Democracies Do Not Make War on One Another.

...or Do They?

by Matthew White

I've witnessed this debate on Usenet several times, and it always follows the same pattern:

1. Somebody casually brings up the old factoid about how no two democracies have ever gone to war with one another.
2. Somebody jumps in and lists a dozen or so wars which have been fought between democracies.
3. Somebody else points out that those countries weren't democratic, not really.
4. Everybody gets into arguments over who was or was not democratic.
5. The argument fizzles out except for two guys continuing to argue over whether the American Civil War was about slavery.

In any case, here is the traditional list of wars which may or may not have been fought between democracies:

1. Greek Wars, 5th and 4th Centuries BCE
   • Democracies: City-states such as Athens, Syracuse et. al.
   • Rebuttal: Citizenship was limited to an elite minority which excluded women, slaves, foreigners, etc.
   • Counter-rebuttal: Among the citizenry, all voices were equal.
   • Quote: From The Wars of the Ancient Greeks by V. D. Hanson: "[D]emocratic practices abroad meant nothing at home when it was a question of Athenian self-interest -- the Assembly might ...readily fight to exterminate democracies like Syracuse (415-413).... Athenians ... fought for two years against [Syracuse,] the only other large democracy in the Greek World."
2. Punic Wars, 2nd and 3rd Centuries BCE
   • Democracies: Rome vs. Carthage.
   • Rebuttal, Counter-rebuttal: Same as for the Greek democracies.
3. American Revolution, 1775-1783
   • Democracies: United States vs. Great Britain
   • Rebuttal: On the one hand, Great Britain was more liberal than most monarchies and it had a reasonably independent parliament, but on the the other hand, the franchise was quite restricted until the Reform Bill of 1832. Also, the United States was run by a provisional coalition during the war, and the country did not become a working democracy until after independence.
   • Counter-rebuttal: One of the most frequently stated goals of the American rebels was that they were entitled to enjoy all the civil rights quaranteed to native-born Englishmen (e.g. parliamentary representation, due process of law), but denied to the colonists. This certainly sounds like the Americans themselves recognized England as a model for their own democratic hopes.
4. American Indian Wars, 1776-1890
   • Democracies: United States vs. various Native American Indian tribes.
   • Rebuttal: The tribes did not have enough formal structure to be considered real democracies.
   • Counter-rebuttal: Well, just for starters, the Iroqouian Confederation was rather complex.
5. French Revolutionary Wars, 1793-1799
   • Democracies: France vs. Great Britain, Switzerland, the Netherlands
   • Rebuttal: For Britain, see the comments for 1775. Also, France at this time was lurching left and right, with bloody purges each time, so it hardly qualifies as a stable democracy.
   • Counter-rebuttal: Under the Directory, 1795-99, France was a relatively stable republic.
6. Franco-American Naval War, 1797-1799
   • Democracies: United States vs. France
   • Rebuttal: It was a Quasi War, for God's sake; even historians call it that. It was little more than a trade war with sporadic ritualized broadsides.
   • Counter-rebuttal: According to official Navy statistics (http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq56-1.htm), the US lost 20 sailors and marines in the Quasi War. Relative to the numbers involved, it was bloodier than the Gulf War.
7. Anglo-American War, 1812-1815
   • Democracies: United States vs. Great Britain
   • Rebuttal: For Britain, use the same two hands as with the 1st Anglo-American War of 1775.
8. Franco-Roman War, 1849
   • Democracies: France vs. the Roman Republic.
   • Rebuttal: Both democratic regimes were less than a year old, and therefore don't count as stable democracies.
   • Counter-rebuttal: C'mon, that's just cheating. You're redefining your terms in order to exclude an awkward exception.
9. American Civil War, 1861-65
   • Democracies: United States vs. Confederate States
   • Rebuttal: The Confederacy was a slave-holding nation and therefore definitely not a democracy -- and while we're at it, the same could be said for the Union as well. Also, "[t]he South was not a sovereign democracy at that time... President Jefferson Davis was not elected, but appointed by representatives selected by confederate states. There was an election in 1861, but it was not competitive." [Rummel]
   • Counterrebuttal: Both nations used almost identical Constitutions, which were easily the most democratic in the world at the time. Both nations conducted state and congressional elections on schedule, despite the difficulties of wartime. They both allowed substantial dissent within their Congresses, even if the opposition in the South never quite formalized into a two party sytem. Every major policy decision in both nations was enacted and approved by elected officials. (And since when is being "appointed by representatives selected by [individual] states" undemocratic? Technically, that's how every American president has been chosen.)
10. Occupation of Veracruz, 1861-62
    • Democracies: Great Britain vs. Mexico
    • Rebuttal: Yes, democratic Britain assisted France and Spain in seizing Veracruz from democratic Mexico (Juarez had been properly elected.), but this was achieved without fighting. As soon as their French allies geared up for military conquest of the whole country, the British pulled out.
    • Counterrebuttal: An invasion is war, even if the defenders don't fight back.
11. Spanish-American War, 1898
    • Democracies: United States vs. Spain
    • Rebuttal: In Spain, "the two major political parties alternated in power, not by election but by arrangement preceding elections." [Rummel]
    • Counterrebuttal: It's hardly unknown for rival parties in a democracy to make a time-sharing agreement or grand coalition. In one form or another, it has happened in Austria (1955-66), Columbia (1958-74), Switzerland (from 1959), UK (1931-45). More importantly, when Spain lost the war, prime minister Sagasta resigned, and national leadership passed to his parliamentary opponents, exactly the same as we would expect in any other constitutional monarchy.
12. Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1901
    • Democracies: Great Britain vs. Transvaal and the Orange Free State
    • Rebuttal: The franchise in the Boer Republics was limited to the white male elite.
13. First World War, 1914-18
    • Democracies: France, Belgium, Great Britain, the USA, et. al. vs. Germany.
    • Rebuttal: Well, yes, the Imperial Reichtag was democratically elected by universal manhood suffrage, but it was a largely powerless body, like the UN. The real power in the German federation was in the hands of the Emperor who appointed the Chancellor and commanded the Army, and in the hands of the Junkers running the undemocratic parliament of the Kingdom of Prussia, which made up around half the federation.
    • Counterrebuttal: Sure, there were aristocratic privileges and traditions that were inconsistent with one-man-one-vote and full equality under the law, but Germany was every bit as democratic as the United Kingdom (cf. the House of Lords and English dominance over the indigenous peoples of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.) And the Reichtag controlled the budget, which is not exactly "powerless".
14. Occupation of the Ruhr, 1923
    • Democracies: France vs. Germany.
    • Rebuttal: Germany didn't fight back.
    • Counterrebuttal: The same counterrebuttal as with the 1861 occupation of Veracruz.
15. Second World War, 1940-45
    • Democracies: Great Britain, United States, et al. vs. Finland.
    • Rebuttal: Finland fought on the same side as the Nazis against the Soviet Union, not against the democratic Allies.
    • Counterrebuttal: Well, the British bombed Finland; that sounds like being at war. And 69 Finnish merchants ships were sunk outside of the Baltic Sea. [n.9] Also, every Finnish soldier fighting the USSR meant that one German soldier could be sent west to fight the Allies. Every Russian soldier killed by the Finns weakened the Allied war effort.
16. First Indo-Pak War, 1947-49
    • Democracies: India vs. Pakistan.
    • Rebuttal: These regimes hadn't been around long enough to qualify as a stable democracies.
17. Iran, Guatemala and Chile, 1953, 1954 and 1973 respectively.
    • Democracies: United-States-backed coups in Iran, Guatemala and Chile.
    • Rebuttals: It's not certain how deeply the CIA was involved in overthrowing these democratically elected governments, but even if it was in up to its neck, these were coups and not wars. Covert operations by shadowy, bureaucratic elites are not democratic. They are not publicly debated and approved beforehand by the citizenry.
    • Counter-rebuttal: Technically, every military operation in the modern world is enacted by secretive bureacracies without public debate. (Was D-Day put to a vote?) If using the CIA is undemocratic, then so is using the Army; and if using the Army is undemocratic, then democracies can't fight wars, period. QED.
18. Lebanese Civil War, 1978, 1982
    • Democracies: Israel vs. Lebanon.
    • Rebuttal: Lebanon hardly counts as a stable democracy.
19. Croatian War of Independence, 1991-92
    • Democracies: Croatia vs. Yugoslavia.
    • Rebuttal: These regimes hadn't been around long enough to qualify as a stable democracies.
    • Counter-rebuttal: Even so, both nations had government that had been put in place through free elections. Even Weart admits that.
20. Border War, 1995
    • Democracies: Ecuador vs. Peru.
    • Rebuttal: President Fujimori of Peru had suspended the constitution in 1992, making himself a virtual dictator.
    • Counter-rebuttal: Just as virtual reality isn't reality, so a virtual dictator isn't a dictator. It is usually considered legal for a democratic leader to exercise emergency powers in an emergency, isn't it? Also, when Fujimori lost parliamentary support in 2000, he quit/was fired. Isn't the peaceful surrender of power one of the major tests of true democracy? [see also the 1898 Spanish-American War and the 1999 Kosovo War for similar applications of this test.]
21. Kosovo War, 1999
    • Democracies: The countries of NATO vs. Yugoslavia.
    • Rebuttal: Milosovic was a dictator.
    • Counter-rebuttal: In the legislative elections of Nov. 1996, Milosovic's supporters won a mere 64 out of 138 seats in parliament, and control of government probably would have gone to the opposition had not infighting and internal divisions prevented them from claiming their place at the helm. In 1997, Milosovic was re-elected president by a plausible margin of 59% to 38% [n.1] which suggests that these elections were not entirely rigged either. In October 2000, a soundly beaten Milosovic actually conceded defeat after an apparently free presidential election. Sure it took a week or so of prodding to get him to vacate the presidential palace, but a concession is a concession nonetheless. (and he gave in quicker than Al Gore.)
22. Fourth Indo-Pak War (Kargil War) 1999
    • Democracies: India vs. Pakistan.
    • Rebuttal: Those weren't Pakistanis. They were independent, volunteer guerrilla forces operating out of Pakistan, not regular troops.
    • Counter-Rebuttal: A technicality, at best. A cover story at worst. According to CNN [n.2], the insurgents were stiffened by Pakistani regulars, and supported by Pakistani artillery firing over the border into the neighboring democracy of India. The nations' air forces raided back and forth regularly.
    • Bad Rebuttal: And Pakistan wasn't even a democracy anyway. I seem to recall that they had a military coup sometime around then
    • Counter-Rebuttal in the form of a brief summary of a rather obscure war: That came later. The Pakistanis were driven back to the de facto international border on 17 July after two months of war. The civilian Prime Minister was deposed in October. The 2-month death toll was 1100, according to CNN.
23. Israel-Lebanon War 2006
    • Democracies: Israel vs. Lebanon
    • Rebuttal: Lebanon is hardly a democracy.
    • Counter-Rebuttal: "A 100-member European Union (EU) delegation monitored voter registration, campaigns, and voting, and approved the [2005] election as free of foreign influence and fair" (Council on Foreign Relations)
24. [n.6: less likely candidates.]

