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The Democratic Peace Theory Reframed: The Impact of Modernity Author(s): Azar Gat Reviewed work(s): Source: World Politics, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Oct., 2005), pp. 73-100 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40060125 . Accessed: 18/06/2012 01:08
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THE DEMOCRATIC PEACE THEORY REFRAMED TheImpactof Modernity

ByAZARGAT democratic peace theory- the idea that democratic or liberal states never or very rarelygo to war with each other and that they are less likely to become involved in militarized disputes (mids) among themselves- is the most robust,"lawlike" finding generated by the disof international relations. It is also the one with the greatest cipline significance for the real world. Introduced in the 1970s, the democratic peace theory has since gathered momentum and gained credence, withstanding extensive criticism and continuously being developed, amended, and refined in the process. In practical terms, the theory suggests that a world of liberal/democratic states will be peaceful, an idea long ago championed by such figures as Thomas Paine, Immanuel Kant, and Woodrow Wilson. The theory has clear policy implications that drew the attention of the Clinton administration and became the centerpiece of President George W. Bush's foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. This article argues that the democratic peace theorists have overlooked the defining development that underlies that peace- and so much else- during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:the industrial-technological revolution. Not only did that revolution make democracy on a country scale (as opposed to democratic city-states) possible; it also made all the countries that experienced the revolution - far less democratic and nondemocratic belligerent in comparison with the interdemocratic peace representing with preindustrialtimes, only the most striking manifestation of that development. In shaping policy toward undeveloped and developing countries it should be realized that democracyis difficult to institute and sustain where economic and social modernization has not taken root; nor would democracy in itself necessarily lead to a democratic peace before such development has occurred.

Politics58 (October2005), 73-100 World

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Some Advances in the Debate I begin with a review of some of the major advances that have been made in the democratic peace theory during the course of the debate.1 It is now generally agreed among international relations scholars that during the nineteenth century, democracy,liberalism, and the democratic peace alike- all existing only in the West- were considerably weaker than they later became.2 This seems to be connected to another vexed issue raised in relation to the democratic peace theory. During the nineteenth century,as the masses moved to the forefront of politics and political systems underwent democratization, it was widely believed that militant popular pressurerather than the wishes of reluctant governments drove countries to war. Contrary to a prevailing view, popular agitation should not be attributedone-sidedly to manipulationby leaders.Just as much,
1 For the major initial statements of the thesis, see Dean Babst, "A Force for Peace," Industrial Research 14 (April 1972); Melvin Small and David Singer, "The War-Proneness of Democratic Regimes, 1816-1965," JerusalemJournal of International Relations 1, no. 4 (1976); R. Rummel, "Libertarianism and International Violence ," Journal of Conflict Resolution 27 (March 1983); Michael Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs," Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (Summer and Autumn 1983); Steve Chan, "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Are the Free Countries More Pacific?"Journal of Conflict Resolution 28 (December 1984); William Domke, War and the Changing Global System (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Zeev Maoz and Nasrin Abdolali, "Regime Type and International Conflict, 1816-1976," Journal of Conflict Resolution 33 (March 1989); Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, "Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946-1986," American Political Science Review 87 (September 1993); Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 2 For the critics, see Christopher Layne, "Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace," International Security 19, no. 2 (1994); idem, "Lord Palmerston and the Triumph of Realism: AngloFrench Relations, 1830-48," in M. Elman, ed., Path to Peace: Is Democracy the Answer? (Cambridge: MIT, 1997); David Spiro, "The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace," International Security 19, no. 2 (1994); Raymond Cohen, "Pacific Unions: A Reappraisal of the Theory that 'Democracies Do Not Go to War with Each Other/" Review of International Studies 20 (July 1994); Ido Oren, "From Democracy to Demon: Changing American Perceptions of Germany during World War I," International Security 20, no. 2 (1995); Henry Farber and Joanne Gowa, "Politics and Peace," International Security 20, no. 2 (1995). For the DP theorists' response, see Russet (fh. 1), 16-19; John Owen, "How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace," International Security 19, no. 2 (1994), idem, Liberal Peace, Liberal War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); James Ray, Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1995); Zeev Maoz, "The Controversy over the Democratic Peace: Rearguard Action or Cracks in the Wall?" International Security 22, no. 1 (1997); Bruce Russett and John Oneal, Triangulating Peace:Democracy, Interdependenceand International Organizations (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 111-14. For the expansion of the initial thesis to MIDin general, see Gregory Raymond, "Democracies, Disputes, and Third-Party Intermediaries," Journal of Conflict Resolution 38 (March 1994); William Dixon, "Democracy and the Peaceful Settlement of International Conflict," American Political Science Review 88 (March 1994); David Rousseau, Christopher Gelpi, Dan Reiter, and Paul Huth, "Assessing the Dyadic Nature of the Democratic Peace, 1918-1988," American Political ScienceReview 90 (September 1996); Jean-Sebastien Rioux, "A Crisis-Based Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition," Canadian Journal of Political Science 31 (June 1998); Michael Mousseau, "Democracy and Compromise in Militarized Interstate Conflicts, 1816-1992," Journal of Conflict Resolution 42 (April 1998).

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leaders catered to a strong public demand. Often it was the masses that swept along their cautious and peacefully inclined leaders and all the more so in liberal/democratic countries. The word jingoism itself, denoting a chauvinistic and bellicose public frenzy,came into currencyin late-nineteenth-century Britain, at a time of increasing democratization. Jingoism was widespread during the Boer War (1899-1902). The United States was carried into war with Spain at the very same time (1898) on the waves of popular enthusiasm that virtually forced the government'shand. Lest it be thought that the enemy in either of these cases failed to qualify as fully liberal/democratic,it should be noted that it was public opinion in both Britain and France that proved most bellicose, chauvinistic,and unsympatheticto the other during the Fashoda Crisis (1898). It was the politicians who climbed down from war. It has been argued that democratization also promotes war because it is closely associated with the assertion of hitherto suppressedethnic identities and nationalist aspirations.Thus, the claim goes, although democracy indeed decreased the likelihood of war, the initial process of democratization,the democratic transition,had the opposite effect.3 In a different formulation it has been shown that partly free states have been morewar prone than nondemocracies.4Bringing together all the above:historically,democratizationand liberalizationin general did not constitute a onetime transition from a nondemocraticregime but rather
3 EdwardMansfieldandJack SeInternational and Snyder,"Democratization the Danger of War," and to Democratization NationalistConflict curity20, no. 1 (1995); Jack Snyder,From Voting Violence: Democratization W. (New York: W. Norton, 2000); EdwardMansfieldandJack Snyder,"Incomplete 46 StudiesQuarterly (December 2002); Kurt and the Outbreakof Military Disputes,"International Politics War Peace(Stanford, and Incentives theDemocratic in and The Gaubatz,Elections War: Electoral of Peace and Calif.:StanfordUniversityPress,1999), chap.2; Paul Huth andTodd Allee, TheDemocratic in Territorial Conflict the TwentiethCentury(New York:CambridgeUniversityPress, 2002). Others have contended that it was regime change in general ratherthan the democratictransitionthat acor counts for greaterbelligerency, they dispute the evidenceon variousgrounds:Zeev Maoz, "Joining the Club of Nations: Political Development and InternationalConflict, 1816-1976," International 33 StudiesQuarterly (June 1989); Stephen Walt, Revolutionand War(Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell UniverInternational 20, Security no. 4 sity Press, 1996); Andrew Enterline,"Drivingwhile Democratizing," 51 (1996); idem, "RegimeChanges and InterstateConflict, 1816-1992," PoliticalResearch Quarterly (June 1998); Andrew Enterline and Michael Greig, "Beaconsof Hope?The Impact of Imposed DeJournalofPolitics67 (November2005); Krismocracyon RegionalPeace,Democracy,and Prosperity," tian Gleditsch andMichaelWard,"Warand Peacein SpaceandTime: The Role of Democratization," 44 StudiesQuarterly (March2000); MichaelWardand KristianGleditsch,"DemocratizInternational Review 92 (March 1998); Russett and Oneal (fn. 2), 51-52, PoliticalScience American ing for Peace," "Causesof Peace:Democracy, Interdepen116-22; John Oneal, BruceRussett,andMichael Berbaum, 47 StudiesQuarterly (September dence, and InternationalOrganizations,1885-1992," International Contiguity:Issues at Stake in 2003), 383-84; SaraMitchell and BrandonPrins,"BeyondTerritorial 43 StudiesQuarterly (March 1999); David DemocraticMilitarizedInterstateDisputes,"International and (Stanford,Calif: StanfordUniversityPress,2005), chap. 6. Rousseau,Democracy War 4Maoz and Abdolali (fn. 1); Steve Chan, "In Searchof DemocraticPeace:Problemsand Promise, Review 41 (May 1997), 83. Studies International Mershon

