to the assumption that only dictatorships initiate military conflict, democratization advocates believed that the global success of their project would usher in a world without war. But this theory lacks a solid foundation and has produced one disaster after another when it has been put into practice.
LONDON – With persuasion, exhortations, legal processes, economic pressure, and sometimes military force, US foreign policy affirms America’s vision of how the world should be run. Only two countries in recent history had such an ambition to transform the world: Great Britain and the United States. In the last 150 years they were the only two countries whose power – hard and soft, formal and informal – spread across the globe and allowed them to plausibly claim the mantle of Rome.
When the United States inherited Britain’s place in the world after 1945, it also inherited Britain’s sense of responsibility for the future of the international order. Embracing that role, the United States was an evangelist for democracy, and one of the central goals of its foreign policy was to promote its spread (sometimes with regime changes, when deemed necessary).
In fact, this strategy dates back to the time of US President Woodrow Wilson. As historian Nicholas Mulder writes in The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War, “Wilson was the first statesman to use economic weapons as instrument of democratization. He thereby added an internal political logic to economic sanctions – the spread of democracy – to the foreign policy goal that (…) the European supporters of sanctions sought: peace between states”. This implies that, when the opportunity arises, military and non-military measures must be used to overthrow “evil” regimes.
According to the theory of democratic peace, democracies do not start wars, only dictatorships do. A fully democratic world would then be a world free of war. This was the hope that emerged in the 1990s. With the end of communism, the expectation, expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1989 article, “The End of History?”, was that the most important parts of the world they would become democratic.
Supposedly, American supremacy would ensure that democracy became the universal political norm. But Russia and China, the leading communist states of the Cold War era, did not adopt it (nor did many other centers in world affairs, especially in the Middle East). Fukuyama recently acknowledged then that if Russia and China were pushed to unite “we would live in a world dominated by these non-democratic powers… (which) would truly be the end of history.”
The argument that democracy is inherently “peaceful” and dictatorships or autocracies are “warlike” is intuitively appealing. It does not deny that states seek their own benefit, but assumes that the interests of democratic states will reflect common values, such as human rights (and that they will try to realize those interests in a less bellicose way, since democratic processes require negotiating differences). . Democratic governments must be accountable to the people, and the people are interested in peace, not war.
On the contrary, according to this view, rulers and elites in dictatorships are illegitimate and therefore insecure. This leads them to seek popular support by inciting animosity against foreigners. If democracy replaced dictatorships everywhere, there would automatically be peace in the world.
This belief rests on two extremely influential propositions in international relations theory, even though they have little theoretical and empirical support. The first notion is that the external behavior of a State depends on its internal constitution, an idea that ignores the influence that the international system can have on the internal politics of the countries. As political scientist Kenneth N. Waltz argued in his 1979 book, The Theory of International Politics, “international anarchy” conditions the behavior of states more than the behavior of states creates international anarchy.
Waltz’s “world-systems theory” perspective is especially useful in an age of globalization. Attention must be paid to the structure of the international system in order to “predict” how individual states will behave, independently of their internal constitutions. “If each state, being stable, only sought security and harbored no designs for its neighbors, all would remain insecure anyway,” he observed, “because the means by which a state seeks security is, of its own existence, the means by which other states are threatened.
Waltz offered a bracing antidote to the simplistic assumption that democratic habits are easily transferable from one place to another. Instead of trying to spread democracy, he suggested that it is better to try to reduce global insecurity.
Although there is undoubtedly some correlation between democratic institutions and peaceful habits, the direction of causality is debatable. Was it democracy that pacified Europe after 1945? Or was it the US nuclear umbrella, the determination of borders by the victors, and the economic growth fueled by the Marshall Plan that finally made it possible for non-communist Europe to accept democracy as its political norm? Political scientist Mark E. Pietrzyk argues that “only relatively secure states – politically, militarily, and economically – can afford free and pluralistic societies; In the absence of such security, states are much more likely to adopt or maintain centralized, coercive, and authoritarian structures, or revert to them.
The second proposition is that democracy is the natural form of the state, one that people everywhere will spontaneously adopt if allowed to do so. This dubious assumption makes regime change look easy, because sanctions-applying powers can tap into the grateful support of those who have had their freedom suppressed and their rights trampled on.
Drawing superficial comparisons with postwar Germany and Japan, the apostles of democratization grossly underestimate the difficulties of establishing democracies in societies that lack Western constitutional traditions. We can see the results of his work in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and many African countries.
Democratic peace theory is, above all, lazy: it provides an easy explanation for “warlike” behavior without considering the location and history of the states involved. This superficiality fosters an overconfidence that a quick dose of economic sanctions or bombing is all it takes to cure a dictatorship of its unfortunate disease.
In short, the idea that democracy is “portable” grossly underestimates the military, economic and humanitarian costs of attempts to spread it in troubled parts of the world. The West paid a terrible price for those ideas… and may be about to do so again.
The author
a member of the British House of Lords and Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at the University of Warwick, he was a non-executive director of the private Russian oil company PJSC Russneft between 2016 and 2021.
Copyright: Project Syndicate 1995 – 2022