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The Democratic Peace Theory Reframed: The Impact of ModernityAuthor(s): Azar GatReviewed work(s):Source: World Politics, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Oct., 2005), pp. 73-100Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40060125 .Accessed: 18/06/2012 01:08

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THE DEMOCRATIC PEACE THEORY REFRAMED The Impact of Modernity

ByAZARGAT

democratic peace theory - the idea that democratic or liberal states never or very rarely go to war with each other and that they

are less likely to become involved in militarized disputes (mids) among themselves - is the most robust, "lawlike" finding generated by the dis-

cipline of international relations. It is also the one with the greatest significance for the real world. Introduced in the 1970s, the democratic

peace theory has since gathered momentum and gained credence, withstanding extensive criticism and continuously being developed, amended, and refined in the process. In practical terms, the theory suggests that a world of liberal/democratic states will be peaceful, an idea long ago championed by such figures as Thomas Paine, Immanuel Kant, and Woodrow Wilson. The theory has clear policy implications that drew the attention of the Clinton administration and became the

centerpiece of President George W. Bush's foreign policy in the wake of 9/11.

This article argues that the democratic peace theorists have over- looked the defining development that underlies that peace

- and so much else - during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the indus-

trial-technological revolution. Not only did that revolution make de-

mocracy on a country scale (as opposed to democratic city-states) pos- sible; it also made all the countries that experienced the revolution -

democratic and nondemocratic - far less belligerent in comparison with preindustrial times, with the interdemocratic peace representing only the most striking manifestation of that development. In shaping policy toward undeveloped and developing countries it should be real- ized that democracy is difficult to institute and sustain where economic and social modernization has not taken root; nor would democracy in itself necessarily lead to a democratic peace before such development has occurred.

World Politics 58 (October 2005), 73-100

74 WORLD POLITICS

Some Advances in the Debate

I begin with a review of some of the major advances that have been made in the democratic peace theory during the course of the debate.1 It is now generally agreed among international relations scholars that

during the nineteenth century, democracy, liberalism, and the demo- cratic peace alike - all existing only in the West - were considerably weaker than they later became.2

This seems to be connected to another vexed issue raised in rela- tion to the democratic peace theory. During the nineteenth century, as the masses moved to the forefront of politics and political systems un- derwent democratization, it was widely believed that militant popular pressure rather than the wishes of reluctant governments drove coun- tries to war. Contrary to a prevailing view, popular agitation should not be attributed one-sidedly to manipulation by leaders. Just as much,

1 For the major initial statements of the thesis, see Dean Babst, "A Force for Peace," Industrial Re- search 14 (April 1972); Melvin Small and David Singer, "The War-Proneness of Democratic Regimes, 1816-1965," Jerusalem Journal of International Relations 1, no. 4 (1976); R. Rummel, "Libertarianism and International Violence ," Journal of Conflict Resolution 27 (March 1983); Michael Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs," Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (Summer and Autumn 1983); Steve Chan, "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Are the Free Countries More Pacific?" Journal of Conflict Resolution 28 (December 1984); William Domke, War and the Changing Global System (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Zeev Maoz and Nasrin Abdolali, "Regime Type and International Con- flict, 1816-1976," Journal of Conflict Resolution 33 (March 1989); Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, "Nor- mative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946-1986," American Political Science Review 87 (September 1993); Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

2 For the critics, see Christopher Layne, "Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace," International Security 19, no. 2 (1994); idem, "Lord Palmerston and the Triumph of Realism: Anglo- French Relations, 1830-48," in M. Elman, ed., Path to Peace: Is Democracy the Answer? (Cambridge: MIT, 1997); David Spiro, "The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace," International Security 19, no. 2 (1994); Raymond Cohen, "Pacific Unions: A Reappraisal of the Theory that 'Democracies Do Not Go to War with Each Other/" Review of International Studies 20 (July 1994); Ido Oren, "From De-

mocracy to Demon: Changing American Perceptions of Germany during World War I," International

Security 20, no. 2 (1995); Henry Farber and Joanne Gowa, "Politics and Peace," International Security 20, no. 2 (1995). For the DP theorists' response, see Russet (fh. 1), 16-19; John Owen, "How Liberal- ism Produces Democratic Peace," International Security 19, no. 2 (1994), idem, Liberal Peace, Liberal War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); James Ray, Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1995); Zeev Maoz, "The Controversy over the Democratic Peace: Rearguard Action or Cracks in the Wall?" International Security 22, no. 1 (1997); Bruce Russett and John Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence and International Organizations (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 111-14. For the

expansion of the initial thesis to MID in general, see Gregory Raymond, "Democracies, Disputes, and

Third-Party Intermediaries," Journal of Conflict Resolution 38 (March 1994); William Dixon, "De-

mocracy and the Peaceful Settlement of International Conflict," American Political Science Review 88 (March 1994); David Rousseau, Christopher Gelpi, Dan Reiter, and Paul Huth, "Assessing the Dyadic Nature of the Democratic Peace, 1918-1988," American Political Science Review 90 (September 1996); Jean-Sebastien Rioux, "A Crisis-Based Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition," Canadian Journal of Political Science 31 (June 1998); Michael Mousseau, "Democracy and Compromise in Mili- tarized Interstate Conflicts, 1816-1992," Journal of Conflict Resolution 42 (April 1998).

DEMOCRATIC PEACE REFRAMED 75

leaders catered to a strong public demand. Often it was the masses that

swept along their cautious and peacefully inclined leaders - and all the more so in liberal/democratic countries. The word jingoism itself, de-

noting a chauvinistic and bellicose public frenzy, came into currency in

late-nineteenth-century Britain, at a time of increasing democratiza- tion. Jingoism was widespread during the Boer War (1899-1902). The United States was carried into war with Spain at the very same time (1898) on the waves of popular enthusiasm that virtually forced the

government's hand. Lest it be thought that the enemy in either of these cases failed to qualify as fully liberal/democratic, it should be noted that it was public opinion in both Britain and France that proved most bel- licose, chauvinistic, and unsympathetic to the other during the Fashoda Crisis (1898). It was the politicians who climbed down from war.

It has been argued that democratization also promotes war because it is closely associated with the assertion of hitherto suppressed ethnic identities and nationalist aspirations. Thus, the claim goes, although democracy indeed decreased the likelihood of war, the initial process of democratization, the democratic transition, had the opposite effect.3 In a different formulation it has been shown that partly free states have been more war prone than nondemocracies.4 Bringing together all the above: historically, democratization and liberalization in general did not constitute a onetime transition from a nondemocratic regime but rather

3 Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, "Democratization and the Danger of War," International Se-

curity 20, no. 1 (1995); Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, "Incomplete Democratization and the Outbreak of Military Disputes," International Studies Quarterly 46 (December 2002); Kurt Gaubatz, Elections and War: The Electoral Incentives in the Democratic Politics of War and Peace (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), chap. 2; Paul Huth and Todd Allee, The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Others have contended that it was regime change in general rather than the democratic transition that ac- counts for greater belligerency, or they dispute the evidence on various grounds: Zeev Maoz, "Joining the Club of Nations: Political Development and International Conflict, 1816-1976," International Studies Quarterly 33 (June 1989); Stephen Walt, Revolution and War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer-

sity Press, 1996); Andrew Enterline, "Driving while Democratizing," International Security 20, no. 4 (1996); idem, "Regime Changes and Interstate Conflict, 1816-1992," Political Research Quarterly 51

(June 1998); Andrew Enterline and Michael Greig, "Beacons of Hope? The Impact of Imposed De-

mocracy on Regional Peace, Democracy, and Prosperity," Journal of Politics 67 (November 2005); Kris- tian Gleditsch and Michael Ward, "War and Peace in Space and Time: The Role of Democratization," International Studies Quarterly 44 (March 2000); Michael Ward and Kristian Gleditsch, "Democratiz-

ing for Peace," American Political Science Review 92 (March 1998); Russett and Oneal (fn. 2), 51-52, 116-22; John Oneal, Bruce Russett, and Michael Berbaum, "Causes of Peace: Democracy, Interdepen- dence, and International Organizations, 1885-1992," International Studies Quarterly 47 (September 2003), 383-84; Sara Mitchell and Brandon Prins, "Beyond Territorial Contiguity: Issues at Stake in Democratic Militarized Interstate Disputes," International Studies Quarterly 43 (March 1999); David Rousseau, Democracy and War (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2005), chap. 6.