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wereprocesses unfolded over time, often over decades and even centhat turies. The dichotomies of liberal/nonliberalor democratic/nondemocratic that long underlay the debate over the "democraticpeace"have been found to be crude and misleading. If liberal and democratic countries have become increasinglyliberal and democratic since the late eighteenth century,this can explain why the interdemocraticpeace seems to have been less secure in the nineteenth-century West and became entrenched only during the twentieth century.5Consider the abolition of slavery,the long and gradualexpansion of the franchise to include all adult males and to females during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the extension of equal legal and social rights to women and minorities, the rise in social tolerance in general, and the increase in political transparencyand accountability during the second half of the twentieth century all these were major developments that made early liberal/parliamentarysocieties progressivelymore liberal and democratic.The standardsof liberalism and democracyhave continuously risen, and with them the democratic peace has also supposedly deepened. In the Third World, the frailness of peace between democracieshas been explainedby lower levels of democracy and liberalism comparedwith what is found in the developed West. In this respect, developing countries are more reminiscent of the nineteenth-century West.6 The simplicity of the original democratic peace theory has been further compromised by the addition of more elements, whose effect, too, was dynamic over time. Greatertrade (relativeto gnp) and greatertrade openness (lower tariffs), advocated by liberals from Adam Smith and the Manchester School as a recipe for prosperity and peace, have been
5 The correlation between the level of liberalism and peace was first suggested by Rummel (fn. 1) and incorporated in his Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1997), 5 and chap. 3; echoed by Ray (fn. 2), 16. Historical gradualism is tentatively noted in the 1992 article by Bruce Russet and Zeev Maoz, incorporated in Russet (fh. 1), 72-73; more fully developed in Maoz (fn. 2); and is integral in Russert and Oneal (fn. 2), 111-14. Some critics have attributed the absence of war among the democracies to the coalition effect of the alliances that they formed against joint enemies - the Axis powers and the Soviet bloc: Randolph Siverson and Julian Emmons, "Birds of a Feather: Democratic Political Systems and Alliances Choices ,"Journal of Conflict Resolution 35 (June 1991); Farber and Gowa (fn. 2); Joanne Gowa, Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Michael Simon and Erik Gartzke, "Political System Similarity and the Choice of Allies," Journal of Conflict Resolution 40 (December 1996); Brian Lai and Dan Reiter, "Democracy, Political Similarity, and International Alliances, 18121992," Journal of 'Conflict Resolution 44 (April 2000); Errol Henderson, Democracy and War:The End of an Illusion (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2002), chap. 2. 6 Russet and Maoz, in Russet (fn. 1), 86. Generally regarding today s Third World: Edward Friedman, "The Painful Gradualness of Democratization: Proceduralism as a Necessary Discontinuous Revolution," in H. Handelman and M. Tessler, eds., Democracy and Its Limits: Lessonsfrom Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1999).

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demonstrated to have a diminishing effect on the likelihood of war between countries.7Greatly expanding the initial democratic peace concept, later studies have found that joint democracy, mutual and open trade, and joint membership in international organizations each independently significantlyreduceswar.They have thus endorsed all the original elements of "Kants tripod for peace."8 And yet the Paine-Kant logic is incomplete and at least partlyflawed. A still broader perspective is needed to account for the liberal/democratic peace, to the extent that such peace has indeed been unfolding. Liberalism, Democracy, Economic Development, and the Modern Transformation What the democratic peace theorists have overlooked is the most profound transformationexperienced by humanity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries indeed, ever. The industrial-technological revolution constituted a quantum leap in human development. The main change for human existence brought about by the revolution was a steep and continuous growth in per capita production, a dramatic break from the "Malthusian trap"that had characterized earlier human history. Prior to the industrial-technological revolution increases in human productivitywere largely absorbedby population growth of a similarproportion. Consumption per capita remained almost stagnant, with the vast majorityof people continuing to live in dire poverty,precariouslyclose to subsistencelevel. With the outbreakof the industrialtechnological revolution, however, all this changed. In the developed countries production has increased since preindustrialtimes by a factor ranging from 50 to 120, with per capita production increasingby a factor ranging from 15 to 30, numbers that more or less reflect the developed world s advantageover today s least developed countries. Average
7 On the Politics(Reading,Mass.: Adof pros and cons, see KennethWaltz, Theory International dison, 1979), 212-15; Doyle (fn. 1), 231-32; EdwardMansfield, Power,Trade,and War(Princeton: A PrincetonUniversityPress, 1994); KatherineBarbieri,"EconomicInterdependence: Path to Peace 33 or a Source of Interstate Conflict?" Journalof PeaceResearch (February1996); Dale Copeland, International 20, "EconomicInterdependenceand War: A Theory of Trade Expectations," Security and no. 4 (1996); EdwardMansfield and Brian Pollins, eds., Economic Interdependence International (Ann Arbor:Universityof Michigan,2003); Solomon Polachek,"Why DemocraciesCooperConflict Review ate More and Fight Less:The Relationshipbetween Trade and InternationalCooperation," 5 Economics (August 1997); KatherineBarbieriand Gerald Schneider,"Globalization of International and Peace:Assessing New Directions in the Study of Trade and Conflict," Journalof PeaceResearch 36 (July 1999). 8This was elaboratedby Russett and originallydemonstratedby Domke (fn. 1); and impressively Oneal (fn. 2).

