Abstract
Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another By Spencer Weart, Yale University Press, 1998, 424 pages; $35.00
A number of authors have argued that the proliferation of democratic governments in the 1980s and 1990s–whether in formerly communist nations or in countries that once had right-wing authoritarian regimes–holds out the hope of a long peace in our time. This is so, they say because democracies do not go to war with each other.
Spencer Weart has now contributed the best book in this growing field. Never at War is comprehensive, surveying all of recorded human history in search of roughly three dozen cases that Weart thinks prove the virtues of his theory. It is also well informed. Weart, a physicist, appears to have read just about everything political scientists have said on the subject. The book is thoughtful, well written, and absorbing.
I should say at the outset, though, that I don't agree with its thesis. One could just as easily argue that communist states don't fight each other (the exception being China's brief 1979 border war with Vietnam). But I do admire the clarity and forthrightness with which Weart, the director of the Center for the History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics, sets about his task.
The question of whether democracies fight each other or not, as analysts of the problem always note, depends on the definition of the two key terms–war and democracy. Weart defines war as “violence organized by political units against one another across their boundaries” in which organized combat produces at least 200 deaths.
On the much more difficult question–what is democracy?–Weart's discussion is nuanced and extensive. Like others, he examines the domestic structure of political republics (paying little attention to the international realm). But ultimately he departs from the typical focus to argue that it requires well-established democratic political cultures to guarantee that two states will not fight each other. His definition thus encompasses both procedural formalities and rooted democratic beliefs (in tolerance, compromise, and fair play) that make for a democratic civil society.
Many detailed case studies (printed in the appendix) lead Weart to conclude that “well-established democracies are inhibited by their fundamental nature from warring on one another.” And, he adds, he found no exception to this rule, “even in remote historical locales.” Ergo, world peace would seem to be guaranteed in our time among the advanced industrial countries, all of which are democracies according to Weart's definition. Elsewhere, however, peace will depend on creating democratic republics and political cultures where none have existed (a much more daunting proposition).
The problem with this thesis is that none of the twentieth century's significant wars figure into Weart's analysis. By definition, neither the two World Wars nor the two major conflicts of the post-war era in Korea and Vietnam count.
Here Weart is not alone. Bruce Russett, whose book Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World is typical of political science accounts of this thesis, offers an extensive bibliography on the subject (as does Weart). But the Russett book has no index entries for Korea or Vietnam. The conflicts in Korea and Vietnam are categorized as civil wars or wars of national liberation–both of which Russett excluded from his analysis. Weart does not rule out civil wars–but he appears to rule out Korea and Vietnam because neither the North nor the South were democracies. He also assumes in each case that the communists in the North were the cause of the conflict.
Weart almost gives the game away by saying that no matter how we classify political regimes, “The real question is how leaders of the time characterized their rivals.” It appears that democracy is less a defined system than a perception in the eye of the beholder, which can change as conflict between two countries grows. For example, he explains, Thomas Jefferson said during the War of 1812 that Britain was not a democracy, but an aristocracy–and a rotten and corrupt one to boot.
In Korea and Vietnam both sides characterized themselves as democracies. Weart does not agree, but American policy-makers certainly argued for the democratic character of both southern sides. On the other hand, many supporters of the northern sides believed that the republics supported by the United States were autocracies–and rotten and corrupt ones to boot.
In a more challenging example, Weart classifies post-war Japan as a democratic republic with a democratic political culture, and so would I. But, as trade conflict with Japan grew in the 1980s, some influential Americans began to argue that Japan was not really a democracy after all, that it had an authoritarian political culture that belonged in a new category infused with “Asian values.” “Japan, Inc.,” they argued, deployed a state-guided neo-mercantilism that made for an alternative type of capitalism. Thus, Japan's procedural democracy paled before its authoritarian politics and its predatory economics.
Weart's concern for political culture also leads him to make questionable assumptions about national character, cultural differences, and categorizations of self and other. He accepts the reductionist idea that “most political behavior falls into one or the other of two distinct types”–a hierarchical, obedient, and thus, authoritarian type, and an open, egalitarian, and thus, democratic type. He therefore makes a number of assumptions about large categories of people, whether Chinese in the imperial epoch or communists in the modern era, while simultaneously arguing against simple-minded assessments of national character and asserting that political cultures can change dramatically in a relatively short time, as in post-war West Germany.
But classifying nations as either authoritarian or democratic cannot account for the eruption of democratic protest in Taiwan and South Korea that led to democratization in the 1990s or explain the nascent democratic movement in China over the past two decades.
The influences of the world's transnational regimes, trading networks, military blocs, and hegemonic systems put even more pressure on the cardinal assumption of the democratic peace literature–that we can assume a norm of sovereign nation-states and categorize them as either democratic or authoritarian. Transnational systems and hierarchies of power can retard democratization. And consider that Japan and Germany remain enmeshed in a post-war settlement that still stations tens of thousands of American troops on their territory, a structure that prevents us from knowing how these countries might differ if they had military autonomy.
And then there is the problem of post-Soviet triumphalism–the presumption that the United States has been behind the spread of liberal democracy. But democracy came to Germany and Japan only with abject defeat and foreign occupation, and to countries like Chile, Guatemala, South Korea, and Taiwan in spite of decades of American support for authoritarian governments.
It is testimony to Weart's open-mindedness, however, that he would welcome these objections (and he readily acknowledges the American assault on democratic government in Guatemala and Chile).
Never at War is thus an ideal book. It asserts a provocative generalization and seeks to prove it using the best methods available, yet it remains an open-ended argument–both because of the author's common sense and his knowledge that the proof of the thesis can really only come in the next century.