4 Maoz and Abdolali (fn. 1); Steve Chan, "In Search of Democratic Peace: Problems and Promise, Mershon International Studies Review 41 (May 1997), 83.

76 WORLD POLITICS

were processes that unfolded over time, often over decades and even cen- turies. The dichotomies of liberal/nonliberal or democratic/nondemo- cratic that long underlay the debate over the "democratic peace" have been found to be crude and misleading.

If liberal and democratic countries have become increasingly liberal and democratic since the late eighteenth century, this can explain why the interdemocratic peace seems to have been less secure in the nine- teenth-century West and became entrenched only during the twentieth century.5 Consider the abolition of slavery, the long and gradual expan- sion of the franchise to include all adult males and to females during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the extension of equal legal and social rights to women and minorities, the rise in social toler- ance in general, and the increase in political transparency and account- ability during the second half of the twentieth century - all these were major developments that made early liberal/parliamentary societies progressively more liberal and democratic. The standards of liberalism and democracy have continuously risen, and with them the democratic peace has also supposedly deepened. In the Third World, the frailness of peace between democracies has been explained by lower levels of de- mocracy and liberalism compared with what is found in the developed West. In this respect, developing countries are more reminiscent of the nineteenth-century West.6

The simplicity of the original democratic peace theory has been fur- ther compromised by the addition of more elements, whose effect, too, was dynamic over time. Greater trade (relative to gnp) and greater trade openness (lower tariffs), advocated by liberals from Adam Smith and the Manchester School as a recipe for prosperity and peace, have been

5 The correlation between the level of liberalism and peace was first suggested by Rummel (fn. 1) and incorporated in his Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1997), 5 and chap. 3; echoed by Ray (fn. 2), 16. Historical gradualism is tentatively noted in the 1992 article by Bruce Russet and Zeev Maoz, incorporated in Russet (fh. 1), 72-73; more fully developed in Maoz (fn. 2); and is integral in Russert and Oneal (fn. 2), 111-14. Some critics have at- tributed the absence of war among the democracies to the coalition effect of the alliances that they formed against joint enemies - the Axis powers and the Soviet bloc: Randolph Siverson and Julian Emmons, "Birds of a Feather: Democratic Political Systems and Alliances Choices ," Journal of Con-

flict Resolution 35 (June 1991); Farber and Gowa (fn. 2); Joanne Gowa, Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Michael Simon and Erik Gartzke, "Political System Similarity and the Choice of Allies," Journal of Conflict Resolution 40 (December 1996); Brian Lai and Dan Reiter, "Democracy, Political Similarity, and International Alliances, 1812- 1992," Journal of 'Conflict Resolution 44 (April 2000); Errol Henderson, Democracy and War: The End of an Illusion (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2002), chap. 2.

6 Russet and Maoz, in Russet (fn. 1), 86. Generally regarding today s Third World: Edward Fried- man, "The Painful Gradualness of Democratization: Proceduralism as a Necessary Discontinuous Revolution," in H. Handelman and M. Tessler, eds., Democracy and Its Limits: Lessons from Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1999).

DEMOCRATIC PEACE REFRAMED 77

demonstrated to have a diminishing effect on the likelihood of war be- tween countries.7 Greatly expanding the initial democratic peace con-

cept, later studies have found that joint democracy, mutual and open trade, and joint membership in international organizations - each in-

dependently - significantly reduces war. They have thus endorsed all the

original elements of "Kant s tripod for peace."8 And yet the Paine-Kant logic is incomplete and at least partly flawed.

A still broader perspective is needed to account for the liberal/demo- cratic peace, to the extent that such peace has indeed been unfolding.

Liberalism, Democracy, Economic Development, and the Modern Transformation

What the democratic peace theorists have overlooked is the most pro- found transformation experienced by humanity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - indeed, ever. The industrial-technological revolution constituted a quantum leap in human development. The main change for human existence brought about by the revolution was a steep and continuous growth in per capita production, a dramatic break from the "Malthusian trap" that had characterized earlier hu- man history. Prior to the industrial-technological revolution increases in human productivity were largely absorbed by population growth of a similar proportion. Consumption per capita remained almost stagnant, with the vast majority of people continuing to live in dire poverty, pre- cariously close to subsistence level. With the outbreak of the industrial-

technological revolution, however, all this changed. In the developed countries production has increased since preindustrial times by a factor

ranging from 50 to 120, with per capita production increasing by a fac- tor ranging from 15 to 30, numbers that more or less reflect the devel-

oped world s advantage over today s least developed countries. Average

7 On the pros and cons, see Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Ad- dison, 1979), 212-15; Doyle (fn. 1), 231-32; Edward Mansfield, Power, Trade, and War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Katherine Barbieri, "Economic Interdependence: A Path to Peace or a Source of Interstate Conflict?" Journal of Peace Research 33 (February 1996); Dale Copeland, "Economic Interdependence and War: A Theory of Trade Expectations," International Security 20, no. 4 (1996); Edward Mansfield and Brian Pollins, eds., Economic Interdependence and International

Conflict (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2003); Solomon Polachek, "Why Democracies Cooper- ate More and Fight Less: The Relationship between Trade and International Cooperation," Review

of International Economics 5 (August 1997); Katherine Barbieri and Gerald Schneider, "Globalization and Peace: Assessing New Directions in the Study of Trade and Conflict," Journal of Peace Research 36 (July 1999).

8 This was originally demonstrated by Domke (fn. 1); and impressively elaborated by Russett and Oneal (fn. 2).

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growth in the industrializing and industrial world is about ten times

greater than it was in preindustrial times, with production per capita for the first time registering substantial and sustained real growth at an

average annual rate of 1.5-2.0 percent.9 The effects of this staggering, exponential transformation have only

recently begun to filter into discussions of the democratic peace. For ex-

ample, it has been found that economically developed democracies have been far more likely than poor democracies to be peaceful toward one another: twice as likely according to a study covering the years 1950- 92 and consistently so in a broader study covering the period since 1885. The democratic peace phenomenon between poor democracies was found to be weak at best.10 Economically developed democracies have also been far less prone to civil war than poorer democracies have been.11 Indeed, what has been on the rise during the past two centu- ries and accounts for the growth of the democratic peace has been not

only liberal countries' level of democracy and liberalism, as proponents of the democratic peace theory believe, but also their wealth. More- over, all of these developments are not separate from one another but are closely intertwined. The idea that the growth of liberalism and de- mocracy rested on the very tangible material developments of the age, such as advanced communications (both transportation and informa- tion technology), urbanization, rising levels of literacy and education, and growing material well-being, has been widely held since the nine- teenth century and endorsed by sociologists and political scientists.12

9 The most comprehensive and up-to-date estimates are found in Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001), 28, 90, 126, 183-86, 264-65; it more or less renders all earlier work obsolete.

10 The best studies are Michael Mousseau, "Market Prosperity, Democratic Consolidation, and Democratic Peace," Journal of 'Conflict Resolution 44 (August 2000); idem, "The Nexus of Market Soci- ety, Liberal Preferences, and Democratic Peace," International Studies Quarterly 47 (December 2003); idem, "Comparing New Theory with Prior Beliefs: Market Civilization and the Democratic Peace," Conflict Management and Peace Science 22, no. 1 (2005); Michael Mousseau, Havard Hegre, and John Oneal, "How the Wealth of Nations Conditions the Liberal Peace," European Journal of International Relations 9 (June 2003). With respect to the first (and last) of these articles, however, Bruce Russett has suggested to me that a close look shows that joint democracy loses statistical significance only at a GDPpc level of the lowest 10 percent of democratic dyads. Nevertheless, the coefficient for effect on conflict remains negative until one hits a GDP level that contains only a single democracy. This would seem to make the statistical finding very thin. See also Polachek, "Why Democracies Cooper- ate More and Fight Less"; Havard Hegre, "Development and the Liberal Peace: What Does It Take to Be a Trading State}" Journal of Peace Research 37 (January 2000). The correlation had already been suggested by Kenneth Benoit, "Democracies Really are More Pacific (in General) ," Journal of Conflict Resolution 40 (December 1996); the article is limited to the years 1960-80.