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growth in the industrializing and industrial world is about ten times greater than it was in preindustrialtimes, with production per capita for the first time registering substantialand sustained real growth at an averageannual rate of 1.5-2.0 percent.9 The effects of this staggering, exponential transformationhave only recentlybegun to filter into discussions of the democraticpeace. For example, it has been found that economically developed democracieshave been far more likely than poor democracies to be peaceful toward one another: twice as likely according to a study covering the years 195092 and consistently so in a broader study covering the period since 1885. The democratic peace phenomenon between poor democracies was found to be weak at best.10Economically developed democracies have also been far less prone to civil war than poorer democracies have been.11Indeed, what has been on the rise during the past two centuries and accounts for the growth of the democratic peace has been not only liberal countries'level of democracy and liberalism, as proponents of the democratic peace theory believe, but also their wealth. Moreover, all of these developments are not separate from one another but are closely intertwined. The idea that the growth of liberalism and democracy rested on the very tangible material developments of the age, such as advanced communications (both transportation and information technology), urbanization, rising levels of literacy and education, and growing materialwell-being, has been widely held since the nineteenth century and endorsed by sociologists and political scientists.12
9 The most comprehensiveand up-to-date estimates are found in Angus Maddison, The World A (Paris:OECD, 2001), 28, 90, 126, 183-86, 264-65; it more or less Economy: MillennialPerspective rendersall earlierwork obsolete. 10The best studies are Michael Mousseau, "MarketProsperity,Democratic Consolidation, and DemocraticPeace," 44 Resolution (August2000); idem, "TheNexus of MarketSociJournalof'Conflict and International 47 StudiesQuarterly (December2003); ety, LiberalPreferences, DemocraticPeace," New Theory with Prior Beliefs:Market Civilization and the Democratic Peace," idem, "Comparing and 22, Conflict Management PeaceScience no. 1 (2005); Michael Mousseau,HavardHegre, andJohn Oneal, "How the Wealth of Nations Conditions the LiberalPeace," Journalof International European Relations9 (June 2003). With respectto the first (and last) of these articles,however,Bruce Russett has suggestedto me that a close look shows that joint democracyloses statisticalsignificanceonly at a GDPpc level of the lowest 10 percent of democraticdyads. Nevertheless,the coefficient for effect on conflict remainsnegative until one hits a GDP level that contains only a single democracy. This would seem to make the statisticalfindingvery thin. See also Polachek,"Why DemocraciesCooperate More and Fight Less";HavardHegre, "Developmentand the LiberalPeace:What Does It Take to Be a TradingState}" 37 Journalof PeaceResearch (January2000). The correlationhad alreadybeen ," suggestedby KennethBenoit, "DemocraciesReallyareMore Pacific(in General) Journalof Conflict Resolution (December 1996); the articleis limited to the years 1960-80. 40 " 11EnrolHendersonand David Singer,"CivilWar in the Post-ColonialWorld, 1946-92 Journalof Peace Research (May 2000); Henderson (fn. 5), chap.5. 37 12The seminal modern work is Seymour Lipset, PoliticalMan (New York:Anchor, 1963), esp. (New Haven:YaleUniversityPress,1971), chap.5; Samuel chaps. 1-2; see also RobertDahl, Polyarchy

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Democracy on a country scale and liberal societies emerged only in the nineteenth century,rather than in any earlier time in history, and have evolved since not only because they were suddenly recognized to be good ideas. Rather, their growth has been underpinned by the revolutionary changes that have taken place in the socioeconomic infrastructure during modernity. To be sure,Germany presents a significant exception during the periods of the Second and, of course,Third Reichs, when it was less liberal and democratic than the other economically developed countries. It is far from clear that economic development necessarily and unilinearily leads to liberaldemocracy.At the same time, liberaldemocraciestend to be economically developed. During the past centuries, poor democracies have been found to be not only less pacificbut also few in number.13 True, economically developing, still predominantlyagrarian,stable liberal/democraticregimes existed in the nineteenth century, most notably the United States before the Civil War (where slavery still existed, however) and a growing number of European and Western countries later in that century, as well as in the twentieth century,most notably, India. Yet not only were these cases few; in all of them, the industrial/ technological revolution had already been brewing, and its products, such as the newspaper and the railway (to which the electronic media were added in the twentieth century), were having profound effects on society and politics. Furthermore,the more economically advanced a liberal/democraticsociety, the more liberal and democratic it becomes, with both these traits closely correlatingwith its pacific tendency.During the 1990s, as democracy became the sole hegemonic model after the collapse of communism, some poor countries democratized. Yet comparativestudies rank poorer democracies lower on the democratic and liberal scales, leading scholarsto describe some of them as "illiberal Democratization and liberalization, economic developdemocracy."14 and pacific inclinations have allbttn intimately bound together ment, in the modern transformation.What reallycomes out of the findings of the debate over the pacificity of the democratic transition period is the following: the more swift and complete the transition to democracy is, the more pacific the result;but, indeed, the more modernized the counin Democratization the Late TwentiethCentury(Norman:Universityof Huntington, The ThirdWave: Oklahoma,1991), 59-72; LarryDiamond, "EconomicDevelopment and DemocracyReconsidered," in G. Marksand L. Diamond, eds., Reexamining (NewburyPark,Calif.:Sage, 1992). Democracy 13 Mousseau(fn. 10, 2000); Marksand Diamond (fn. 12), passim. 14FareedZakaria,"The Rise of IlliberalDemocracy, Affairs76, no. 6 (1997); LarryDiaForeign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress,1999), esp. 34-60, 279-80; mond, Developing Democracy 10 "The Decline of IlliberalDemocracy," Adrian Karatnycky, Journalof'Democracy (January1999).

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the and liberal, democratic international try(andthe moremodernized, it joins),the greater its chancesof effectingsucha swift and are system completetransformation.15 of This bringsus to the vexedquestionof the applicability the democraticpeace to premodern times, a questionthat has puzzledpropostatesdo not fight For nentsof the theory. if modernliberal/democratic eachother,presumably reasonsrootedin theirregime,why did the for most notablythose of classisame not applyto earlierdemocracies, In cal antiquity? This questioninvolvesa specialdifficulty. comparison that has survived with what we have for modernity, information the fromearlier times is painfully evenwith respectto some of the patchy, best-documented cases, such as classicalAthens and Rome. KnowlaboutGreekpoleisotherthanAthens (with the partialexception edge the of Sparta) hazy.We possessnothingeven remotelyapproaching is full recordabouteithertheirwarsor their regimesthat we havewith Unof respectto the countries the nineteenthandtwentiethcenturies. der these limitations,one comprehensive has found that Greek study to democracies exhibiteda somewhat actually propensity fight greater eachotherthando nondemocracies mixeddyads. or The mostdramatic caseinvolved famousAtheniancampaign the (415-13 againstSyracuse the concluded War.Nonetheless, authors bc) duringthe Peloponnesian that (1) democracy the time was still veryyoung, and that (2) the at ancientrecordis badlyincompleteand therefore might be distorted.16 Sincethe interdemocratic is peacein modernity allegedto be practically this a universal, hardlyconstitutes satisfactory explanation. Another comprehensive study took a differentline, assertingthat ancientrepublics, Yet too, neverfought each other.17 a few examples will sufficeto demonstrate falsityof this claim.Manyof the known the in democracies ancientGreecebelongedto the AthenianEmpireof the fifth centuryBC. The empirewas coerciveand oppressive, with Athens to join and preventing them fromleavingby means forcingcity-states of its overwhelming force.Rebellions were harshlyput down.Athens alsoprevented members the alliance of the ones) (including democratic
15See fnn. 3 and 4 above. 16Bruce Russett and William Antholis, "The Imperfect Democratic Peace of Ancient Greece," reprintedin Russett(fn. 1), chap. 3. 17 Will SpencerWeart, Never at War:WhyDemocracies Not Fight OneAnother(New Haven: Yale UniversityPress,1998).This was criticizedby Eric Robinson,a leadingexperton earlyGreekdemocracies;Robinson,"Readingand Misreadingthe Ancient Evidence for Democratic Pace" Journalof PeaceResearch (September2001), resultingin a short exchangein the same issue:Weart, 609-13; 38 Robinson,615-17. See also the criticismby the leading authorityon the Greek polis and fourth-cenAthenian democracy: and turyBC Mogens Hansen andThomas Nielsen,An Inventory Archaic Clasof sicalPoleis(Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress,2004), 84-85.

