Benefit of the Doubt: Kangas said:

» pseudoerasmus - Kangas said:

Liberals argue that when the entire world becomes democratic, we shall see the end of all war.

Too bad such a conclusion is considerably beyond what the evidence strictly allows. But it's a touching faith.

The last time we had an exchange about the Democratic Peace Hypothesis, I mentioned that the fact of peace between democracies was little more than a statistical observation, with little explanatory or predictive power all by itself -- a claim you did not dispute. Yet here you are, making an untoward interpretation from a mere statistical observation which allows several possible interpretations. To wit, the relative rarity of democracies throughout history makes it eminently possible that the absence of wars between democracies has been due entirely to chance.

As you may know, democracies do not declare war on democracies. All wars have at least one dictator, and often two dictators on both sides. That is because it's the citizens (voters) who risk death as soldiers in war, but individual leaders see no problem with committing other people's sons to war.

This sounds like the a priori deductivism you so decry in others. All the same, your argument amounts to what Bruce Russett calls the "structural and institutional constraints" theory of democratic peace, for which he found less evidence than for the "democratic norms and culture" theory. (See pp 88-93 of the book.)

But the problem is, if the theory called on to explain the statistical observation of peace between democracies is shared values, norms and cultures, then it makes the strong prediction that any pair of democracies nearly coming to blows should in the end eschew violence on account of those shared values and norms. Then, the border-line cases like the Fashoda incident between France and Britain, or the Venezuela border dispute between Britain and America, assume some importance. In both cases, however, the historical record shows that strategic exigencies, not shared culture, were what induced the leaders of both countries from going to war.

-- posted by pseudoerasmus