Basically It Depends on the Definition

"Democracy"

If you define democracy as a system of government in which policy is set by unpunished, unrestricted debate among the citizens of a nation and put into action by their elected representatives, then all of the above nations are democratic. On the other hand, if you start narrowing the definitions, then obviously you'll get fewer democracies to work with, so of course you're going to have fewer wars between democracies.

• If you consider slavery and democracy to be mutually exclusive, then no major power was a democracy until the French Revolution, and the United States passed nearly its entire first century without being a proper democracy.
• If you insist that a democracy must be free from all corruption, bribery, vote fraud, cronyism, intimidation and ballot box stuffing, then even a fine old democracy like the United States fails the test more often than we like to admit. The 1960 and 1972 presidential elections, for example, had enough irregularites and questionable activities to make honest civil libertarians wring their hands and worry whether any country can meet the high standards set by political theorists. [n.3]
• If you consider women's sufferage to be an essential component of democracy, then no nation was a democracy until the 20th Century. Switzerland, the poster boy of peaceful democracies, didn't pass this threshhold until 1971 (and at the local level until 1990). France fought two World Wars without being a proper democracy. With this proviso ("women have to count.") in place, you can easily weed out the first 11 controversies in our list.
• If you insist on that tired old bromide that the US (for example) is a republic, not a democracy, then obviously, there's no such thing as an existing democracy, so -- big surprise -- there hasn't been a war between democracies in, like, 2300 years.
• Some democraticians would avoid labelling a nation democratic until after the first peaceful, orderly transfer of power to the opposition following an electoral defeat. I'll admit this makes a certain amount of sense -- until the ruling elite actually steps down, you can't be sure whether the elections are real or just for show -- however, it does significantly trim the number of democracies in the world at any given time.
  • For example, under this rule, the USA didn't become a democracy until 1801, a quarter century after the Declaration of Independence. West Germany didn't become a democracy until 1969, 20 years after the Allied occupation ended (and only 20 years before the emergence of democracy in its East German rival). Mexico has been having regularly scheduled and hotly contested elections for decades, and yet didn't pass this threshold of democracy until a few months ago. Despite the joyous ends to oppressive regimes almost a decade ago -- and a string of regular, contested elections since then -- Russia and South Africa still are not democratic by these standards. [n.8]
• However, rather than wait years or decades for a visible transfer of power, some democraticians prefer to set a temporal milestone at which "unstable" democracies transform into "stable" ones. If constitutional rule of law survives its first awkward years and passes (for example) its third birthday, then how about we just declare it a full adult? This way, we can dismiss any wars it fought in its infancy as growing pains and youthful mistakes made before they learned that democracies are not supposed to do that sort of thing.