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from fighting one another.After Athenianpower had been severely weakenedduringthe laterstage of the Peloponnesian War,the allies, rebelledin greatnumber. democratic Thus the record ones, including of ancientGreeceduringthe fifth centuryBCis morea tale of democoercion thanone of interdemocratic craticimperial Moreover, peace.18 the it shouldbe noted that it was consistently Atheniandemos,rather elementsin Atheniansociety,that pushedfor agthan the aristocratic and gressive imperial expansion war. The fourth centuryBCoffers an even more significanttest. First, had when the numberof Greekdemocracies increased. Furthermore, it was formedin 377 BC, was basedon a secondAthenian-ledalliance To Athensassisted and principles. weakenSparta, voluntary egalitarian in of in the restoration independence Thebes. Not only did Thebes the it become a democracy; also reestablished BoeotianLeagueon a of the basis.In 371 BC Boeotianarmyunderthe generalship democratic in the smashed invincible Spartans the Battleof Leuctra. Epaminondas in the Greekbalanceof powerfollowed.Spartan A dramatic change imperialrulewere broken,whereasThebes hegemonyand tyrannical assisted rose to prominence. Epaminondas Invadingthe Peloponnese, and satellitesin breakingawayand formingdemocracies reSparta's s He freeda largepartof Sparta helots.And democratic leagues. gional to advantageous Thebes,werevigorously yet thesenobleacts,obviously Athens. For afterLeuctra,it none other than democratic opposedby was Theban,ratherthan Spartan, hegemonythat Athens fearedand balanced Indeed,DavidHume singledout this shift as a strikagainst. of ing ancientexampleof the operation the balanceof power. Athensjoinedthe waragainst In 369 BC Thebes,allyingitselfagainst and and with oligarchic oppressive Greekfreedom Sparta its oligarchic and suchas Dionysiusof Syracuse the bloodallies,with Greektyrants Persia. Alexanderof Pherae,and with foreign and autocratic thirsty were thus engaged For sevenyearsthe two great Greek democracies The in a war that ragedeverywhere along their imperialperipheries. downto the Athenianparticipation numerous warinvolved encounters, Thebes in the Battleof Mantinea(362 bc), the greatestbattle against in Greekhistoryuntilthen,whereEpaminondas againwon a crushing cameto andthe warthereby victorybut was killed.Thebanhegemony its its to an end.As Athensattempted reassert own hegemony, conduct
18 Weart(fn. 17) postponesany mentionof the firstAthenian Empireto as late in his book as possible and then summarily disposesof this inconvenience(p. 246). The problemwas betteracknowledged the "Explaining DemocraticPeace:The Evidence by Russett and Antholis (fn. 17);Tobias Bachteler, 34 Research (August 1997). from Ancient Greece Reviewed," Journalof Peace

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toward allies began to resemble its first empire, prompting a rebellion known as the Social War (357-55 BC) that broke the power of the alliance. Lest it be thought that Thebes' conduct towardother democracies was saintly,it should be noted that it conquered and razed its old rival, democratic Plataea (373 bc).19 Surprisingly,the record of Republican Rome's wars in the Italian peninsula has not been examined at all in this context and appearsto be no less questionablewith respect to the democraticpeace phenomenon. How democratic the Roman Republic was remains a matter of debate among classicalscholars,with recent trends swinging in the more democratic direction.20 Rome was classifiedby Polybius {TheHistories7.1118) as a mixed polity, in which the people's assemblies and tribunes, the aristocratic senate, and elected magistrates balanced each other's power.It should be remembered,however,that our own modern liberal democracies, too, would probably have been classified as mixed polities by the ancients, and unlike ancient republics they do not include popular assemblies of all citizenry that directly legislate and decide on issues such as war and peace. Knowledge about the internal regimes of the Italian city-states is meager and imprecise. Still, to argue that none of the hundreds of Italic and Greek city-states that were brought under Roman rule were republics that Rome was in fact the only republic - is in Italy patently untenable. For example, Capua and Tarentum,the two leading city-states of southern Italy that defected from Rome during the Second Punic War, and were harshly crushed by Rome, were both democratic republics at the time (Livy, 23.2-7, 24.13). Indeed, during the Second Punic War, Carthage, Rome's rival, was judged by Polybius (6.5; following Aristotle, ThePolitics,2.11 and 4.8-9) to have been a mixed polity, in which the demos (which supportedthe Barkaide war party) dominated more than it did in the Roman Republic itself.21 Neither in these instances nor in any other case does the evidence with respect to public deliberationsin Rome on war and peace include even a reference to the enemy's regime as an issue meriting consideration. As with the mid data in modernity, this may expand the scope of rel19The ancient sources for fourth-century BCGreece are varied and patchy. N. Hammond can serve as a useful synthesis; Hammond, A History of Greeceto 322 bc (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). David Hume offers a thoroughly misleading account of the above war and the Battle of Mantinea (which he does not even name!) that clearly refutes his thesis; Hume, "Of the Balance of Power," in Hume, Essays: Literary, Moral and Political (London: Routledge, 1894), 198; Weart (fn. 17), 25-26. 20Alexander Yakobson, Elections and Electioneering in Rome (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999). 21Weart (fn. 17) does not at all discuss Rome, and not because of absentmindedness. For he mentions Rome once, in his appendix of problematic cases (p. 297), where he lamely excuses himself from discussing it on the grounds that we lack information about Carthage.

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evant information for testing the democratic peace thesis; however, in contrast to the MIDdata, the finding in this case appearsto be wholly negative. A third line of interpretation has been offered to account for the apparentinapplicabilityof the modern peace to the classical republics. Those who emphasize liberalism above democracy as the explanation for the modern phenomenon have arguedthat classicaldemocraciescan hardly be considered liberal since they practiced slaveryand in general did not uphold the liberal rights and other "republican* preconditions requiredby Kant, such as a separationof powers (Rome's mixed polity notwithstanding).22However, this interpretation is not fully satisfactory either, for in the United States slaveryexisted until the Civil War, long after the United States is counted as a liberal and democratic state by the proponents of the liberal/democratic peace theory. As already mentioned, other liberal/democratictraitswere also still relativelyweak or absent in many of the countries listed as liberal/democraticby the democratic peace theorists. Furthermore,whereas Athens has become the proverbialexemplum for the perils of direct democracy,in the Roman republic institutional constraints were very strong. A popular assembly of the people in arms, the comitiacenturiata,was called to vote for war,but such a motion could be brought before the assemblyonly by the appropriatemagistrate, a consul (and theoretically a praetor) annually elected in highly competitive elections after a decision for war had been debated and reached by the senate. Paine and Kant subscribed to the Enlightenment view that selfish autocrats were responsible for war. According to that view, once the people, who carried the burden of war and incurred its costs, were allowed to make the decision, they would recoil from war. However, the demos was the most bellicose element in Athenian society,even though it fought in the army, manned the rowing benches of the Athenian navy,and had to endure war's destruction and misery, as in the forced evacuation of Attica during the Peloponnesian War. Rome's proverbial military prowess and tenacity similarly derived specifically from its republican regime, which successfullyco-opted the populace for the purpose of war. Historically, democracies proved particularlytenacious in war precisely because they were socially and politically inclusive. And, again, in premodern times they also did not refrainfrom fighting each other.
22 Doyle (fn.l), 212.

