Drawing on both extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses they and other political scientists have conducted, Professor Mansfield and Professor Snyder demonstrate that emerging democracies tend to have weak political institutions and are especially likely to go to war. Leaders of these countries attempt to rally support by invoking external threats and resorting to belligerent, nationalist rhetoric and slogans. They point to this pattern in cases ranging from revolutionary France to contemporary Russia. One of the most interesting case studies is the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. ~Leon Hadar, Antiwar.com

If emerging democracies are “especially likely to go to war” (and I have no reason to doubt this), a policy of democratisation on a global scale, which is to say a policy of creating a lot more emerging democracies, is a recipe for bloodbath after bloodbath.

Here’s Hadar again with some fun, contrarian points:

If anything, the history of Europe in the 19th century suggests that authoritarian governments were more successful in maintaining a relative peace in the continent for close to a century. Similarly, the most peaceful European states during World War II and the ones that avoided entering the war were Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, and Turkey, three non-democratic regimes, and Switzerland, which granted women the right to vote only in 1971(!).

Perhaps the time has come for an innovative political scientist to conduct research to determine whether – and I know it’s not very PC – non-democracies are actually more peaceful than democratic states.

What had the chanceries of 19th century Europe found to be the cause of wars in their recent past? Ideological enthusiasms, revolutionary ferment, the stirring up of national identities and the promise of emancipation–these were the things the autocrats and conservatives of the 19th century wanted to suppress, and with good reason. It is precisely all of this garbage that Mr. Bush holds up as the means of our deliverance. Bring back Metternich!