I suppose that all these limits and conditions are fine in theory, except for four problems:

1. Everyone forgets the fine print. When a politician declares in his stump speech that democracies don't fight democracies, he usually omits the parenthetical remark that we're only counting "states in which fair competative elections have led to a peaceful handover of power from one head of government to his or her rival" (to quote the small print in Dan Smith's The State of the World Atlas, 6th ed.)
2. The old double standard:
   • Slobodon Milosovic was frequently denounced in his nation's press and challenged in elections by opposition leaders, but he maintained an iron grip on power through vote fraud, private security forces and the judicious application of unregistered cash. His armies fought secret wars. When the voices against him grew too loud, he scurried away like a thief in the night.
   • Dictator, right?
   • The same, however, could be said about Richard Nixon. Why do the irregularities of Milosovic's regime prove that Yugoslavia was a dictatorship, but the irregularities of Nixon's regime prove that in America, "the system works"? (Of course, on the other hand, if we accept that Nixon was dictator rather than a democratic leader, it becomes easier to explain that the 1973 unpleasantness between Chile and the US was not an example of two democracies at war.)
3. Shifting the definitions to fit the theory: Right now, believers in the Democratic Peace Theory count Russia and Ukraine as two of the world many democracies at peace with each other, but if these two countries went to war with each other, the DPTists would suddenly find all the anti-democratic features of these regimes to be extremely significant. In fact, I suspect that even if the United States invaded Canada tomorrow, the DPTists would be able to find some reason to call one or both non-democratic, such as the Guantanamo Bay prison and the irregularities of the 2000 Election.
4. Statistically insignificant sample: As we trim more and more dubious democracies from our list, we certainly make the statement that "democracies don't fight each other" truer, but we also make it a lot less impressive. If there are only 2 functioning democracies in the world (think, for example, the United States and Switzerland, ca. 1855), then peace between them is no big surprise. After all, how many times have two Mormon countries gone to war with one another? Or two nations led by people named Leslie?

"War"

On any given day, as you flip page-by-page through a big city newspaper, you'll see stories from a half dozen wars going on worldwide -- and these are just the wars that produced something newsworthy the day before. Taking into account the wars which have entered a hiatus as one side plans and the other side licks its wounds (along with unofficial cease-fires, disruptive weather, and concealed massacres) we can easily assume another dozen distant wars smoldering out of sight of newspaper's understaffed foreign bureaus.

In fact, to pull some numbers into this discussion, the Center for Defense Information listed 21 armed conflicts under way as of 1 January 1998. The New State of War and Peace by Kidron and Smith has a table listing 82 unique wars fought between January 1980 and September 1990.

And yet, in this violent world, how many wars were being fought between democracies? A handful at most -- and arguably none at all. Eighty-two wars and not a single one pitting undisputed democracies against each other? Shouldn't this tell us something?

Well, it tells me that we need to clarify what we mean by war. Most of the conflicts raging across the world at any given time are civil wars. Rather than being well-organized, distinct affairs in which massed armies blitzkrieg across the border and formally annex foreign territory, your average civil war sputters along indistinctly, year after year. In these wars, loosely constituted rebel armies launch sporadic raids from secret bases against government targets and then melt back unrecognizably into the population. The government retaliates by torturing information out of any citizen who may have made contact with the rebels, and by depopulating the war zone with massacres and deportations in order to dry up the rebels' pool of supporters and potential recruits.

In civil wars, the opposing sides are generally refered to as the rebels and the government -- that's "government" in the singular -- but when we talk of the likelihood of two democratic governments going to war, we are talking about "governments" in the plural. So, let's forget the 82 armed conflicts of the 1980s. If were going to get a handle on the probability of two democracies coming into conflict, we have to limit ourselves to international wars, a much rarer phenomenon.

How many international wars have there been in the 55 years since WW2? How many times have regular troops from sovereign nations openly exchanged fire with each other, with intent to kill, under orders, during a continuous period of armed clashes? The list thins out quite a bit:

All(?) International Wars, 1945-1999:

Please keep in mind that our definition of "international war" only includes wars in which governments fight each other, not where several governments band together to fight rebels. Thus the war which Americans generally call "The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan" is not an international war because the two governments involved were allies, not foes.

Naturally, we can quibble over specific wars.

• Was the Biafran War of 1967-70 international or not? (The answer: It depends on whether Biafra was a nation.)
• Similarly, maybe we should exclude the Israeli War of Independence considering that Israel didn't actually become a nation until it won the war.
• Should we count the American bombing of Libya in April 1986? Is one air raid a proper war?
• Did any of the various intervening armies in Lebanon or Congo actually come to blows with each other, or just with various rebel factions?
• Was the Chinese seizure of Tibet a foreign invasion, or the reclamation of a rebellious province?

However, even shuffling the dubious cases (adding some, subtracting some), the pattern holds up. Between 1945 and 2000, there were fewer international wars than there were years.

Also, keep in mind that some of these conflicts are rather small -- often mere blips on the world radar -- so if we impose a minimum death toll we could lose several of them. (And remember -- as we reduce the number of valid wars under consideration, it becomes less surprising that few, if any, were between democracies.)

In the context at hand, we can trim the list even more. If the believers in Democratic Peace want to weed out wars between democratic regimes that are less than 3 years old, then the believers in Democratic War get to ignore wars involving any regime that's less than three years old. If the Franco-Roman War of 1848 is cut because the governments involved were too young, then we have to cut Korea, Tibet, the Iran-Iraq War and at least a couple of the Arab-Israeli or Indo-Pak Wars because they too involve the impetuous youth of immature regimes -- in this case, however, the immature bullies of the world. (It can easily be argued that even the most brutal totalitarian regimes mellow with age. Notice that Red China's wars get smaller and fewer as time goes by.)