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Why, then, did the citizens of Athens and Rome repeatedlyvote for war and endure devastating and protracted wars for years and years, It including, as we have seen, against other democracies/republics? was not because they were less democratic than modern societies; rather,it was because in their agrarianage there were great material benefits to be gained from war. First, there was booty to be had. Furthermore,in Athens, the empire meant lavish tribute, which financed about half of the Athenian budget, paying for the extensive public construction and the huge navy, in both of which the demos was employed (Plutarch, Pericles 12). Moreover, the empire'smight boosted Athenian trade su, premacy,which, in turn, increasedits resourcesand enhanced its might, and vice versa in a military-financialvirtuous circle. Finally,poor Athenians were allocated farms in colonies (c/eruchies) established on terriconfiscated from defeated enemies. Although Rome did not levy tory tribute on its "allies," confiscated land from the defeated on an enorit mous scale throughout Italy and settled its citizens and the Latins in colonies established on that land. The underlying rationale here is familiar enough: in preindustrial times, such growth as there was in overallresourcesthrough innovation and exchange was so slow as to make resourcespracticallyfinite and the competition over them close to a zero-sum game. With the expansion of European and global trade during the early modern period, a greater portion of production was intended for the market (although most of it was still produced for self-consumption), increasing the benefits of free exchange for the parties involved. This was the process described by Adam Smith and noted by Paine and Kant. Yet only with industrialization did the balance change radically:wealth was no longer finite but rose at a staggering pace; agriculturalproduce, and hence territory, ceased to constitute the main source of wealth and was replacedby industrial production that was best developed at home and, later, by the service-information economy where the significance of raw materials declined greatly;production became overwhelmingly intended for the market, magnifying the benefits of exchange and increasing interdependence.23Contrary to earlier times, the economic ruin of the enemy was a detriment to one's own prosperity. It is not the cost of war per se, as is widely claimed, that became prohibitive in modernity.Societies paid horrendouscosts in wars throughout history as a matter of course, no less horrendous in relative terms
23Cf. Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerceand Conquest in the Modern World (New York: Basic Books, 1986); idem, The Rise of the Virtual State (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

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than that of the total wars of the twentieth century. This was their nature-like law so long as the Malthusian logic of preindustrialtimes prevailed. It was mainly the benefits of peace that rose dramatically, tilting the overallbalance between war and peace, once the Malthusian trap was broken. It has been claimed that the Kantian"tripodof peace" transformed the vicious circle of anarchy,mutual insecurity, and war But to the extent that into a virtuous circle of peace and cooperation.24 such a transformationoccurred,it was in fact industrializationand the escape from the Malthusian vicious circle that underlaythe "tripod.* This process is dramatically reflected in the statistics of war. The number of wars and war years among the great powers and among economically advanced states in general the most powerful states - declined and most destructive interstate wars sharply in the century after 1815, to about a third of their frequency in the preceding century,and even lower comparedwith earliertimes. This trend continues into the twentieth century,although the mobilization of resourcesand manpower in the majorwars that did occur and, hence, wars'intensity and lethality per time unit, increased most notably, in the two world wars.25Can the decline in the number of wars and war years among advancedsocieties be explainedby their greaterintensity?This hypothesis barelyholds for the nineteenth century.From 1815 to 1914, as the numberof wars and war years among the great powers sharplydeclined, the cost of wars registered little significant increase relative to population and wealth. Conversely,in the twentieth century,the mere twentyone years that separated the two world wars- the most intense and devastatingwars in modern European history also do not support an inverse relationbetween war intensity and frequency.Any such relation has been rejected bv all specialized statistical studies of the subject.26 Obviously,when great power wars did occur, the antagonists were able to devote much greater resourcesto them. At the same time, however, they proved reluctantto embarkon such wars in the first place.

24Russettand Oneal (fn. 2), chap. 1. 25Melvin Small and David Singer give no basis for comparisonto earliertimes, while also enand compassingthe widest rangeof development in effect differentworlds:preindustrial industrial; 1816-1980 (BeverlyHills: Sage, 1982). and International Civil Wars, to Small and Singer,Resort Arms: 1495-1975 (Lexington:UniversityPressof in But see Jack Levy, War theModernGreatPowerSystem, 1983), esp. 112-49. Levy concentrateson the greatpowers'warsamong themselves,that is, Kentucky, (Lonthe majorwarsby the most advancedstates. See also Evan Luard, Warin International Society don:Tauris,1986), 53, 67. 26Small and Singer (fn. 25), 156-57, 198-201; Levy (fn. 25), 136-37, 150-68; Luard (fn. 25), 67-81.

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Indeed, the striking fact overlooked by the proponents of the democraticpeace is that nondemocraticcountries, too, fought much less during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the industrial age, than they did in earlier times. In the century after 1815, nondemocratic/ nonliberal great powers such as Prussia and Austria (which were not colonial powers) engaged in war not only far less frequentlythan Britain and Francebut also dramaticallyless in comparisonwith their own earlier histories: only once every eight or nine years, compared with once every two years (Austria) or three years (Prussia)in the eighteenth century that more or less representedthe European great powers'average during early modernity.The nondemocratic/nonliberalgreat powers also shared in the sharp post-1815 decline in the frequencyof great power wars to about one-third of their rate in early modernity.27 None other than the famous future chief of the Prussiangeneral staff Helmuth von Moltke wrote in 1841:
We candidly confess our belief in the idea, on which so much ridicule has been cast, of a general European peace . . . wars will become rarerand rarerbecause they are growing expensive beyond measure; positively because of the actual cost; negatively because of the necessary neglect of work. Has not the population of Prussia, under a good and wise administration,increased by a fourth in twenty-five years of peace?And are not her fifteen millions of inhabitantsbetter fed, clothed and instructedtoday than her eleven millions used to be?Are not such resultsequal to a victorious campaign or to the conquest of a province . . . ?28

The reasons why the democratic peace theorists overlooked this overallsharp decline in the occurrenceof war are naturalenough: since liberal and democraticcountries emerged only during the past two centuries, it appearedreasonableto focus only on these centuries,which in any case seemed like a long period of time. In addition, the most extensive and widely used databaseof wars, the Correlatesof War, only covers the period from 1815 on. In consequence, no comparison with the pre-1815 period has been carried out. Nor have the democratic peace theorists asked why liberal and democratic societies started to appear only during the past two hundredyears or so and how this fact is related
27 John Mueller overlooks the decline of war in the century before 1914 and fails to account for the deeper sources of the "obsolescence"; Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence Major War of (New York: Basic Books, 1989). Lars-Erik Cederman detects a decline in belligerency among nondemocracies after 1945, but the main decline occurred in comparison with the pre-1815 period, which he does not examine. His "learning mechanism" also has no apparent motivating factor; Cederman, "Back to Kant: Reinterpreting the Democratic Peace as a Macrohistorical Learning Process," American Political ScienceReview 95 (March 2001). 28Helmuth von Moltke, Essays, Speechesand Memoirs (New York: Harper, 1893), 1:276-77.