11 Enrol Henderson and David Singer, "Civil War in the Post-Colonial World, 1946-92 " Journal of

Peace Research 37 (May 2000); Henderson (fn. 5), chap. 5. 12 The seminal modern work is Seymour Lipset, Political Man (New York: Anchor, 1963), esp.

chaps. 1-2; see also Robert Dahl, Polyarchy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), chap. 5; Samuel

DEMOCRATIC PEACE REFRAMED 79

Democracy on a country scale and liberal societies emerged only in the nineteenth century, rather than in any earlier time in history, and have evolved since not only because they were suddenly recognized to be

good ideas. Rather, their growth has been underpinned by the revolu-

tionary changes that have taken place in the socioeconomic infrastruc- ture during modernity.

To be sure, Germany presents a significant exception during the peri- ods of the Second and, of course, Third Reichs, when it was less liberal and democratic than the other economically developed countries. It is far from clear that economic development necessarily and unilinearily leads to liberal democracy. At the same time, liberal democracies tend to be economically developed. During the past centuries, poor democra- cies have been found to be not only less pacific but also few in number.13 True, economically developing, still predominantly agrarian, stable lib- eral/democratic regimes existed in the nineteenth century, most nota-

bly the United States before the Civil War (where slavery still existed, however) and a growing number of European and Western countries later in that century, as well as in the twentieth century, most notably, India. Yet not only were these cases few; in all of them, the industrial/

technological revolution had already been brewing, and its products, such as the newspaper and the railway (to which the electronic media were added in the twentieth century), were having profound effects on

society and politics. Furthermore, the more economically advanced a liberal/democratic society, the more liberal and democratic it becomes, with both these traits closely correlating with its pacific tendency. Dur-

ing the 1990s, as democracy became the sole hegemonic model after the collapse of communism, some poor countries democratized. Yet

comparative studies rank poorer democracies lower on the democratic and liberal scales, leading scholars to describe some of them as "illiberal

democracy."14 Democratization and liberalization, economic develop- ment, and pacific inclinations have allbttn intimately bound together in the modern transformation. What really comes out of the findings of the debate over the pacificity of the democratic transition period is the

following: the more swift and complete the transition to democracy is, the more pacific the result; but, indeed, the more modernized the coun-

Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1991), 59-72; Larry Diamond, "Economic Development and Democracy Reconsidered," in G. Marks and L. Diamond, eds., Reexamining Democracy (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1992).

13 Mousseau (fn. 10, 2000); Marks and Diamond (fn. 12), passim. 14 Fareed Zakaria, "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy, Foreign Affairs 76, no. 6 (1997); Larry Dia-

mond, Developing Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), esp. 34-60, 279-80; Adrian Karatnycky, "The Decline of Illiberal Democracy," Journal of 'Democracy 10 (January 1999).

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try (and the more modernized, liberal, and democratic the international system it joins), the greater are its chances of effecting such a swift and complete transformation.15

This brings us to the vexed question of the applicability of the demo- cratic peace to premodern times, a question that has puzzled propo- nents of the theory. For if modern liberal/democratic states do not fight each other, presumably for reasons rooted in their regime, why did the same not apply to earlier democracies, most notably those of classi- cal antiquity? This question involves a special difficulty. In comparison with what we have for modernity, the information that has survived from earlier times is painfully patchy, even with respect to some of the best-documented cases, such as classical Athens and Rome. Knowl- edge about Greek poleis other than Athens (with the partial exception of Sparta) is hazy. We possess nothing even remotely approaching the full record about either their wars or their regimes that we have with respect to the countries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Un- der these limitations, one comprehensive study has found that Greek democracies actually exhibited a somewhat greater propensity to fight each other than do nondemocracies or mixed dyads. The most dramatic case involved the famous Athenian campaign against Syracuse (415-13 bc) during the Peloponnesian War. Nonetheless, the authors concluded that (1) democracy at the time was still very young, and that (2) the ancient record is badly incomplete and therefore might be distorted.16 Since the interdemocratic peace in modernity is alleged to be practically universal, this hardly constitutes a satisfactory explanation.

Another comprehensive study took a different line, asserting that ancient republics, too, never fought each other.17 Yet a few examples will suffice to demonstrate the falsity of this claim. Many of the known democracies in ancient Greece belonged to the Athenian Empire of the fifth century BC. The empire was coercive and oppressive, with Athens forcing city-states to join and preventing them from leaving by means of its overwhelming force. Rebellions were harshly put down. Athens also prevented members of the alliance (including the democratic ones)

15 See fnn. 3 and 4 above. 16 Bruce Russett and William Antholis, "The Imperfect Democratic Peace of Ancient Greece,"

reprinted in Russett (fn. 1), chap. 3. 17

Spencer Weart, Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). This was criticized by Eric Robinson, a leading expert on early Greek democ- racies; Robinson, "Reading and Misreading the Ancient Evidence for Democratic Pace" Journal of Peace Research 38 (September 2001), resulting in a short exchange in the same issue: Weart, 609-13; Robinson, 615-17. See also the criticism by the leading authority on the Greek polis and fourth-cen- tury BC Athenian democracy: Mogens Hansen and Thomas Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Clas- sical Poleis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 84-85.

DEMOCRATIC PEACE REFRAMED 81

from fighting one another. After Athenian power had been severely weakened during the later stage of the Peloponnesian War, the allies, including democratic ones, rebelled in great number. Thus the record of ancient Greece during the fifth century BC is more a tale of demo- cratic imperial coercion than one of interdemocratic peace.18 Moreover, it should be noted that it was consistently the Athenian demos, rather than the aristocratic elements in Athenian society, that pushed for ag- gressive imperial expansion and war.

The fourth century BC offers an even more significant test. First, the number of Greek democracies had increased. Furthermore, when a second Athenian-led alliance was formed in 377 BC, it was based on voluntary and egalitarian principles. To weaken Sparta, Athens assisted in the restoration of independence in Thebes. Not only did Thebes become a democracy; it also reestablished the Boeotian League on a democratic basis. In 371 BC the Boeotian army under the generalship of Epaminondas smashed the invincible Spartans in the Battle of Leuctra. A dramatic change in the Greek balance of power followed. Spartan hegemony and tyrannical imperial rule were broken, whereas Thebes rose to prominence. Invading the Peloponnese, Epaminondas assisted Sparta's satellites in breaking away and forming democracies and re- gional democratic leagues. He freed a large part of Sparta s helots. And yet these noble acts, obviously advantageous to Thebes, were vigorously opposed by none other than democratic Athens. For after Leuctra, it was Theban, rather than Spartan, hegemony that Athens feared and balanced against. Indeed, David Hume singled out this shift as a strik- ing ancient example of the operation of the balance of power.

In 369 BC Athens joined the war against Thebes, allying itself against Greek freedom with oligarchic and oppressive Sparta and its oligarchic allies, with Greek tyrants such as Dionysius of Syracuse and the blood- thirsty Alexander of Pherae, and with foreign and autocratic Persia. For seven years the two great Greek democracies were thus engaged in a war that raged everywhere along their imperial peripheries. The war involved numerous encounters, down to the Athenian participation against Thebes in the Battle of Mantinea (362 bc), the greatest battle in Greek history until then, where Epaminondas again won a crushing victory but was killed. Theban hegemony and the war thereby came to an end. As Athens attempted to reassert its own hegemony, its conduct

18 Weart (fn. 17) postpones any mention of the first Athenian Empire to as late in his book as possi- ble and then summarily disposes of this inconvenience (p. 246). The problem was better acknowledged by Russett and Antholis (fn. 17); Tobias Bachteler, "Explaining the Democratic Peace: The Evidence from Ancient Greece Reviewed," Journal of Peace Research 34 (August 1997).

