Triangulating Peace? Or, Three Foundations for Oppression?
Corporatism, Democracy, Non-Fiction Reviews, War[The following is a revised version of a reaction paper I wrote for a graduate seminar in international conflict back in 2005.]
In Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations, Bruce Russet and John Oneal mount the most thorough defense of the democratic peace thesis I have yet seen. Indeed, they go beyond the democratic peace thesis to posit a Kantian peace consisting of the interrelated and reciprocal effects of democracy, economic interdependence, and international law and organizations. I am not without criticism, however.
I have always been skeptical of the democratic peace thesis, which posits that democratic states do not go to war with one another, in part because it seemed to me to be incomplete. Russet and Oneal attempt to shore up that incompleteness by emphasizing the pacifying effects of both bilateral and global economic interdependence as well as (though not unproblematically) international law and organizations.
Despite the impossibility of discovering empirical laws via inductive and statistical methods, it may be true that (liberal) democracies rarely go to war with one another and, ceteris paribus, might be less war prone than other states. But I am not confident this trend will hold for all times and places.1 Moreover, democracies may still be more likely to go to war with non-democracies for ideological reasons. “We’ve” got to make the world safe for democracy, after all.
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Joanne Gowa, in Ballots and Bullets, argued that the democratic peace was an artifact of the Cold War; it appeared to be true only because Western, capitalist, democratic nations had a shared security interest against the Soviet Union. My professor for the above-mentioned seminar, David Sobek, argued that Gowa’s book suffers from methodological deficiencies, but said that he had been working on an article (I don’t know if it was ever published) that improved on Gowa’s methods and he was surprised to find her results confirmed. ↩
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