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to the defining development of that period- the onset of the industrial-technological age. The whole question of the democraticpeace has been considered out of its truly defining historical context. For this reason, both those who have found that wealth and economic growth did as not affect the occurrenceof war,29 well as their criticswho arguedthat wealth was indeed very significant in reducing war but only in connechave been led astray somewhat tion and in tandem with democracy,30 by too short a perspective.For in comparisonwith the preindustrialage bothdemocracies and nondemocracies have fought on averageconsiderablyless after the industrialrevolution. It is true, however,that liberal and democratic societies have exhibited greaterpacific tendencies than nondemocracies during the industrial age, as mainly demonstrated in their relationswith each other. Why is this so? A number of related reasons have been at work. In many nonliberal and nondemocratic industrial countries a militant ethos, often associated with a traditional warrior elite, was deeply embedded in the national culture. Led from above to national unification and modernization and then coming late to the imperialrace,both Germany andJapan had successfullyrelied in the past on militaryforce to asserttheir claims and expected to continue to do so in the future. Statism remained central to their modern development. Conjointly, they either rejected the logic of free trade in the name of national economy and/or feared that the global liberal trade system would give way to closed imperial blocs, leaving them out in the cold. In communist countries, for their part, the total rejection of the marketprinciplewent hand in hand with their ideological commitment to its destruction by force. Furthermore,since they were repressiveat home, nonliberal and nondemocratic countries felt little compunction about practicing repressionabroad.Contrary to a widely held view, it has been shown that their empires could and did pay off.31So long as the advantages and/or very viability of the liberal economic model as opposed to the national-capitalist (and socialist) one remained in dispute, forceful nation-centered imperialism remained a temptation. By comparison, liberal democratic countries have differed in some crucialrespects. Socialized to peaceful, law-mediated relations at home, their citizens expect the same norms to be applied internationally.Living in increasinglytolerant,less conformist,and argumentativesocieties,
29Maoz and Russett (fh. 1); Russet and Oneal (fn. 2), 151-53. 30See the studies in fn. 10 above. 31 Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of OccupiedIndustrial Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

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they have grown more receptiveto the Other s point of view. Promoting freedom, legal equality,and (expanding) political participationdomestically,liberal democraticpowers, although initially in possession of the greatest colonial empires, have found it increasingly difficult to justify rule over foreign people without their consent and/or without granting them full citizenship and voting rights. Conjointly, sanctifying life, liberty, and human rights, liberal democracies have ultimately proved to be failuresat forcefulrepression.32 Liberaleconomy, dominating despite in any case rejected war and military subjugation in periodical lapses, favor of peaceful economic growth and mutually beneficial trade. Furthermore, with the individuals life and pursuit of happiness elevated above group values, the sacrifice, let alone self-sacrifice, demanded by war has increasingly lost legitimacy in liberal democratic societies. Democratic leaders have shared the above outlook and norms or else have been forced by public pressureto conform to them or face being removed from office. As scholars now tend to agree, structuraland normative factors are intertwined in creating the democratic peace. For these reasons,even though nonliberaland nondemocratic states, too, became much less belligerent in the industrial age, liberal democracies have proven inherently more attuned to its pacifying aspects. This applies most strikingly to the relations among democracies, but, as scholars have become increasinglyaware,it applies also to their conduct in general.33 Other Related and Independent Factors Additional factors associated with the modern transformation might also be involved in making affluent liberal democratic societies more pacific. It is common among social scientists to regardparsimony as a scientific ideal and to dislike "laundrylists"of causes.Yet, without quar32Gil Lose Merom, How Democracies Small Wars (New York:CambridgeUniversityPress,2003). 33This is mostly demonstratedin the democracies'record of much less intense wars during the twentieth century (far lower casualties,partlybecause of far weaker rivals)and far fewer civil wars: Rummel (fn. 1); idem (fn. 5); Domke (fn. 1); Stuart Bremer,"DangerousDyads: Conditions AfResolution (June 1992); 36 fecting the Likelihood of InterstateWar, 1816-1965,"Journalof Conflict Benoit (fn. 10); Rousseauet al. (fn. 2); Rousseau(fn. 3); Rioux (fn. 2); Russett and Oneal (fn. 2), 49-50. Mathew Krainand MarrissaMyers find no change over time but fail to distinguishbetween advancedand less advanced Krainand Myers,"Democracy CivilWar:A Note on the and democracies; DemocraticPeace Proposition," International Interactions no. 1 (1997);TanjaEllingson,"Colorful 23, Community or Ethnic Witches-Brew? Multiethnicity and Domestic Conflict during and after the Cold War," Resolution (April 2000); Ted Gurr,Minoritiesat Risk A GlobalView 44 Journalof Conflict ofEthnopolitical Conflicts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1993); Henderson and Singer (fn. 11); Henderson (fn. 5), chap.5.

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reling with the theoretical proposition, it is the case that a multiplicity of factors are at play in social phenomena, often making theoretically "less elegant" explanations truer. Some of the additional factors suggested below are variablyrelated to liberal democracy,while others are associated with economic development, which, in turn, is also variably related to liberal democracy.How and to what extent this is so remains to be determined. Wealth and Comfort - Again Throughout history,rising prosperityhas been associatedwith decreasing willingness to endure the hardships of war. Freedom from manual labor and luxurious living conditions achieved by the rich in prosperous premodern societies conflicted with the physical hardship of campaigning and life in the field, which thereby became more alien and unappealing. As the industrial-technological age unfolded and wealth per capita rose exponentially,the wealth, comfort, and other amenities formerly enjoyed by only the privileged elite spreadthroughout society. Thus, increasing wealth has worked to decrease war not only through the modern logic of expanding manufacturingand trading interdependence but also through the traditionallogic that affluence and comfort affect society's willingness to endure hardship. Because new heights of affluence and comfort have been achieved in the developed world in the post-World War II era, when practicallyall the world's affluent countries have been democracies, it is difficult to distinguish the effects of comfort from those of democracy in diminishing belligerency. Obviously, as alreadynoted, the two factors have to some degree been interrelated. It is difficult for people in today s liberal, affluent, and secure societies to visualize how life was for their forefathersonly a few generations earlier and largely still is in poor countries. Angst may have replaced fear and physical pain in modern societies; yet, without diminishing the merits of traditional society or ignoring the stresses and problems Peoof modernity,this change has been nothing short of revolutionary. in premodern societies struggled to survive in the most elemental ple sense. The overwhelming majority of them endured a lifetime of hard physical labor to escape hunger, from which they were never secure. The tragedy of orphanage, of child mortality, of premature death of a spouse, and of early death in general was an inescapable fact of life. People of all ages were afflicted with illness, disability, and physical pain, for which no effective remedies existed. Even where state rule prevailed, violent conflict between neighbors was a regularoccurrenceand,