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toward allies began to resemble its first empire, prompting a rebellion known as the Social War (357-55 BC) that broke the power of the alli- ance. Lest it be thought that Thebes' conduct toward other democracies was saintly, it should be noted that it conquered and razed its old rival, democratic Plataea (373 bc).19

Surprisingly, the record of Republican Rome's wars in the Italian

peninsula has not been examined at all in this context and appears to be no less questionable with respect to the democratic peace phenomenon. How democratic the Roman Republic was remains a matter of debate among classical scholars, with recent trends swinging in the more dem- ocratic direction.20 Rome was classified by Polybius {The Histories 7.11- 18) as a mixed polity, in which the people's assemblies and tribunes, the aristocratic senate, and elected magistrates balanced each other's power. It should be remembered, however, that our own modern liberal democracies, too, would probably have been classified as mixed poli- ties by the ancients, and unlike ancient republics they do not include popular assemblies of all citizenry that directly legislate and decide on issues such as war and peace. Knowledge about the internal regimes of the Italian city-states is meager and imprecise. Still, to argue that none of the hundreds of Italic and Greek city-states that were brought under Roman rule were republics - that Rome was in fact the only republic in Italy - is patently untenable. For example, Capua and Tarentum, the two leading city-states of southern Italy that defected from Rome dur- ing the Second Punic War, and were harshly crushed by Rome, were both democratic republics at the time (Livy, 23.2-7, 24.13). Indeed, during the Second Punic War, Carthage, Rome's rival, was judged by Polybius (6.5; following Aristotle, The Politics, 2.11 and 4.8-9) to have been a mixed polity, in which the demos (which supported the Barkaide war party) dominated more than it did in the Roman Republic itself.21 Neither in these instances nor in any other case does the evidence with respect to public deliberations in Rome on war and peace include even a reference to the enemy's regime as an issue meriting consideration. As with the mid data in modernity, this may expand the scope of rel-

19 The ancient sources for fourth-century BC Greece are varied and patchy. N. Hammond can serve as a useful synthesis; Hammond, A History of Greece to 322 bc (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). David Hume offers a thoroughly misleading account of the above war and the Battle of Mantinea (which he does not even name!) that clearly refutes his thesis; Hume, "Of the Balance of Power," in Hume, Essays: Literary, Moral and Political (London: Routledge, 1894), 198; Weart (fn. 17), 25-26.

20 Alexander Yakobson, Elections and Electioneering in Rome (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999). 21 Weart (fn. 17) does not at all discuss Rome, and not because of absentmindedness. For he men-

tions Rome once, in his appendix of problematic cases (p. 297), where he lamely excuses himself from

discussing it on the grounds that we lack information about Carthage.

DEMOCRATIC PEACE REFRAMED 83

evant information for testing the democratic peace thesis; however, in contrast to the MID data, the finding in this case appears to be wholly negative.

A third line of interpretation has been offered to account for the

apparent inapplicability of the modern peace to the classical republics. Those who emphasize liberalism above democracy as the explanation for the modern phenomenon have argued that classical democracies can

hardly be considered liberal since they practiced slavery and in general did not uphold the liberal rights and other "republican* preconditions required by Kant, such as a separation of powers (Rome's mixed polity notwithstanding).22 However, this interpretation is not fully satisfac-

tory either, for in the United States slavery existed until the Civil War, long after the United States is counted as a liberal and democratic state

by the proponents of the liberal/democratic peace theory. As already mentioned, other liberal/democratic traits were also still relatively weak or absent in many of the countries listed as liberal/democratic by the democratic peace theorists. Furthermore, whereas Athens has become the proverbial exemplum for the perils of direct democracy, in the Ro- man republic institutional constraints were very strong. A popular as-

sembly of the people in arms, the comitia centuriata, was called to vote for war, but such a motion could be brought before the assembly only by the appropriate magistrate, a consul (and theoretically a praetor) - an-

nually elected in highly competitive elections - after a decision for war had been debated and reached by the senate.

Paine and Kant subscribed to the Enlightenment view that selfish autocrats were responsible for war. According to that view, once the

people, who carried the burden of war and incurred its costs, were al- lowed to make the decision, they would recoil from war. However, the demos was the most bellicose element in Athenian society, even though it fought in the army, manned the rowing benches of the Athenian

navy, and had to endure war's destruction and misery, as in the forced evacuation of Attica during the Peloponnesian War. Rome's proverbial military prowess and tenacity similarly derived specifically from its re-

publican regime, which successfully co-opted the populace for the pur- pose of war. Historically, democracies proved particularly tenacious in war precisely because they were socially and politically inclusive. And, again, in premodern times they also did not refrain from fighting each other.

22 Doyle (fn.l), 212.

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Why, then, did the citizens of Athens and Rome repeatedly vote for war and endure devastating and protracted wars for years and years, including, as we have seen, against other democracies/republics? It was not because they were less democratic than modern societies; rather, it was because in their agrarian age there were great material benefits to be gained from war. First, there was booty to be had. Furthermore, in Athens, the empire meant lavish tribute, which financed about half of the Athenian budget, paying for the extensive public construction and the huge navy, in both of which the demos was employed (Plutarch, Pericles , 12). Moreover, the empire's might boosted Athenian trade su-

premacy, which, in turn, increased its resources and enhanced its might, and vice versa in a military-financial virtuous circle. Finally, poor Athe- nians were allocated farms in colonies (c/eruchies) established on terri- tory confiscated from defeated enemies. Although Rome did not levy tribute on its "allies," it confiscated land from the defeated on an enor- mous scale throughout Italy and settled its citizens and the Latins in colonies established on that land.

The underlying rationale here is familiar enough: in preindustrial times, such growth as there was in overall resources through innovation and exchange was so slow as to make resources practically finite and the competition over them close to a zero-sum game. With the expansion of European and global trade during the early modern period, a greater portion of production was intended for the market (although most of it was still produced for self-consumption), increasing the benefits of free exchange for the parties involved. This was the process described by Adam Smith and noted by Paine and Kant. Yet only with industri- alization did the balance change radically: wealth was no longer finite but rose at a staggering pace; agricultural produce, and hence territory, ceased to constitute the main source of wealth and was replaced by in- dustrial production that was best developed at home and, later, by the service-information economy where the significance of raw materials declined greatly; production became overwhelmingly intended for the market, magnifying the benefits of exchange and increasing interde- pendence.23 Contrary to earlier times, the economic ruin of the enemy was a detriment to one's own prosperity.

It is not the cost of war per se, as is widely claimed, that became pro- hibitive in modernity. Societies paid horrendous costs in wars through- out history as a matter of course, no less horrendous in relative terms

23 Cf. Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York: Basic Books, 1986); idem, The Rise of the Virtual State (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

DEMOCRATIC PEACE REFRAMED 85

than that of the total wars of the twentieth century. This was their nature-like law so long as the Malthusian logic of preindustrial times

prevailed. It was mainly the benefits of peace that rose dramatically, tilting the overall balance between war and peace, once the Malthusian

trap was broken. It has been claimed that the Kantian "tripod of peace" transformed the vicious circle of anarchy, mutual insecurity, and war into a virtuous circle of peace and cooperation.24 But to the extent that such a transformation occurred, it was in fact industrialization and the

escape from the Malthusian vicious circle that underlay the "tripod.* This process is dramatically reflected in the statistics of war. The

number of wars and war years among the great powers and among economically advanced states in general - the most powerful states and most destructive interstate wars - declined sharply in the century after 1815, to about a third of their frequency in the preceding cen-

tury, and even lower compared with earlier times. This trend continues into the twentieth century, although the mobilization of resources and

manpower in the major wars that did occur and, hence, wars' intensity and lethality per time unit, increased - most notably, in the two world wars.25 Can the decline in the number of wars and war years among advanced societies be explained by their greater intensity? This hypoth- esis barely holds for the nineteenth century. From 1815 to 1914, as the number of wars and war years among the great powers sharply declined, the cost of wars registered little significant increase relative to popula- tion and wealth. Conversely, in the twentieth century, the mere twenty- one years that separated the two world wars - the most intense and

devastating wars in modern European history - also do not support an inverse relation between war intensity and frequency. Any such relation has been rejected bv all specialized statistical studies of the subject.26 Obviously, when great power wars did occur, the antagonists were able to devote much greater resources to them. At the same time, however, they proved reluctant to embark on such wars in the first place.

24 Russett and Oneal (fn. 2), chap. 1. 25 Melvin Small and David Singer give no basis for comparison to earlier times, while also en-

compassing the widest range of development - in effect different worlds: preindustrial and industrial; Small and Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816-1980 (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982). But see Jack Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495-1975 (Lexington: University Press of

Kentucky, 1983), esp. 112-49. Levy concentrates on the great powers' wars among themselves, that is, the major wars by the most advanced states. See also Evan Luard, War in International Society (Lon- don: Tauris, 1986), 53, 67.

