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The Threat of a Democratic Peace

The U.S. presidencyÂ—a site of intense rhetorical activity that shapes public affairs more directly than the nation s founders wished or anticipatedÂ—enters the twenty-first century dangerously predisposed toward imposing a democratic peace on the post-Cold War world.1 The question of immediate concern is not whether the United States will succeed in what would appear, at best, to be a quixotic quest to achieve universal and permanent peace by transforming all nation-states into democracies. Such an outcome seems unlikely given the inherent limits of even the greatest powers to impose their will so definitively on a global scale. Instead, the matter I wish to call into question is the attitude advanced in presidential and scholarly discourse which represents "democratic peace" as a truism of our time. In the words of one scholar typical of others working in this area, "The absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations."2 This "fact" that democracies do not fight one another, which is derived from a body of scholarship in international relations, has become a commonplace of presidential rhetoric and centerpiece of the present administration's foreign policy.3 Observing early in his first term that "democracies rarely wage war on one another" and again, even more definitively, in his 1994 State of the Union address that "democracies don't attack each other," President Clinton has proceeded to make democratization a foundation of U.S. security policyÂ—what he calls the "third pillar" of his foreign policy.4 This democratic peace theorem, I wish to suggest, is highly problematic and should become the object of close scrutiny, both because it exacerbates the problem of war and exposes a fundamental distrust of democracy itself. The present notion of a democratic peace is traced to Kant's essay on "Perpetual Peace," published in 1795, in which he envisions a zone of peace among liberal republics, not democratic states.5 Scholars in the last two decades have spent considerable energy attempting to demonstrate empirically the existence of this liberal zone of peace, but (with the notable exception of Michael Doyle's seminal essay) they have advanced their findings under the sign of democracy rather than liberalism, inspired by Samuel Huntington's vision of a "third wave" of democratization