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therefore, an ever-present possibility, putting a premium on physical strength, toughness, honor, and a reputation for all of these. Hardship and tragedy tended to harden people and make them fatalistic. In this context, the suffering and death associated with war were endured as just another nature-like affliction, together with Malthus's other grim reapers:famine and disease. By comparison, by contrast even, life changed dramaticallyin affluent liberalsocieties.The decline of physicallabor has alreadybeen mentioned. Hunger and want were replaced by societies of plenty, where food, the most basic of needs, became availablepracticallywithout limit, with overweight ratherthan starvationbecoming a majorproblem, even and, indeed, sometimes especially,among the poor. Infant mortalityfell to roughly one- twentieth of its rate during preindustrialtimes. Annual general mortality declined from around thirty per thousand people to between seven and ten per thousand.34Infectious diseases, the number one killer of the past, were mostly rendered nonlethal by improved hygiene, vaccinations, and antibiotics. Countless bodily irritations and disabilities deteriorating eyesight, bad teeth, skin disease, herniathat used to be an integral part of life, were alleviated by medication, medical instruments, and surgery.Anesthetics and other drugs, from painkillers to Viagra, dramaticallyimproved the quality of life. People in the developed world live in well-heated and air-conditioned homes, equipped with all manner of electrical appliances. They have indoor bathrooms and lavatories.They wash daily and change clothes as often. They drive ratherthan walk. They are flooded with popular media entertainment with which to occupy their spare time. They take vacations in farawayplaces. They embrace "postmodern," "postmaterialistic"values that emphasize individual self-fulfillment. In an orderly and comfortable society, rough conduct in social dealings decreases,while civility,peaceful argument,and humor become the norm. Men are more able to "connect to their feminine side."Whereas children and youth used to be physically disciplined by their parents and fought among themselves at school, on the playground,and in the street, they now encounter a general social abhorrenceof violence. Social expectations and psychological sensitivity have risen as dramatically as these changes. People in affluent liberal societies expect to live, to control their lives, and to enjoy life rather than merely endure it, with war scarcelyfitting into their life plan.
34See B. Historical 1750-1970 (London:Macmillan,1975), B6, B7. Statistics, Mitchell, European

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It is not surprisingthen that the "imprudentvehemence"historically associatedwith republicanforeign policy appearsto have all but disappeared in the affluent, consumer-hedonistic, liberal democratic societies that developed after World War II- indeed, that this change has affected the elites and affluent middle class in these societies even more than their less affluent "demos." Metropolitan Service Society

The growth of city and metropolitan life is a somewhat related phenomenon. Commercial and metropolitan cities were considered by classical military authorities such as Vegetius, followed by Machiavelli, as the least desirable recruiting ground compared to the countryside with its sturdy farmers, accustomed to hard physical labor. Typically immigrating from diverse quarters, the residents of large metropolitan centers lacked traditional communal bonds of solidarity and were free from the social controls of village and small town communities. Exposed to the cities' quick dealings and temptations, they were regarded as too fickle, rootless, undisciplined, and cynical to be trusted. With modernity, urbanism and city life in large metropolises were no longer confined, as they had been earlier,to only a few percent of the total population, but steadily expanded to encompass the majority of the people. Correspondingly,country folk shrank in number to where they constitute only a few percent of the population. Yet the military continued to regardthem as the best "recruitingmaterial." Examples abound. With the coming of the twentieth century, the German armydrafteddisproportionatelyin the countryside and, as second best, among country-town people. It limited its recruitment from the large cities, where the masses were regardedboth as militarily less suitable and, being infected with socialism, as politically suspect.35In liberal democratic Britain, too, the world's most urban society, which adopted the draft in both world wars, country folk were considered the best fit for military service. Industrialworkerswere considered less desirable, while office people were perceived as the least suitable for the rigors of military life. Notably, the British Empire s undisputed best troops during both world wars came from the farms of the still predominantlyruraldominions: New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. Similarly, the farmer recruits from Middle America who dominated the United States armies during World War I were regarded as first35For the statistics, see Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War(New York: Longmans, 1914), 243-44.

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class "militarymaterial/' The American armies of World War II, in which city folk increased in number, still fought well enough but did not enjoy the same superbreputationas their predecessorsin the earlier world war. And Vietnam War draftees,especiallythose from the more urbanstates,had an even lower reputationfor "natural" soldierlyqualities. The U.S. Army releasesno statisticson the geographical breakdownof its but an analysisof the hometown of the fallenin the IraqWar recruitment, revealsthat ruraland small-town communitiescontributenearlytwice as many volunteer recruitsper population than the metropolitancenters.36 Israels crackunits duringthe firstdecadesof its existencewere drawnoversmall numberof volunwhelminglyfrom the young people of a relatively tarycommunalvillages(kibbutzim)and farmcommunities(moshavim). The far-reachingchange in the occupational structureof society and the cities has to be factored in. City folk during the zenith of the industrialage consisted mainly of factoryworkers.They were accustomed to physical labor,machines, and the massive, coordinated work regime labeled "Fordism" "Taylorism." and They lived in dense urban communities and were mostly literate.These qualities were majorstrengths for the military,especially as the military,too, was undergoing mechanization. However, as the industrial-technological era progressed,manufacturing declined while the service sector rose in its shareof the workforce in the most advanced economies. In the United States, which led this trend, 70 percent of the workforce is now employed in services while It only 18 percent work in manufacturing.37 can be argued that the too, has been moving from mechanized to information-based military, forces, increasinglyrelying on computerized data processing and accurate standoff fire to do most of the fighting. All the same, adaptationto military life comes far less naturallyto people from contemporary affluent societies who are accustomed to office work and the seclusion of residentialsuburbiathan it did to their forebearswho were farmersand factoryworkers.Again, while high rates of industrialurbanismcharacterized not only liberal societies but also Imperial and Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, nearly all the advancedservice economies are associated with liberal democracies, making the effect of the two factors hard to distinguish from one another.
36Bill Bishop, "Who Goes to War," WashingtonPost, November 16, 2003. After this article was submitted for review, demographic data were released by the Pentagon, confirming the trend: Ann Scott Tyson, "Youths in Rural U.S. Are Drawn to Military," Washington Post, November 10, 2005. Despite its tide, this article emphasizes the recruits' poor economic background (a significant point to be sure) but not their rural roots. 37Rosecrance (fn. 23), xii and also 26 for the other major industrial countries; Robert Gilpin, The Challenge of Global Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 33.