So just taking a quick look at the raw numbers here, what do we see?

Of the 39 international wars between WW2 and Y2K, 6 might have been between democracies.

That's 15% -- one out of six and a half. That's not much, is it? In an era where somewhere between a quarter and a half of all the world's countries are democracies, it doesn't seem like a lot, right?

Mathematical Probability:

(Hey wait! Don't run off! I'll be mercifully brief. I promise)

By pure mathematics, we wouldn't expect too many interdemocratic wars anyway. The odds of an event happening (flipping heads on a coin; a democracy going to war) are considerably higher than the odds of that same event happening twice (flipping heads on a coin twice; two democracies going to war).

In the case of flipping heads, the probability is 1/2 on one flip, 1/4 on two flips [1/2*1/2], 1/8 on three flips [1/2*1/2*1/2]. (We all remember our high school algebra, don't we?) What then is the baseline probability for any two types of government going to war? That is, if we were to grab two random countries to fight a war, what would be the odds that we would grab two democracies?

THE MATH: In 1967 (just to pick a year) there were 126 sovereign nations big enough to show up on a world map, among them 33 democracies of the same minimum size [n.4]. That's 26%. Therefore if we were to stage random, one-on-one wars between all the world's visible nations at that time, 6.8% (or 26%*26%) of these wars would pit democracies against democracies, 38.7% (or 74%*26%*2) would see democracies fighting non-democracies and 54.5% (or 74%*74%) would be exclusively between non-democracies.

Now, 1967 is just a single year, but I've spent a good deal of this Atlas counting democracies. I can state with reasonable certainty that 44.5% of mapable sovereignties during the WW2-Y2K Era were full democracies. This calculates out to...

• The odds of 2 random democracies going to war: 19.8%
• The odds of 2 random non-democracies going to war: 30.8%
• The odds of a random democracy going to war with a random non-democracy: 49.4%

This means that among the 39 international wars during the WW2-Y2K Era, we would only expect to find 8 inter-democratic wars anyway.

And we've found 6 instead -- maybe. What does this tell us?

It tells me that when you're calculating the odds of a rare type of country (democracy) performing a rare act (fighting an international war), the sample is too small to draw any valid conclusion. The difference between 6 and 8 falls easily within any reasonable margin of error.

Why does it matter?

Although there is no undisputed case of two democracies at war, the evidence certainly casts doubt on the thesis. In fact, the thesis is not nearly as strong as the statement that no two countries with a McDonald's Restaurant have ever gone to war with one another, so why do you never hear distinguished international diplomats expound on the need to sell more beef patties in the world? [n.5]

At first, this McDonald's factoid seems enormously trivial; however, when you stop and think about it, the McDonald's Peace Formula can be quite interesting. It seems to indicate that as countries are incorporated into the global economy by trans-national corporations, they stop waging war on one another (although it might be vice versa). Unfortunately, no one wants to go around saying that the best way to assure peace is to surrender your national economy to large heartless corporations. It makes a much better campaign slogan to say that democracy is the best path to peace. This is why we see so many people claiming that democracies never fight each other, and relatively few people outside of McDonald's Corporate Headquarters claiming the geopolitical virtues of burger bars.

More to the point, it should remind us that McDonald's (like democracy) is most common among rich countries, while war is most common among poor countries, so the apparent peace between democracies may stem independently from economic causes, rather than as direct cause and effect. [n.7]

The Universal Democracy Peace Formula has been around a long time -- since the days of Immanuel Kant and his 1795 essay Perpetual Peace, in fact. It dates back to an era when democracies were more often hypothetical rather than real, and political philosophers were trying to sell democracy as a path to peace by prophesying that no one really likes war, so if we granted our cannon fodder the chance to decide their fates for themselves, they'd say no, thank you. In fact, it almost sounds like that old adage spouted by monarchs, fascists and dictators for centuries -- Democracies don't have the stomach for war -- and it seems to forget that it doesn't take much to whip a mob into an angry frenzy.

Appendix 1

[15 July 2005]

More damn math. Statistics from reputable sources.

(This is not really vital to the main essay, and it tends to be horribly mathematical, so I won't be at all offended if you just want to skip down to the hyperlinks and check out some related sites, or maybe even go out and enjoy this lovely day. Class dismissed.)

You sometimes hear about precise, professional statistical studies that determine that none of the 2,000 or so wars fought over the past 200 years were between democracies. These numbers are usually quite impressive and, if true, a strong argument in favor of the proposition. If we've really seen 2,000 wars in two hundred years, wouldn't it be reasonable to expect a few between democracies? How about 10%? That's reasonable, right? But where are those 200 interdemocratic wars? I mean, even if it's only 2%, we should still have seen 40 wars between democracies -- unless democracies simply will not go to war with each other. Period.

