Rosato, Sebastian. "The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory". The American Political Science Review, Vol.97, No.4 (2003): 585-602.

Rosato, Sebastian. "The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory". The American Political Science Review, Vol.97, No.4 (2003): 585-602.

• Democratic peace theory has extremely important political implications, as it provides an important insight into the dynamics of conflict, international relations [IR], and the benefits of democracy. If true, democratic peace theory simultaneously undermines the Realist school of IR, and justifies democracy-creation as furthering global peace (585).
• There are a number of potential causal explanations as to why democracies are unlikely to go to war with other democracies, including normative explanations that democracies respect each other, and institutional explanations that the accountability inherent in democracies constrains public support for war and decreases the possibility of a surprise attack because information is distributed by a free press (586).
• While democracies due tend to respect other democracies and resolve conflicts diplomatically with respected states, this only occurs when democracies recognize each other as legitimate. In cases where one democracy doubts the legitimacy of another democracy, it may be just as inclined to war as against a dictatorship (586).
• Because democracies contain a number of mechanisms to express disapproval of unpopular policies, democratic leaders are only incentivized to go to war in cases of strong popular support. Moreover, democracies distribute war costs in a way that makes particular groups, particularly business interests and potential draftees, less likely to support war than in other polities (587).
• Decisions to engage in war are better judged in democracies than in other systems of government, as the costs and benefits of war can be discussed in a free press and judged by public opinion through elections, making the decision to go to war a more inclusive process than in non-democracies (587).
• There are a number of flaws in the normative logic underpinning democratic peace theory. Namely, the foundations claims that democracies internalize norms of peaceful and legal resolutions are false, as are assumptions that democracies do not resort to force when they have conflicting interests (588).
• Liberal international norms should circumscribe democratic wars within certain institutional limitations and restrict them to certain causes which are liberal and popular, namely self-defense and liberating oppressed peoples. The frequency of colonial wars waged by liberal democracies throughout the 19th and 20th Century clearly shows that democracies have not successfully internalized liberal norms when it comes to warfare (588).
• A common counter-argument is that the French, American, and British states of the 19th and 20th Centuries were not sufficiently liberal or democratic to allow for democratic peace theory to take place. If this is true, it undermines the analytical value of democratic peace theory, because those are the most democratic countries on Earth until the 1950s (590).
• A full list of colonial or illiberal wars fought by liberal democracies is provided on page 589 and includes: the Anglo-Zulu wars, the Afghan Wars, the Opium Wars, the Baluchi War, the British intervention in the Uruguayan dispute, the Anglo-Sikh wars, the British conquest of Burma, the British invasion of Ethiopia, the Maori Civil War, the Tonkin War, the Netherlandish conquest of Aceh, the French invasion of Tunisia, the Indochina Wars, the French annexation of Madagascar, the French colonial wars in West Africa, the Belgian invasion of the Congo, the Ashanti Wars, the Boer War, the French invasion of Morocco, and the French invasion of Syria.
• "Liberal states have consistently violated liberal norms when deciding to go to war. It is not that liberal norms only matter a little; they have often made no different at all" (590).
• The idea that liberal democracies treat each other with respect and trust not accorded to other states is also not supported by historical evidence, as frequent military interventions or subversions of democracies by democracies during the Cold War demonstrate. Moreover, democratic great powers did not respect or trust each other more than non-democratic great powers during the long 19th Century (591-592).
• Some supporters of democratic peace theory argue that these examples do not count because the overthrown regimes were 'not really democratic'. While they were not always fully liberal democracies, all these governments were certainly more democratic than the regimes which replaced them (591).
• Other defenses of Western interventions in other democracies have pointed to the fact that such actions were covert, demonstrating that they were not defensible under domestic liberal norms. On the contrary, the fact that public officials were willing to both subvert liberal norms of warfare and domestic law demonstrates just how poorly liberal norms have been entrenched in the foreign policy of democracies (591).
• A partial list of American and/or Western interventions into democratic regimes, often ending with their replacement with undemocratic regimes, is available on page 591. It includes: the 1953 intervention in Iran, a 1954 coup in Guatemala, Sukarno's 1957 coup in Indonesia, intervention in Guyana from 1961 onward, multiple military coups in Brazil, General Pinochet's coup in Chile, and the Nicaraguan Civil War.
• Explanations of the lack of respect and trust between democracies often include the supposition that democratic respect requires each side to recognize the other as democratic. This judgement, however, is highly subjective and often disputed in domestic politics. The objective level of democracy, to what degree that exists, does not play a major role in determining the nature of relations between two ostensibly democratic states (592).
• The status of diplomatic connections is clearly not independent from perceptions of other states as liberal democracies, as generally states are less likely to view each other as democratic as relations worsen. For example, Americans were willing to define Germany as democratic in the late 1800s, but not in the 1910s, despite Germany's objective democratization during that time period (593).
• The idea that democracies have increased methods of accountability which make their leaders less likely to engage in war is deeply flawed, as most of these accountability checks occur in the majority of non-democratic states. Moreover, increased availability of information neither prevents democracies from launching surprise attacks and mobilizing quickly, nor increase state ability to navigate crises peacefully (593).
• Contrary to assumptions, democratic leaders are not more likely to face removal from office, or forms of criminal liability, for their action in aggressive or lost wars than non-democratic leaders. If anything, autocrats are more likely to be held politically or criminally accountable for losing wars, making they more accountable in some ways (593-594).
• Moreover, autocratic leaders often base their support on small segments of the population, meaning that they will not go to war without this key support. This mechanism can actually make autocracies more constrained in their institutional ability to wage war than any democracies (596-597).
• Increased availability of information in liberal democracies does not make make these states less likely to go to war than non-democracies. This is partially because large democracies do not usually distribute the costs of war beyond soldiers and their families, and because democratic publics are usually supportive of war (594-595).
• Popular support for war appears to be the default reaction for the public in most democracies, as in the major aggressive wars fought by democracies in the USA, UK, France, Israel, and India from 1815 onward, only the Suez Crisis and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon did not immediately receive overwhelming public support (595).
• Democratic peace theorists often assume that liberal elite groups are the most effective at mobilize support in democracies, although this does not seem to be the case. Jingoistic, nationalist, and even industrial interests have all been equally if not more adept at garnering public support in favor of war through the free press (596).
• Many democracies, such as the United States, allow executive officials to organize and order military actions in certain cases without direct legislative permission, meaning that many democracies can mobilize and attack quickly and covertly, simply because the information is not immediately available to the free press or general public (597-598).
• The mass of information and opinions available in democracies does not necessarily produce more pacific results or allow states to better avoid confrontation. While effective and clear communication can help avoid war, the surplus of information in democracies does not necessarily mean that communication will be either (598-599).
• "The causal logics that underpin democratic peace theory cannot explain why democracies remain at peace with one another because the mechanisms that make up these logics do not operate as stipulated by the theory's proponents" (599).
• Since the explanations underpinning democratic peace theory do not hold up to inspection, the author proposes that actually the democratic peace which has existed in the West since 1945 is a symptom of American hegemony, and its continuation in those areas in a reflection of American power (599).
• Democratic peace theory makes more sense in the post-war period since prior to 1945 the few democracies in existence were so physically separated as to make war impossible. Even during the post-war prior, democracy has primarily been a phenomenon of Western Europe and the Americas, firmly in the American sphere of influence (600).
• Unlike democratic peace theory, the explanation of pax Americana has historical evidence and causality to back up its claims. The reason that, for example, peace developed between French and the Bonn Republic was because both were democracies, but because the US actively enforced a peace policy in Paris and Bonn (600).