26 Small and Singer (fn. 25), 156-57, 198-201; Levy (fn. 25), 136-37, 150-68; Luard (fn. 25), 67-81.

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Indeed, the striking fact overlooked by the proponents of the demo- cratic peace is that nondemocratic countries, too, fought much less dur-

ing the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the industrial age, than

they did in earlier times. In the century after 1815, nondemocratic/ nonliberal great powers such as Prussia and Austria (which were not colonial powers) engaged in war not only far less frequently than Brit- ain and France but also dramatically less in comparison with their own earlier histories: only once every eight or nine years, compared with once every two years (Austria) or three years (Prussia) in the eighteenth century that more or less represented the European great powers' aver-

age during early modernity. The nondemocratic/nonliberal great pow- ers also shared in the sharp post-1815 decline in the frequency of great power wars to about one-third of their rate in early modernity.27

None other than the famous future chief of the Prussian general staff Helmuth von Moltke wrote in 1841:

We candidly confess our belief in the idea, on which so much ridicule has been cast, of a general European peace . . . wars will become rarer and rarer because

they are growing expensive beyond measure; positively because of the actual cost; negatively because of the necessary neglect of work. Has not the popula- tion of Prussia, under a good and wise administration, increased by a fourth in

twenty-five years of peace? And are not her fifteen millions of inhabitants better fed, clothed and instructed today than her eleven millions used to be? Are not such results equal to a victorious campaign or to the conquest of a province . . . ?28

The reasons why the democratic peace theorists overlooked this overall sharp decline in the occurrence of war are natural enough: since liberal and democratic countries emerged only during the past two cen- turies, it appeared reasonable to focus only on these centuries, which in any case seemed like a long period of time. In addition, the most exten- sive and widely used database of wars, the Correlates of War, only cov- ers the period from 1815 on. In consequence, no comparison with the pre-1815 period has been carried out. Nor have the democratic peace theorists asked why liberal and democratic societies started to appear only during the past two hundred years or so and how this fact is related

27 John Mueller overlooks the decline of war in the century before 1914 and fails to account for the

deeper sources of the "obsolescence"; Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989). Lars-Erik Cederman detects a decline in belligerency among nonde- mocracies after 1945, but the main decline occurred in comparison with the pre-1815 period, which he does not examine. His "learning mechanism" also has no apparent motivating factor; Cederman, "Back to Kant: Reinterpreting the Democratic Peace as a Macrohistorical Learning Process," American Political Science Review 95 (March 2001).

28 Helmuth von Moltke, Essays, Speeches and Memoirs (New York: Harper, 1893), 1:276-77.

DEMOCRATIC PEACE REFRAMED 87

to the defining development of that period - the onset of the indus- trial-technological age. The whole question of the democratic peace has been considered out of its truly defining historical context. For this rea- son, both those who have found that wealth and economic growth did not affect the occurrence of war,29 as well as their critics who argued that wealth was indeed very significant in reducing war but only in connec- tion and in tandem with democracy,30 have been led astray somewhat

by too short a perspective. For in comparison with the preindustrial age both democracies and nondemocracies have fought on average consid-

erably less after the industrial revolution. It is true, however, that liberal and democratic societies have exhibited greater pacific tendencies than nondemocracies during the industrial age, as mainly demonstrated in their relations with each other. Why is this so?

A number of related reasons have been at work. In many nonliberal and nondemocratic industrial countries a militant ethos, often associ- ated with a traditional warrior elite, was deeply embedded in the na- tional culture. Led from above to national unification and moderniza- tion and then coming late to the imperial race, both Germany and Japan had successfully relied in the past on military force to assert their claims and expected to continue to do so in the future. Statism remained cen- tral to their modern development. Conjointly, they either rejected the

logic of free trade in the name of national economy and/or feared that the global liberal trade system would give way to closed imperial blocs, leaving them out in the cold. In communist countries, for their part, the total rejection of the market principle went hand in hand with their

ideological commitment to its destruction by force. Furthermore, since

they were repressive at home, nonliberal and nondemocratic countries felt little compunction about practicing repression abroad. Contrary to a widely held view, it has been shown that their empires could and did pay off.31 So long as the advantages and/or very viability of the liberal economic model as opposed to the national-capitalist (and so-

cialist) one remained in dispute, forceful nation-centered imperialism remained a temptation.

By comparison, liberal democratic countries have differed in some crucial respects. Socialized to peaceful, law-mediated relations at home, their citizens expect the same norms to be applied internationally. Liv-

ing in increasingly tolerant, less conformist, and argumentative societies,

29 Maoz and Russett (fh. 1); Russet and Oneal (fn. 2), 151-53. 30 See the studies in fn. 10 above. 31 Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1996).

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they have grown more receptive to the Other s point of view. Promoting freedom, legal equality, and (expanding) political participation domes-

tically, liberal democratic powers, although initially in possession of the

greatest colonial empires, have found it increasingly difficult to justify rule over foreign people without their consent and/or without granting them full citizenship and voting rights. Conjointly, sanctifying life, lib-

erty, and human rights, liberal democracies have ultimately proved to be failures at forceful repression.32 Liberal economy, dominating despite periodical lapses, in any case rejected war and military subjugation in favor of peaceful economic growth and mutually beneficial trade. Fur- thermore, with the individuals life and pursuit of happiness elevated above group values, the sacrifice, let alone self-sacrifice, demanded by war has increasingly lost legitimacy in liberal democratic societies. Democratic leaders have shared the above outlook and norms or else have been forced by public pressure to conform to them or face being removed from office. As scholars now tend to agree, structural and nor- mative factors are intertwined in creating the democratic peace.

For these reasons, even though nonliberal and nondemocratic states, too, became much less belligerent in the industrial age, liberal democ- racies have proven inherently more attuned to its pacifying aspects. This applies most strikingly to the relations among democracies, but, as scholars have become increasingly aware, it applies also to their con- duct in general.33

Other Related and Independent Factors

Additional factors associated with the modern transformation might also be involved in making affluent liberal democratic societies more pacific. It is common among social scientists to regard parsimony as a scientific ideal and to dislike "laundry lists" of causes. Yet, without quar-

32 Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 33 This is mostly demonstrated in the democracies' record of much less intense wars during the twentieth century (far lower casualties, partly because of far weaker rivals) and far fewer civil wars: Rummel (fn. 1); idem (fn. 5); Domke (fn. 1); Stuart Bremer, "Dangerous Dyads: Conditions Af- fecting the Likelihood of Interstate War, 1816-1965," Journal of Conflict Resolution 36 (June 1992); Benoit (fn. 10); Rousseau et al. (fn. 2); Rousseau (fn. 3); Rioux (fn. 2); Russett and Oneal (fn. 2), 49-50. Mathew Krain and Marrissa Myers find no change over time but fail to distinguish between advanced and less advanced democracies; Krain and Myers, "Democracy and Civil War: A Note on the Democratic Peace Proposition," International Interactions 23, no. 1 (1997);Tanja Ellingson, "Colorful Community or Ethnic Witches-Brew? Multiethnicity and Domestic Conflict during and after the Cold War," Journal of Conflict Resolution 44 (April 2000); Ted Gurr, Minorities at Risk A Global View ofEthnopolitical Conflicts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1993); Henderson and Singer (fn. 11); Henderson (fn. 5), chap. 5.

DEMOCRATIC PEACE REFRAMED 89

reling with the theoretical proposition, it is the case that a multiplicity of factors are at play in social phenomena, often making theoretically "less elegant" explanations truer. Some of the additional factors sug- gested below are variably related to liberal democracy, while others are associated with economic development, which, in turn, is also variably related to liberal democracy. How and to what extent this is so remains to be determined.

Wealth and Comfort - Again

Throughout history, rising prosperity has been associated with decreas-

ing willingness to endure the hardships of war. Freedom from manual labor and luxurious living conditions achieved by the rich in prosper- ous premodern societies conflicted with the physical hardship of cam-

paigning and life in the field, which thereby became more alien and

unappealing. As the industrial-technological age unfolded and wealth

per capita rose exponentially, the wealth, comfort, and other amenities

formerly enjoyed by only the privileged elite spread throughout society. Thus, increasing wealth has worked to decrease war not only through the modern logic of expanding manufacturing and trading interdepen- dence but also through the traditional logic that affluence and comfort affect society's willingness to endure hardship. Because new heights of affluence and comfort have been achieved in the developed world in the post-World War II era, when practically all the world's affluent countries have been democracies, it is difficult to distinguish the ef- fects of comfort from those of democracy in diminishing belligerency. Obviously, as already noted, the two factors have to some degree been interrelated.