However, on the Correlates of War website, they list three categories of war. As I mentioned earlier, we can't count civil wars -- what they call intra-state wars -- because these don't involve multiple, recognized governments fighting each other. Nor can we count what they call extra-state wars, because one side in these wars is either a colony or tribe -- not a government. In fact, the Correlates of War Project lists only 79 inter-state wars between functioning, identifiable governments between 1816 and 1997. (Personally, I think the American Civil War is a prime example of democracies at war, but the supporters of DPT would shoot down this example by demanding that only stable, sovereign democracies count, so let's hold them to that standard for all governments at war, otherwise we're not measuring the relative belligerence of democratic and non-democratic governments, but rather the relative belligerence of unstable and mature governments.)

Freedom House lists exactly no democracies in the world in 1900. Now, assuming that the world didn't lose any democracies in the previous century, that means that it was simply, ontologically impossible for any of the 30 interstate wars from 1816-1899 to have been between strictly defined democracies. We don't need fancy political theories to explain this. (Loosely defined democracies, as everyone points out, have fought plenty of wars.)

By 1950, the number of countries fitting Freedom House's definition of democracy had risen to 22 out of 80 sovereign nations. As this represents the total after democracy had beaten fascism and was on the upswing, let's average this 27.5% with the 0% from 1900 to represent democracy's share of the world's nations for the first half of the 20th Century. Of the 28 interstate wars listed by the Correlates of War Project, we would only expect random matching to have produced 0.5 inter-democratic wars -- or to put it more realistically, you'd probably need twice as many wars to produce one random inter-democratic war anyway.

[The calculation goes: .275 + 0 / 2 ^ 2 * 28 = .53]

If we take Freedom House's count of democracy in 2000 (120 Ds out of 190 nations, or 63%) and average it with 1950, we can estimate that some 45% of nations were democracies during the 2nd half of the 20th Century. Of the 21 wars between governments during this period, random pairing would ideally produce only 4 inter-democratic wars.

[The calculation goes: .275 + .63 / 2 ^ 2 * 21 = 4.3]

The upshot is that the critics of the Democratic Peace Theory don't have to explain why there haven't been 200 interdemocratic wars. They only have to explain why there haven't been 4, and I've offered a few candidates at the top of the page. If you don't like those, the gap between the number of interdemocratic wars we'd expect (4) and the number we've seen (<4) can perhaps be partially explained by, yes, the tendency of democracies to respect each other and negotiate, but it's more likely that we're seeing the results of double standards, slippery definitions, the bipolar nuclear standoff, the Pax Americana, international trade relations, random happenstance and the fact that rich countries have little to gain and a lot to lose by attacking each other.

So how do the DPTists get 2000 wars out of 79? It's simple. They don't count wars. They count dyadic conflicts.

A dyad is just a fancy name for a pair of things that have a relationship to each other.

For example, the 1991 Gulf War saw 34 countries lined up against Iraq. To you and me, that's one war, but to political scientists, that's 34 belligerent dyads -- the US against Iraq, the UK against Iraq, France against Iraq, Saudi Arabia against Iraq, etc. During World War One, all the countries followed the quaint diplomatic procedure of issuing formal declarations of war, and eventually 54 were issued -- that's 54 dyads. The Second World War, the biggest war in history, produced 189 declarations of war. Note how three wars have expanded into 277 dyads.

If you prefer dyadic analysis, fine. I see it mostly as a judgement call, like arguing about whether to abolish the Electoral College, but I also see a few problems:

• Everyone thinks you're counting wars. As long as the difference between the two is kept clear, fine, but as soon as someone slips and calls a "dyadic conflict" an (unmodified) "conflict", it misleads.
• Again with the double standards. One of our 2,000 dyads is very definitely between democracies -- Britain vs. Finland in WW2 -- but DPTists are quick to point out that this actually produced few direct casualties. OK, but in fact, most of these 2,000 dyads involve few (if any) direct casualties (Japan vs. Turkey and Liberia vs. Germany in WW1, for example), so which are we counting? All dyads in bloody wars, or only extremely bloody dyads? The first criterion gives us one inarguable war between democracies, while the second gives us none, but far, far fewer dyads than the original 2,000.
• Some wars are weighted more heavily than others. For example, the 1991 Gulf War was 1 war and 34 dyads, while the 1980 Iran-Iraq War was 1 war and 1 dyad. Is the 1991 war really 34 times more important to our analysis than the 1980 war?
• Dyadic analysis ignores the fact that some blocs of countries coordinate foreign policy and operate as one entity -- the British Commonwealth in WW2, the Warsaw Pact in Czechoslovakia, and the UN in the Korean War, for example.
• Since ultimately, the purpose of DPT is to understand how and why wars start, a proper analysis should weight each outbreak or casus belli equally. The 1967 Arab-Israeli War had 4 participants, but only one outbreak. The 1991 Gulf War resulted from 1, not 34, casus belli. Admittedly, a big war like WW2 can have several individual casus belli as new countries are brought in (the invasion of Poland, Pearl Harbor, Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Operation Barbarossa, etc.), but even that is closer to 1 than to 189.

