The following is the rough draft of a reaction paper for my (empirically and quantitatively oriented) international conflict seminar. Please forgive the rather terse arguments. I was limited by space and time constraints as well as the fact that my professor does not share my anarcho-capitalist and epistemological views. Hopefully it is not so radical as to give me a bad grade. Sometimes I just can’t help myself though. Enjoy!
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 have always been skeptical of the democratic peace thesis, in part because it seemed to me to be incomplete. Russet and Oneal shore up that incompleteness by rightly emphasizing the pacifying effects of both bilateral and global economic interdependence as well as (though not unproblematically) international law and organizations.
I am not without criticism, however. Despite the impossibility of discovering empirical laws via inductive and statistical methods, I have come to accept that (liberal) democracies rarely go to war with one another and might not be more war prone than other states. I am less confident this trend will hold for all times and places. Their work shows that economic interdependence is at least as important, if not more so, than democracy for promoting peace, but they need to expand their measurement criteria beyond merely free trade. An interesting tidbit from their book is that major powers are much more war prone than minor powers, even if they are democracies. This needs to receive more attention, particularly in connection with another tidbit, the well-known fact that smaller countries are more dependent on trade than larger countries because the latter are more self-sufficient.
Far more important than democracy for promoting peace, it seems to me, is an analysis of the power and size of states in relation to war-proneness. Economic interdependence reduces the incentive to go to war. Large states are more self-sufficient, engage in less trade, and therefore have greater incentive to go to war. Larger size also lends itself to greater economies of scale in war-making. The size of a state is closely but not perfectly correlated with its power, but relatively high raw military and economic power also increase the incentive to go to war.
Just as important, and also neglected by international conflict scholars, is understanding how the anatomy of the state necessarily makes it war prone. The state is a territorial monopolist of the legal use of force and ultimate decision-making. As a monopolist, its natural tendency is to suppress (internal and external) competitors and extract ever more wealth from its subjects in order to increase its own power. Its tendency is to grow into Leviathan. Being a monopolist, it lacks the incentive to lower costs and improve the quality of its goods and services. As a monopolist, unlike private citizens and businesses, it has the power to externalize the costs of war onto its subjects. Having the ability to externalize costs increases its incentive to go to war.
Far more important than democracy and international organizations in promoting peace, then, would seem to be (somehow) vastly increasing the number of small states and decreasing the number of large, powerful states in the international system. This will promote economic interdependence and therefore peace. It will also increase competition among states though they will remain territorial monopolists. Smaller size, resulting in increased need for trade, will reduce the ability of states to externalize costs and extract wealth from their subjects.
Finally, a word about the problem of focusing solely on peace. While it may be true that democracy and international law and organizations help promote peace, it is not clear that this is necessarily desirable in light of likely alternatives. They may increase peace, but they may also increase more subtle forms of force and oppression than outright war (defined as 1,000+ battle deaths). And it is not clear that a federation of democracies will not merge into, or at least collectively act like, the necessarily despotic world government Kant rejected.
Geoffrey is an Aristotelian-Libertarian political philosopher, writer, editor, and web designer. He is the founder of the