Never Say Never: Wishful Thinking on Democracy and War

Critics of the democratic-peace hypothesis make two main counterarguments. Their first line of attack holds that the apparent pacifism between democracies may be a statistical artifact: because democracies have been relatively rare throughout history, the absence of wars between them may be due largely to chance. Evidence for a democratic peace also depends on the time periods one examines and on how one interprets borderline cases like the War of 1812 or the American Civil War. Critics also note that strong statistical support for the proposition is limited to the period after World War II, when both the U.S.-led alliance system and the Soviet threat to Western Europe's democracies discouraged conflict between republics.

A second challenge focuses on the causal logic of the theory itself. Democratic-peace proponents often attribute the absence of war between republics to a sense of tolerance and shared values that makes using force against fellow republics illegitimate. (As noted above, Weart's version of this argument emphasizes the tendency for republics to see similar states as part of their own "in-group.") If this theory is true, however, there should be concrete historical evidence showing that democratic leaders eschewed violence against each other primarily for this reason. But critics like Christopher Layne have shown that when democratic states have come close to war, they have held back for reasons that had more to do with strategic interests than shared political culture. These cases suggest that even if democracies have tended not to fight each other in the past, it is not because they were democracies.

Instead of meeting these challenges head-on, Weart assembles his own body of supporting evidence and devises his own explanation for the apparent lack of war between republics. Although his arguments should not be dismissed lightly, Never at War illustrates many of the limitations that have marred this debate since its inception.

To begin with, Weart's treatment of historical materials is hardly evenhanded. He is quick to embrace evidence that supports his argument and even quicker to reject evidence that challenges it. Thus, he dismisses in a single footnote the claim that the democratic peace may be a statistical artifact and treats the work of other skeptics with equal disdain. He also excludes the various wars between the Roman republic and its neighbors, including the brutal Punic Wars with Carthage, on the grounds that "no primary sources nor reliable secondary sources survive." Yet he does not hesitate to use other ancient sources that buttress his claim, such as Thucydides and Xenophon, even though they are by no means perfectly reliable. Modern classicists generally agree that both Carthage and Rome were oligarchic republics, which suggests that excluding them was a largely arbitrary judgment that just happened to leave Weart's central claim intact.

Second, Weart's historical accounts focus almost entirely on the role of political culture and pay little attention to more plausible alternative explanations. His cases show that political culture might account for the absence of war between similar republics, but he rarely asks whether other factors were more important -- either in keeping the peace between similar republics or in causing wars between states whose domestic regimes were different. As presented, his case studies create the impression that political culture is the key to explaining war and peace, but Weart offers scant direct evidence for this.

Weart's interpretation of Anglo-American relations illustrates this problem nicely. His account of the War of 1812 emphasizes England's "arrogant" and "imperious" maritime policies (including its impressment of U.S. seamen and embargo on trade with France) and highlights the differences in English and American diplomatic styles. This interpretation implies that war occurred because England was an aristocratic republic and the United States a democracy, but it overlooks the fact that England's maritime policies were a direct outgrowth of its protracted war with Napoleonic France. What Weart portrays as a clash of cultures was at bottom a clash of national interests. Similarly, Weart attributes the peaceful resolution of the Venezuelan crisis of 1896 to the growing similarities between the two republics, especially the shared Anglo-American preference for negotiation and compromise. In fact, U.S. statesmen were interested not in compromise but in reaffirming U.S. primacy in the western hemisphere. War was averted not because both sides were republics, but because England lacked the strength to oppose the United States in its own backyard and England's leaders knew it. Weart also sees the subsequent rapprochement between England and the United States as the result of their shared democratic character, but he fails to mention that England was mending fences with imperial Japan and czarist Russia during the same period. A similar political culture may have facilitated the Anglo-American rapprochement, but strategic calculations -- especially the rise of Germany -- were much more important.