Further Reading:

(Like my word isn't good enough for you.)

• Cecil Adams: The Straight Dope: Is it true there has never been a war between two democracies?
• Andrew Bennett & Alexander George: Case Study Methods and Research on the Democratic Peace
• Miriam Fendius Elman: Paths to Peace: Is Democracy the Answer? (abstract)
• Alexander Hamilton: The Federalist Papers: No. 6. Concerning Dangers from Dissensions Between the States
• Fred Kaplan: Elections Aren't Enough.
• John J. Mearsheimer: Why We Will Soon Miss The Cold War
• John M. Owen IV: Iraq and the Democratic Peace
• David Plotz: Greens Peace
• James Poniewozik: Fallen Arches
• R.J. Rummel: Democracies Don't Fight Democracies
• R.J. Rummel: Political Systems, Violence, and War
• Thomas Schwartz & Kiron Skinner: The Myth of Democratic Pacifism
• Michael D. Ward & Kristian Gleditsch: Democratizing For Peace
• Spencer R. Weart: Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another (Ch.1)
• Wikipedia, or rather, my review of their article (May 2005)

Notes:

[n.1] "...margin of 59% to 38%"

See Election Watch http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/ election_watch/v009/index.html

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[n.2] "... according to CNN ..."

See http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9907/06/kashmir.o2/ for CNN's story. Also, try 23 July 1999 Asiaweek or 7 June 1999 Time.

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[n.3] "... 1960 and 1972 presidential elections ..."

I wrote this paragraph mere weeks before the 2000 elections gave us yet another example of a tainted American election that would look mighty suspicious if the same events had occurred under a Third World strongman. The sad truth is that three of the last eleven presidential elections (that's 27%) were uncomfortably corrupted.

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[n.4] "... 33 democracies"

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Botswana, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany (W), Guyana, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Madagascar, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela, Zambia

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[n.5] "... beef patties in the world?"

FAQ: Until the end of the 20th Century, the most commonly suggested exception to the rule was the Falklands War (2 April to 14 June, 1982). This, however, was flat out wrong. The first McDonald's did not open in Argentina until November 1986.

Unfortunately for world peace, the Big Mac Attack Rule finally broke down in 1999. On 24 March 1999, NATO began its air attack on Yugoslavia. Faced with angry nationalism, vandalism and boycotts, all the McDonalds in Yugoslavia shut their doors on 26 March. This means that for two full days, McDonaldland was wrenched asunder by its first intramural war ever. When McD finally reopened on 17 April, it was an occassion of public celebration almost matching the end of the Kosovo War itself.

P.S. (20 April 2003): I've just been informed that McDonald's opened in Panama in 1971, so the 1989 war with the US would be another, earlier exception.

Another suggested exception would be the 1995 war between Ecuador and Peru, but the McD first opened in Lima in 16 Oct. 1996, and in Ecuador (I think, but can't confirm) in 1997, so this is wrong.

While poking around, confirming these suggestions, I discovered the Kargil Exception: Pakistan's McD opened in Karachi on 19 Sept. 1998, while India's opened on 13 Oct 1996. Thus, yet again, the 1999 Kargil War is making a mockery out of all our truisms.

Anyway, as this means there are now three exceptions to the McDonald's peace formula, let's just forget I even brought this up, okay?

PPS (20 March 2004): I picked up this idea as a free-floating meme in Usenet ca. 1997, but to give (belated) credit where credit is due, The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention originated with Tom Friedman, NY Times, 1996.

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[n.6] "... less likely candidates."

PS (14 April 2005): I sometimes see suggested counterexamples that are less likely to count as proper democracies, so I don't want to clutter my main list with them. Some of these governments actually had cabinet ministers, rival factions, noisy opposition newspapers and parliaments of some form, but I'm still going to leave these out.

1. Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652-74): Exactly when England shifted from absolute to constitutional monarchy can be heavily debated, but one of the earliest arguable milestones would be the the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This event largely ended the Anglo-Dutch Wars by putting both countries under the same ruler.
2. Mexican-American War (1845-48): During the crisis leading up to the war, General Paredes seized the Presidency of Mexico from General Herrera by coup d'etat.
3. Franco-Prussian War (1871): This period of French history is called the Second Empire. Napoleon III had suspended the constitution of the Second Republic in 1852. Napoleon fell from power because of the war, and Germany continued the invasion despite the new republican government, but that's cutting it a bit close for our purposes.
4. Cod Wars (Iceland vs. United Kingdom: 1958-61, 1973, 1975-6): No blood = no war.
5. Falklands War (1982): Some people vaguely recall that Argentina became democratic around this time, but they get the timing wrong. Democracy was restored after the war. In fact, it was their defeat in the Falklands War that brought the military junta down.
6. Second Intifada (2000- ): The Palestinian National Authority is sort of democratic sometimes. It had an election in 1996, and then nothing until 2005. Another problem is that the PNA is not really sovereign; it's more of a semi-autonomous territory of Israel. Also the fight against Israel isn't being directed by the PNA.

