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“The Democratic Peace”

As to Germany, how could it be considered a democracy with regard to its war with England, France, and the United States in World War I? The German people had no control over starting the war. The unelected and hereditary emperor made that decision. He was sovereign in foreign policy, appointed and could fire the […]

As to Germany, how could it be considered a democracy with regard to its war with England, France, and the United States in World War I? The German people had no control over starting the war. The unelected and hereditary emperor made that decision. He was sovereign in foreign policy, appointed and could fire the chancellor, had direct authority over the military, and was heavily influenced by it. Moreover, because of the emperor’s great influence on domestic policy and power over foreign policy and war, and unlike Eland and Gregory today, no democracy at the time perceived Germany as democratic. ~R.J. Rummel

This is a sad attempt at a dodge of the issue. The lack of consent by the American people in supplying the Allied war effort in both world wars, much like the lack of consent by the British public concerning intervention in 1914, ought to tell us that the presumably most democratic states involved themselves in the war without public approval. Incidentally, the German national franchise was more expansive and had fewer barriers than the American at the time. Had the general American public had a definitive say in whether or not to declare war in 1917, the motion would have been defeated by a 2 to 1 margin, yet the Congress almost unanimously voted for the declaration. No modern democratic state has left foreign policy in the hands of “the people,” but leaves it in either the hands of the legislative and executive branches of government. Either Mr. Rummel can accept that democratic systems can and often do embrace warfare, or he will have to deny that Britain and the United States were democratic polities c. 1914-18. Would Mr. Rummel take the ludicrous, but for him necessary, step of denying that there were any democracies involved in WWI? If he does, then we have practically no frame of reference for discussing the potential of democracies to start wars. His utopian project will remain the ideological fantasy that it is: an untested and untestable hypothesis to which he clings fervently no matter what.

What little evidence is left does not reflect well on democracy, however: the Civil War was a head-on collision between the two most democratic polities on earth at that time (whichever side you take, a democracy will be to blame for starting the war), and the intensity, savagery and destructiveness of that war was directly related to its mass character; the Boer War was the result of an act of unmitigated and unjustifiable aggression by one polity with universal suffrage against two other polities with universal suffrage; only the most charitable and nationalistic interpretation can entirely absolve the very democratic United States from provoking the Mexican war, even if not actually firing the first shot; very simply, mass nationalist hysteria combined with the worst sorts of imperialist schemers and their lackeys in the press (Mr. Rummel may recognise himself among the latter) forced Washington into a war of aggression against Spain that had no remote justification, as the government knew perfectly well at the time. Democracy helped make the Spanish war happen when it might otherwise not have done so.

This is not to focus all criticism on the United States: late nineteenth century British imperialist expansion and its attendant wars were pushed by the democratising, vote-reforming Liberals and then adopted by both parties. The mass enthusiasm for the Boer War and xenophobia against the European states that opposed Britain’s war was a measure of how successfully and naturally democracy and aggressive imperialism fit together. Italy was considerably democratic when it invaded Libya in 1911 without provocation. Begging off that it was technically a constitutional monarchy is simply avoiding the reality that its democratic elements in no serious way opposed warfare. Modern Greece’s involvement in foreign wars and irredentism, however understandable they might have been, grew in direct proportion to the democratic nature of its polity and the rise of a Liberal government against a neutralist and less aggressive monarchy. To take just one more example, the Balkan wars of 1912-13 were started by the elective governments of the Balkan states, and in the case of the second war by Greece, Serbia and Montenegro against Bulgaria and the Ottomans one sees an anticipation of the war between similarly elected governments in 1914. The list could, and does, go on. Finding truly pacific governments that are significantly democratic is historically much harder than finding those that are belligerent. The only vindication the theory of “democratic peace” has lies in places such as Switzerland and Scandinavia, though, of course, all the countries in question had abandoned foreign wars centuries ago in any event. So, perhaps, it is possible to have democracy and peace, but only if one adopts a foreign policy of strict neutrality, which is precisely the sort of foreign policy Mr. Rummel hates.

Very simply, foreign policy was the prerogative of the Cabinet in Britain just as it was that of the Kaiser and Chancellor in Germany, and this does not change whether or not we can properly define these governments as truly democratic or, at the very least, significantly democratic (majority rule based on universal or near-universal franchise in a population of political equals being the defining feature). There has practically never been an occasion when a significantly democratic state, presented with the opportunity to go to war, has chosen peace instead. Only an ideologue or a very uninformed student of WWI would claim that popular enthusiasm for the war had nothing to do with the decisions of Berlin and Vienna in those fateful summer days: the mob atmosphere in Berlin very directly affected the calculations of the German government as to how far it should back Austria. But for this influence of public opinion on government action, both Vienna and Berlin could have conceivably climbed down from the demands put to Serbia and found a satisfactory diplomatic solution. The demands of the mob and its mouthpieces in the press compelled these governments to act when they might have otherwise preferred not to act.

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