Advantages Of Democratic Peace Theory

The statement is a concept put forward and developed by many individuals and has been dubbed the Democratic Peace Theory. Its origins can be found in the article ‘Perpetual Peace’ written in 1795 by philosopher Emmanuel Kant. He proposed the idea that countries where the people vote for their government, where their collective voice influences government decisions, there is a reluctance for war.

In modern times, this has been further worked on by scholars such as Michael Doyle who claimed that secure and stable democracies have yet to actually go to war with one another. (Doyle, 2011) For the most part, this appears to be true when using the classic definitions of the terms war, peace, and democracy. Whilst the definition of democracy is a

The first is that they rarely threaten military force when they come in to conflict, as it is the nature of democratic political systems. This is because the majority of the people would vote against war and very few if any would benefit. Therefore, the government would not risk their seat of power to go against the wishes of the people and put them in harms way by declaring war. The second, as previously stated, that democracies never go to war with one another. Jack Levy claimed that “This absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations” (Levy, 1988, pg 662). This suggests that in the world of International Relations that it is very much accepted that true liberal democracies will not go to war with each other; even if they find themselves in conflict with one another, there will be no use of military force. Whilst there are many reasons behind the lack of military conflict, none have been so rigorously tested to prove causality. For example, it is incredibly unlikely for United States of America to ever be at war with the United Kingdom. This is partly because the liberal system and ideology on which they were and still are founded and developed forces a kind of interdependence which would make war a counterintuitive action for both sides. The neo-liberal, or laissez faire, system of economics used throughout the

The idea that democracies do not war with one another can be considered false, considering that there actually have been wars. For example, there was a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan spanning six years from 1988 to 1994 despite both having democratically elected government. An even more recent example would be the Russo-Georgian war that took place in 2008 and is considered to be the first European war of the new millennium. Even though, in the public eye, the legitimacy of Russia’s democracy is dubious at best, it is still a democracy and thus contradicts the democratic peace