It is difficult for people in today s liberal, affluent, and secure societ- ies to visualize how life was for their forefathers only a few generations earlier and largely still is in poor countries. Angst may have replaced fear and physical pain in modern societies; yet, without diminishing the merits of traditional society or ignoring the stresses and problems of modernity, this change has been nothing short of revolutionary. Peo-

ple in premodern societies struggled to survive in the most elemental sense. The overwhelming majority of them endured a lifetime of hard

physical labor to escape hunger, from which they were never secure. The tragedy of orphanage, of child mortality, of premature death of a spouse, and of early death in general was an inescapable fact of life.

People of all ages were afflicted with illness, disability, and physical pain, for which no effective remedies existed. Even where state rule pre- vailed, violent conflict between neighbors was a regular occurrence and,

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therefore, an ever-present possibility, putting a premium on physical strength, toughness, honor, and a reputation for all of these. Hardship and tragedy tended to harden people and make them fatalistic. In this context, the suffering and death associated with war were endured as

just another nature-like affliction, together with Malthus's other grim reapers: famine and disease.

By comparison, by contrast even, life changed dramatically in afflu- ent liberal societies. The decline of physical labor has already been men- tioned. Hunger and want were replaced by societies of plenty, where food, the most basic of needs, became available practically without limit, with overweight rather than starvation becoming a major problem, even and, indeed, sometimes especially, among the poor. Infant mortality fell to roughly one- twentieth of its rate during preindustrial times. Annual

general mortality declined from around thirty per thousand people to between seven and ten per thousand.34 Infectious diseases, the num- ber one killer of the past, were mostly rendered nonlethal by improved hygiene, vaccinations, and antibiotics. Countless bodily irritations and disabilities - deteriorating eyesight, bad teeth, skin disease, hernia -

that used to be an integral part of life, were alleviated by medication, medical instruments, and surgery. Anesthetics and other drugs, from

painkillers to Viagra, dramatically improved the quality of life. People in the developed world live in well-heated and air-conditioned homes, equipped with all manner of electrical appliances. They have indoor bathrooms and lavatories. They wash daily and change clothes as of- ten. They drive rather than walk. They are flooded with popular media entertainment with which to occupy their spare time. They take vaca- tions in faraway places. They embrace "postmodern," "postmaterialis- tic" values that emphasize individual self-fulfillment. In an orderly and comfortable society, rough conduct in social dealings decreases, while civility, peaceful argument, and humor become the norm. Men are more able to "connect to their feminine side." Whereas children and youth used to be physically disciplined by their parents and fought among themselves at school, on the playground, and in the street, they now en- counter a general social abhorrence of violence. Social expectations and psychological sensitivity have risen as dramatically as these changes. People in affluent liberal societies expect to live, to control their lives, and to enjoy life rather than merely endure it, with war scarcely fitting into their life plan.

34 See B. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750-1970 (London: Macmillan, 1975), B6, B7.

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It is not surprising then that the "imprudent vehemence" historically associated with republican foreign policy appears to have all but disap- peared in the affluent, consumer-hedonistic, liberal democratic societ- ies that developed after World War II - indeed, that this change has affected the elites and affluent middle class in these societies even more than their less affluent "demos."

Metropolitan Service Society

The growth of city and metropolitan life is a somewhat related phe- nomenon. Commercial and metropolitan cities were considered by classical military authorities such as Vegetius, followed by Machiavelli, as the least desirable recruiting ground compared to the countryside with its sturdy farmers, accustomed to hard physical labor. Typically immigrating from diverse quarters, the residents of large metropoli- tan centers lacked traditional communal bonds of solidarity and were free from the social controls of village and small town communities.

Exposed to the cities' quick dealings and temptations, they were re-

garded as too fickle, rootless, undisciplined, and cynical to be trusted. With modernity, urbanism and city life in large metropolises were no

longer confined, as they had been earlier, to only a few percent of the total population, but steadily expanded to encompass the majority of the people. Correspondingly, country folk shrank in number to where

they constitute only a few percent of the population. Yet the military continued to regard them as the best "recruiting material."

Examples abound. With the coming of the twentieth century, the German army drafted disproportionately in the countryside and, as sec- ond best, among country-town people. It limited its recruitment from the large cities, where the masses were regarded both as militarily less suitable and, being infected with socialism, as politically suspect.35 In liberal democratic Britain, too, the world's most urban society, which

adopted the draft in both world wars, country folk were considered the best fit for military service. Industrial workers were considered less desirable, while office people were perceived as the least suitable for the rigors of military life. Notably, the British Empire s undisputed best troops during both world wars came from the farms of the still

predominantly rural dominions: New Zealand, Australia, and Canada.

Similarly, the farmer recruits from Middle America who dominated the United States armies during World War I were regarded as first-

35 For the statistics, see Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War (New York: Longmans, 1914), 243-44.

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class "military material/' The American armies of World War II, in which city folk increased in number, still fought well enough but did not enjoy the same superb reputation as their predecessors in the earlier world war. And Vietnam War draftees, especially those from the more urban states, had an even lower reputation for "natural" soldierly qualities. The U.S. Army releases no statistics on the geographical breakdown of its recruitment, but an analysis of the hometown of the fallen in the Iraq War reveals that rural and small-town communities contribute nearly twice as

many volunteer recruits per population than the metropolitan centers.36 Israel s crack units during the first decades of its existence were drawn over- whelmingly from the young people of a relatively small number of volun- tary communal villages (kibbutzim) and farm communities (moshavim).

The far-reaching change in the occupational structure of society and the cities has to be factored in. City folk during the zenith of the in- dustrial age consisted mainly of factory workers. They were accustomed to physical labor, machines, and the massive, coordinated work regime labeled "Fordism" and "Taylorism." They lived in dense urban commu- nities and were mostly literate. These qualities were major strengths for the military, especially as the military, too, was undergoing mechaniza- tion. However, as the industrial- technological era progressed, manufac- turing declined while the service sector rose in its share of the workforce in the most advanced economies. In the United States, which led this trend, 70 percent of the workforce is now employed in services while only 18 percent work in manufacturing.37 It can be argued that the military, too, has been moving from mechanized to information-based forces, increasingly relying on computerized data processing and accu- rate standoff fire to do most of the fighting. All the same, adaptation to military life comes far less naturally to people from contemporary af- fluent societies who are accustomed to office work and the seclusion of residential suburbia than it did to their forebears who were farmers and factory workers. Again, while high rates of industrial urbanism charac- terized not only liberal societies but also Imperial and Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, nearly all the advanced service economies are as- sociated with liberal democracies, making the effect of the two factors hard to distinguish from one another.

36 Bill Bishop, "Who Goes to War," Washington Post, November 16, 2003. After this article was sub- mitted for review, demographic data were released by the Pentagon, confirming the trend: Ann Scott Tyson, "Youths in Rural U.S. Are Drawn to Military," Washington Post, November 10, 2005. Despite its tide, this article emphasizes the recruits' poor economic background (a significant point to be sure) but not their rural roots.

37 Rosecrance (fn. 23), xii and also 26 for the other major industrial countries; Robert Gilpin, The

Challenge of Global Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 33.