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[n.7] "... from economic causes ..."

PS (11 August 2005): Now that the Golden Arches Theory has been shot down (see Footnote 5), the paradigm has shifted to the Greens Peace Theory, which states that golf-playing countries never fight each other. What no one seems to notice (or at least, they don't discuss it in front of the servants) is that these three suggested agents of world peace (democracy, McDonald's, golf) are all characteristics of rich countries. A simpler (and far less silly) theory might calculate a more basic measure of wealth and point out that no two countries with more than 160 cars per 1000 people have ever gone to war with each other either. There are, at the last count, some 33 countries that fall into that category, and none have fought each other since they passed this vital milestone. All of them, by the way, are clearly and inarguably democratic, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, #33, with 166 cars/1000.

But why don't rich countries go to war with each other? I suspect it's for purely practical reasons:

1. All wars are a challenge to the status quo, and the status quo obviously works very well for rich countries, so why bother starting a war?
2. All wars are also a gamble, and why take the risk if you have a lot to lose and little to gain?
3. Conspicuously standing as Number One in the category of "a lot to lose", rich countries have more foreign trade.
4. Number Two in the Lots-to-Lose Category: Rich countries value human life higher than poor countries. I mean that economically, not morally. For the same reasons that it's cheaper to manufacture clothing in Malaysia than in North Carolina, it's also cheaper to throw away the lives of a thousand South Asians than a thousand Americans. Armies are mostly recruited from unemployed teenagers, and these cost less in a poor country.
5. Rich countries have modern, well-equipped armies, which makes fighting them riskier than fighting poor countries, with their armies of undisciplined bullies and obsolete weaponry. For example, the 16 million people of the Netherlands face no immediate threats to their security and are not considered unusually aggressive, and yet they spend $6.5 billion on defense, ten times as much as the 84 million people of Vietnam, which has ongoing quarrels with all its neighbors.

I'm not saying that these reasons make rich countries peaceful in all situations. I'm saying that when two rich countries get into a dispute (for example, when Saudi terrorists attack the United States), these reasons push a military solution toward the bottom of the list of options and encourage both sides to negotiate, but when a rich country and a poor country have a dispute (for example, if Afghanistan gives sanctuary to terrorists who have attacked the USA), there are fewer reasons not to fight it out. These reasons count for even less in a dispute between poor countries like Senegal or Mauretania, who can easily fight a small border war without serious economic consequences.

The main problem that people have with this theory is that it sounds suspiciously Marxist.

I specifically drew the line at 160 cars per 1000 people to exclude some notable close calls of recent history: the 1981 Falklands War of Britain (267 cars/1000 at the time) against Argentina (ca. 107 cars/1000 according to the 1982 World Almanac), and the 1999 Kosovo War of NATO (average ca. 300 cars/1000) against Serbia (150 cars/1000). This means that if you find an exception to my rule, I can easily raise the bar again -- just like the advocates of the Democratic Peace Theory.

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[n.8] "... Mexico... Russia... South Africa..."

I wrote this in 2000, and obviously the relentless march of history has made some of these comments outdated, but the point is still worth making. By waiting for the first transfer of power, we create a bizarre contradiction where a country's first democratically elected leader (George Washington, Nelson Mandela, Boris Yeltsin, etc.) is, by definition, not the leader of a democracy. [23 Sept. 2005]

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[n.9] "... the British bombed Finland..."

http://www.fleetairarmarchive.net/RollofHonour/Battlehonour_crewlists/Petsamo_Kirkenes_1941.html

http://users.tkk.fi/~jaromaa/Navygallery/Background/Auxiliaries.htm

Yes, the British air raid was against Germans in Finland, but the UK didn't attack Germans in other countries, like Portugal or Sweden, because attacking a country is an act of war, and they weren't at war with them, but they were at war with Finland and attacked it. As for the Finnish shipping sunk outside the Baltic -- I can't definitely say that the UK/US sank them, but it was outside the Soviet operational zone and in the British operational zone, so it's worth looking into.

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Well, let's see if anyone actually looks at this page:

since 1/1/2005

1st version posted: 1 March 1998

Revised (2nd) version posted: 14 October 2000

Footnote 3 added: 30 December 2000

Quote added to "Greek Wars": 5 Nov. 2003

Notes 6, 7 & 8 and Appendix 1 added in mid-2005.

Copyright © 1998-2005 Matthew White

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