DEMOCRATIC PEACE REFRAMED 93

The Sexual Revolution

Sexual promiscuity is another factor that may have dampened enthusi- asm for war in advanced modern societies, especially among unmarried young men. Traditionally constituting the most aggressive element in

society, largely because of their unsettled sexual situation, young single males now find themselves with plenty of outlets for their restless- ness. Correspondingly, foreign adventure that once lured many of them

away from the dull and suffocating countryside and from small towns, has lost much of its attraction, especially for city dwellers, whereas the sexual aspects of such adventure are severely curtailed by state mili-

tary authorities. In modern imperial Japan the troops still indulged in state-tolerated mass rape while serving abroad, some of it in the form of state-organized forced prostitution. At least two million women are estimated to have been raped by Soviet soldiers in conquered eastern

Germany in 1945. Mass rape was a major feature of the ethnic wars in Bosnia and Rwanda during the 1990s. Whereas rape is severely pun- ished (though it still occurs sporadically) in the armies of the West- ern democracies, American GIs and other Allied troops widely availed themselves of an abundant supply of low-cost prostitution in ruined Western Europe and, later, in desperately poor Vietnam.38 All in all, however, the balance of sexual opportunity changed radically. Young men are now more reluctant to leave behind the pleasures of life for the

rigors and chastity of the field. "Make love not war" was the slogan of the powerful antiwar youth campaign of the 1960s, which by no coin- cidence took off in tandem with a far-reaching liberalization of sexual norms. Once more, this liberalization occurred mainly in affluent and urban liberal societies, though it is interesting to speculate about how much it affected the Soviet Union in later periods and how it may affect

today's China. Again, there is no need to fully accept the reasoning of Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and Michel Foucault to appreciate the signifi- cance of this factor.

Fewer Young Males

In addition to changes in the circumstance and attitudes of young males, the significant decline in their relative number is another factor that may have decreased enthusiasm for war in contemporary developed

38 For the Soviets, see Anthony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2003), 410. For

the Americans and Japanese in World War II, see Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 337, 346, respectively.

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societies.39 In premodern societies life expectancy not only at birth but also for adults was considerably lower than it is today. Thus the share of young adult males in the adult population was higher, even under zero demographic growth. With the onset of industrialization, as child mortality fell sharply whereas birthrates followed only slowly, the num- ber of young adults in a fast-growing population increased not only in absolute terms but also relative to the total adult population. This was evident in the nineteenth-century West, as it was in the twentieth- century developing world. Young male adults were most conspicuous in the public enthusiasm for war in July-August 1914, as they were in all wars and revolutions. In today's affluent societies, however, with birthrates falling below replacement level and with increased longevity, young adults - including males - constitute a shrinking portion of an aging population. Before World War I males aged fifteen to twenty- nine constituted 35 percent of the adult male population in Britain, and 40 percent in Germany; by 2000 their share had dropped to 24 and 29 percent, respectively. By comparison, young adult males of the same age cohorts constituted 48 percent of Iran's population in 2000.40

Again, since young males have always been the most aggressive ele- ment in society while older men were traditionally associated with a counsel of moderation and compromise, some scholars have suggested that the decline in young men's relative numbers may contribute to the pacificity of developed societies while explaining the greater belligerency of developing ones, particularly those of Islam. China's one-child policy may make it more similar to a developed society; but in Islamic societies booming population growth peaked only recently, and the relative share of young men is at its height.41 Avoiding simplistic correlations, one should understand the restlessness of the cohorts of young adult males in Islam in the context of their lack of economic (and sexual) opportu- nity in traditional, stagnant, and culturally defensive societies. At the height of its population growth around the middle of the nineteenth century, the share of young adult males in industrially booming Britain was over 40 percent of the adult male population, not unlike in today's Iran, and yet this was the period ofthtpax Britannica.42

39 Herbert Moller, "Youth as a Force in the Modern World," Comparative Studies in Society and

History 10 (April 1967-68); Christian Mesquida and Neil Wiener, "Human Collective Aggression: A Behavioral Ecology Perspective," Ethology and Sociobiology 17, no. 4 (1996).

40 Mitchell (fn. 33), sec. B2, esp. 37, 52; United Nations, World Population Prospects: The 2000 Revi- sion (New York: UN ,2001).

41 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Si- mon and Schuster, 1997), 116-20.

42 Mitchell (fh. 33), sec. B2, esp. 37, 52. Edward Luttwak argues that with fewer children per family,

DEMOCRATIC PEACE REFRAMED 95

Women s franchise

While young men have always been the most aggressive element in so-

ciety, men in general have always been more aggressive and belligerent than women. Having won the franchise in twentieth-century liberal democracies, women have been able to influence government policies by their role as voters. Studies in the West during the past decades have shown a consistent gender gap in attitudes toward the use of military force.43 Such gender differences may play a significant role in tilting the electoral balance against military ventures in affluent liberal de- mocracies. The women's vote has been suggested as one of the factors that accounts for why liberal democracies became more pacific in the twentieth century than they had been in the nineteenth.44

It should be noted, though, that women are not unconditionally pac- ifist. In some societies and conflicts the attitudes of the sexes do not

diverge significantly. For example, no such divergence has been revealed in studies of both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The authors of these studies have suggested that their findings were most likely explained by the high salience of the conflict, which generated high mobilization levels among members of both sexes.45 Similarly, in the 2004 American

presidential elections, the so-called security moms, who feared addi- tional megaterror attacks at home, cast more votes for the tougher can- didate George W. Bush than they did for his Democratic challenger. In Russia the mothers' voice, still mute in the totalitarian system dur-

ing the failed Soviet Afghan campaign (1979-88), became dominant

during the first Chechen war (1994-96), after Russia had liberalized. Mothers took to the streets in public demonstrations, significantly con-

tributing to the Russian decision to withdraw. However, as with the American security moms, the continuation of terror attacks on Russian soil carried out by Chechen extremists after the Russian withdrawal le-

parents are much more reluctant to accept the loss of children in war; Luttwak, "Blood and Computers: The Crisis of Classical Military Power in Advanced Postindustrialist Societies," in Zeev Maoz and Azar

Gat, eds., War in a Changing World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). This argument does not withstand scrutiny, however; see Azar Gat s critique, also in Maoz and Gat (pp. 88-89).

43 Lisa Brandes, "Public Opinion, International Security and Gender: The United States and Great

Britain since 1945" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994). 44 Bruce Russet, "The Democratic Peace - And Yet It Moves," in M. Brown, S. Lynn-Jones, and S.

Miller, eds., Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge: MIT, 1996), 340; Doyle, "Michael Doyle on the

Democratic Peace - Again," in Brown, Lynn-Jones, and Miller (p. 372). 45 MarkTessler and Ina Warriner, "Gender, Feminism, and Attitudes toward International Conflict:

Exploring Relationship with Survey Data from the Middle East," World Politics 49 (January 1997); MarkTessler, Jodi Nachtwey, and Audra Grant, "Further Tests of the Women and Peace Hypothesis: Evidence from Cross-National Survey Research in the Middle East," International Studies Quarterly 43 (September 1999).

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gitimized Russian reintervention, at least in the eyes of Russian public opinion, men and women alike.

Nuclear Weapons

The advent of nuclear weapons is widely regarded as the crucial factor that has prevented a great power war since 1945. However, the Long Peace since 1945, the longest yet in the modern great power system, was preceded by the second and third longest peace ever between the Western powers in the years 1871-1914 and 1815-54. Crucially, of course, nuclear weapons have all but prevented the breakup of such extended periods of peace with devastating interstate wars as had oc- curred before 1945. This is a monumental change. And yet something had been changing in the relations between industrializing/industrial great powers, and particularly between industrial liberal/democratic great powers, long before the bomb.46

The advent of nuclear weapons marks a turning point in history. Yet the resulting restraint is based on an arms race, deterrence, and the bal- ance of terror, and leaves room for covert, indirect, and low-intensity forms of armed conflict. At the same time, however, any sort of vio- lent conflict between modern affluent liberal democracies was becom- ing virtually unthinkable irrespective of the bomb. A "positive" rather than a "negative" peace prevails among them. There is a big difference between the two, which does not make either of them less significant.

As repeatedly pointed out here, all the above elements are deeply interconnected in the modern transformation, and each may have a contributing affect that has come into play and increased at different points in time. Among other things, this may explain why the demo- cratic peace phenomenon has progressively gained in strength. None of these elements is reducible to the other, and all of them interact in a mutually affecting and mutually reinforcing causal web.

Some readers will undoubtedly find my argument problematic, be- cause the effect of each of the above variables is difficult to isolate, let alone measure. To achieve such isolation, variability among the relevant cases is needed, yet it does not always exist. Affluent societies emerged only after World War II, and all have been liberal democracies. Had nondemocratic and capitalist Germany and Japan survived World War II and become affluent, the effect of affluence could have been tested more effectively. If China becomes affluent while remaining nondemo-

46 I stand between the two poles represented by Mueller (fn. 27); and Martin van Creveld, The

Transformation of War (New York: Free Press, 1991).

DEMOCRATIC PEACE REFRAMED 97

cratic, such a test may yet turn out to be more feasible. The same applies to metropolitan-service society and largely also to the sexual revolution, with the very limited test cases offered by the later Soviet Union and

today's China. The complexity of the causal web is demonstrated in connection with the number of young males during the pax Britannica and today's Islamic world. Women's franchise is a factor already pointed out in earlier works, and righthly so, because its potential contribution

may be quite significant even though it is difficult to isolate. Indeed, to overlook all of the above potent developments because their effect can- not always be effectively isolated and measured evokes the proverbial images of the coin under the lamppost, the lack of evidence that is not an evidence of a lack, the dog that did not bark, and so on. A true gen- eralized understanding of reality, alias theory, is achievable - theoretical

impoverishment is avoided - only if it incorporates the relevant range of causal factors, including those that we can less fully isolate and mea- sure, at least for the present.

Conclusion: Past and Future

The industrial-technological revolution has been transforming the world over the past two centuries. It is in the context of this radical transformation that the idea of the democratic peace theory must be understood and - although basically true - amended. A far more com-

plex causal process has been at work than a simple relationship between an independent variable, liberalism/democracy, and a dependent one, the democratic peace.

The emergence of the democratic peace phenomenon sometime

during the nineteenth century has been linked, without further ques- tioning, to the fact that liberal/democratic regimes began to evolve only then. But, indeed, they began to evolve on a country scale only at that

point in time, rather than any earlier in history, precisely because of the modern transformation: the growth of "imagined communities'' of

print; a commercial-industrial economy; mass, urban, society; mass lit-

eracy; the bourgeois way of life; and growing abundance. The demo- cratic peace phenomenon has been intimately connected with these un-

derlying processes and has increased with them. Indeed, all the liberal

projections of peace - whether based on democracy or on production

and trade dependency - are mutually interconnected and are grounded

in, presuppose, the sweeping changes to human existence generated by the industrial revolution. The democratic peace did not exist among premodern democratic and republican city-states not because they were

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not democratic or even liberal enough politically but because they were

premodern, unaffected by the modern transformation. This is the piece of the puzzle that Paine and Kant lacked in their visionary tracts, if only because they themselves predated most of that transformation.

The modern transformation accounts for the fact that not only lib- eral/democratic countries but all countries, once swept by the indus-

trial-technological age, engaged in war far less than they previously did, a fact overlooked by the democratic peace theorists. Rather than the cost of war becoming prohibitive (it changed little, relative to popu- lation and wealth), it was mainly the benefits of peace that increased

dramatically once the Malthusian trap was broken, tilting the overall balance between war and peace for economically ever-growing, market- oriented, increasingly interdependent industrializing and industrial so- cieties, regardless of their regime, for which wealth acquisition ceased to be a zero-sum game. This being acknowledged, the liberal/democratic countries' path to modernity has involved a distinctly greater aversion to war than that of nondemocratic and nonliberal countries, because of the political, economic, social, and normative reasons specified above. These manifest themselves most strikingly when both sides to a poten- tial conflict are liberal and democratic.

Other factors that have derived from the modern transformation ap- ply mostly to liberal democratic countries while being only variably connected to their regime. Such factors have been the staggering rise in the standard of living; the decrease in hardship, pain, and death; the dominance of metropolitan life and the service economy; the spread of the consumer and entertainment society; sexual promiscuity, strikingly captured in the 1960s antiwar slogan "make love not war"; women's franchise; and the shrinking ratio of young males in the population.

How does the reframing of the democratic peace thesis offered here affect the current policy debate? After the collapse of the communist challenge and as the democratic peace theory took hold in the 1990s, the Wilsonian notion that the democratization of the world should be actively pursued by the United States as a means for creating not only a just but also a peaceful world gained widespread currency. Yet although there is much validity to the theory, it has tended to ignore some crucial factors, lending itself to simplistic interpretations by political enthusi- asts who lost sight of the massive intricacies involved.

In the first place, as Wilson and his successors discovered in failed efforts to establish democracy through intervention, including military intervention, in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, democracy is neither desired by all nor un-

DEMOCRATIC PEACE REFRAMED 99

conditionally sustainable. Contrary to a widely held view in the West, democratic freedom is not merely a neutral mechanism for best achiev- ing any chosen value; it is itself an ideological choice, incorporating a whole set of values that many societies and cultures find to be deeply in conflict with other values they cherish more dearly Furthermore, the adoption of democracy is not merely an act of will but has rather tended to occur on a country scale in conjunction with economic and social modernization. As Wilson himself came to appreciate, "the real cause of the trouble in Mexico was not political but economic"; elec- tions would not address "the prime cause of all political difficulties" there, the highly unequal pattern of land distribution and, hence, of social relations. Consequently, the president grew skeptical about the ability of foreign intervention to generate real change.47

The forceful democratization of Germany and Japan after World War II, the most successful cases of democratization in the twenti- eth century, had been made possible by more than the political cir- cumstances of defeat in total war and the communist threat. While considerable cultural resistance to democracy and liberalism had to be overcome in both countries, both possessed a modern economic and social infrastructure upon which a fiinctioning liberal democracy could be built.48 While the attempt to bring democratization to countries -

such as those of the Arab world - that lack both a liberal tradition and a modern socioeconomic infrastructure, countries that are largely tribal and fraught with ethnic and religious cleavages, should persist, its limi- tations must be recognized. It will be a gradual process, as it was even in the United States, Britain, and France, and it can backfire under ex- cessive pressure, threatening stability in existing moderately pluralistic state-societies, where the main opposition is not liberal and democratic but Islamist and often undemocratic and radical. Not only public dis- cussion but also much of the scholarly work seems to have lost sight of the fact that even the United States, Britain, and France became lib- eral and parliamentary decades, if not centuries, before turning demo- cratic. In all these countries before modernization it was feared (and in France, for example, demonstrated in the wake of both the Great and 1848 Revolutions) that the people's choice if given the vote would not

47 Thomas Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1992), 26-28; and generally, Tony Smith, Americas Mission: The United States and Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), chap. 3.

48 Cf. very similarly Francis Fukuyama, State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty- first Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 38-39, 92-93.

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be liberalism or, indeed, democracy, let alone a moderate and peaceful regime

Second, the democratic peace phenomenon tends to be much weaker in the early stages of liberalization, democratization, and economic de-

velopment. Thus it is not at all clear that the democratization of Arab and Muslim states would ipso facto reduce the militancy of their soci- eties. As in nineteenth-century Europe, and contrary to the prevailing cliche, public opinion in Arab states tends to be more militant than that of the semiautocratic state rulers, who struggle to keep a lid on such

popular pressures. The semidemocratic Islamic regime in Iran that re-

placed the autocratic Shah in a popular revolution has been highly mili- tant, no different in this respect from Revolutionary France's republican regime. Although presidential candidates in Iran must be approved by the the religious authorities who disqualify those whose Islamic cre- dentials are suspect, it is still the case that the more fundamentalist and militant candidate Ahmadinejad won a sweeping victory over the rela-

tively moderate Rafsanjani in the 2005 popular elections. Popular sup- port for Iran's nuclear program transcends social and political divides. In the first democratic Algerian elections ever, held in 1992, the radical Islamic front won, leading to the army's intervention to cancel the elec- tions' results and to a murderous civil war. The consequences of the vic- tory of the Shia coalition in the January 2005, post-Saddam Hussein, free Iraqi elections are too early to determine at the time of writing. The same applies to the results of free elections in Palestinian territory, where the militant Islamic movement Hamas enjoys strong popular support. (As this article was under review in January 2006, the Hamas won the Palestinian elections, seemingly validating the above observa- tion.) The peace treaties that the rulers of Egypt and Jordan signed with Israel are unpopular with public opinion in these Arab countries. Obviously, while sharing a great deal, Arab and Muslim countries are not a monolith, and the consequences of democratization in them may diverge accordingly. A discerning approach is therefore called for. De- mocratization, advanced as a remedy for such societies, should be un- derstood as part of a far more complex causal web, whereby economic and social modernization is very much intertwined with successful de- mocratization and liberalization, all of them affecting the growth of a democratic peace.