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The Sexual Revolution Sexual promiscuity is another factor that may have dampened enthusiasm for war in advancedmodern societies, especially among unmarried young men. Traditionally constituting the most aggressive element in society, largely because of their unsettled sexual situation, young single males now find themselves with plenty of outlets for their restlessness. Correspondingly,foreign adventurethat once lured many of them away from the dull and suffocating countryside and from small towns, has lost much of its attraction,especially for city dwellers, whereas the sexual aspects of such adventure are severely curtailed by state military authorities. In modern imperialJapan the troops still indulged in state-tolerated mass rape while serving abroad, some of it in the form of state-organized forced prostitution. At least two million women are estimated to have been raped by Soviet soldiers in conquered eastern Germany in 1945. Mass rape was a major feature of the ethnic wars in Bosnia and Rwanda during the 1990s. Whereas rape is severely punished (though it still occurs sporadically) in the armies of the Western democracies,American GIs and other Allied troops widely availed themselves of an abundant supply of low-cost prostitution in ruined Western Europe and, later, in desperately poor Vietnam.38All in all, however, the balance of sexual opportunity changed radically.Young men are now more reluctantto leave behind the pleasuresof life for the rigors and chastity of the field. "Make love not war"was the slogan of the powerful antiwaryouth campaign of the 1960s, which by no coincidence took off in tandem with a far-reachingliberalization of sexual norms. Once more, this liberalization occurred mainly in affluent and urban liberal societies, though it is interesting to speculate about how much it affected the Soviet Union in later periods and how it may affect today's China. Again, there is no need to fully accept the reasoning of Freud,Wilhelm Reich, and Michel Foucault to appreciatethe significance of this factor. Fewer Young Males In addition to changes in the circumstance and attitudes of young males, the significant decline in their relative numberis another factor that may have decreasedenthusiasm for war in contemporarydeveloped
38For the Soviets, see Anthony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2003), 410. For the Americans and Japanese in World War II, see Joshua Goldstein, Warand Gender:How GenderShapes the WarSystemand Vice Versa(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 337, 346, respectively.

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societies.39In premodern societies life expectancy not only at birth but also for adults was considerablylower than it is today.Thus the share of young adult males in the adult population was higher, even under zero demographic growth. With the onset of industrialization,as child mortality fell sharplywhereas birthratesfollowed only slowly,the number of young adults in a fast-growing population increased not only in absolute terms but also relative to the total adult population. This was evident in the nineteenth-century West, as it was in the twentiethcentury developing world. Young male adults were most conspicuous in the public enthusiasm for war in July-August 1914, as they were in all wars and revolutions. In today's affluent societies, however,with birthratesfalling below replacementlevel and with increasedlongevity, young adults including males constitute a shrinking portion of an aging population. Before World War I males aged fifteen to twentynine constituted 35 percent of the adult male population in Britain, and 40 percent in Germany;by 2000 their share had dropped to 24 and 29 percent, respectively.By comparison,young adult males of the same age cohorts constituted 48 percent of Iran'spopulation in 2000.40 Again, since young males have always been the most aggressiveelement in society while older men were traditionally associated with a counsel of moderation and compromise, some scholars have suggested that the decline in young men's relative numbers may contribute to the pacificityof developed societies while explainingthe greaterbelligerency of developing ones, particularlythose of Islam. China'sone-child policy may make it more similarto a developed society;but in Islamic societies booming population growth peaked only recently,and the relativeshare of young men is at its height.41Avoiding simplistic correlations, one should understandthe restlessness of the cohorts of young adult males in Islam in the context of their lack of economic (and sexual) opportunity in traditional, stagnant, and culturally defensive societies. At the height of its population growth around the middle of the nineteenth century,the share of young adult males in industriallybooming Britain was over 40 percent of the adult male population, not unlike in today's Iran, and yet this was the period ofthtpax Britannica.42
39 Herbert Moller, "Youth as a Force in the Modern World," Comparative Studies in Society and History 10 (April 1967-68); Christian Mesquida and Neil Wiener, "Human Collective Aggression: A Behavioral Ecology Perspective," Ethology and Sociobiology 17, no. 4 (1996). 40Mitchell (fn. 33), sec. B2, esp. 37, 52; United Nations, WorldPopulation Prospects:The 2000 Revision (New York: UN ,2001). 41 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 116-20. 42Mitchell (fh. 33), sec. B2, esp. 37, 52. Edward Luttwak argues that with fewer children per family,

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Women s franchise While young men have alwaysbeen the most aggressiveelement in society, men in general have always been more aggressiveand belligerent than women. Having won the franchise in twentieth-century liberal democracies, women have been able to influence government policies by their role as voters. Studies in the West during the past decades have shown a consistent gender gap in attitudes toward the use of military force.43Such gender differences may play a significant role in tilting the electoral balance against military ventures in affluent liberal democracies.The women's vote has been suggested as one of the factors that accounts for why liberal democracies became more pacific in the twentieth century than they had been in the nineteenth.44 It should be noted, though, that women are not unconditionallypacifist. In some societies and conflicts the attitudes of the sexes do not diverge significantly.For example, no such divergencehas been revealed in studies of both sides of the Arab-Israeliconflict.The authorsof these studies have suggested that their findings were most likely explained by the high salience of the conflict, which generated high mobilization levels among members of both sexes.45 Similarly,in the 2004 American presidential elections, the so-called security moms, who feared additional megaterrorattacks at home, cast more votes for the tougher candidate George W. Bush than they did for his Democratic challenger. In Russia the mothers' voice, still mute in the totalitarian system during the failed Soviet Afghan campaign (1979-88), became dominant during the first Chechen war (1994-96), after Russia had liberalized. Mothers took to the streets in public demonstrations,significantlycontributing to the Russian decision to withdraw. However, as with the American securitymoms, the continuation of terrorattackson Russian soil carriedout by Chechen extremists after the Russianwithdrawalleparents are much more reluctant to accept the loss of children in war; Luttwak, "Blood and Computers: The Crisis of Classical Military Power in Advanced Postindustrialist Societies," in Zeev Maoz and Azar Gat, eds., War in a Changing World(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). This argument does not withstand scrutiny, however; see Azar Gat s critique, also in Maoz and Gat (pp. 88-89). 43Lisa Brandes, "Public Opinion, International Security and Gender: The United States and Great Britain since 1945" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994). 44Bruce Russet, "The Democratic Peace And Yet It Moves," in M. Brown, S. Lynn-Jones, and S. Miller, eds., Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge: MIT,1996), 340; Doyle, "Michael Doyle on the Democratic Peace - Again," in Brown, Lynn-Jones, and Miller (p. 372). 45MarkTessler and Ina Warriner, "Gender, Feminism, and Attitudes toward International Conflict: Exploring Relationship with Survey Data from the Middle East," WorldPolitics 49 (January 1997); MarkTessler, Jodi Nachtwey, and Audra Grant, "Further Tests of the Women and Peace Hypothesis: Evidence from Cross-National Survey Research in the Middle East," International Studies Quarterly 43 (September 1999).

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gitimized Russian reintervention, at least in the eyes of Russian public opinion, men and women alike. Nuclear Weapons The advent of nuclearweapons is widely regardedas the crucial factor that has prevented a great power war since 1945. However, the Long Peace since 1945, the longest yet in the modern great power system, was preceded by the second and third longest peace ever between the Western powers in the years 1871-1914 and 1815-54. Crucially, of course, nuclear weapons have all but prevented the breakup of such extended periods of peace with devastating interstate wars as had occurredbefore 1945. This is a monumental change. And yet something had been changing in the relations between industrializing/industrial great powers, and particularly between industrial liberal/democratic great powers, long before the bomb.46 The advent of nuclearweapons marks a turning point in history.Yet the resulting restraintis based on an arms race, deterrence,and the balance of terror,and leaves room for covert, indirect, and low-intensity forms of armed conflict. At the same time, however, any sort of violent conflict between modern affluent liberal democracies was becoming virtually unthinkable irrespectiveof the bomb. A "positive"rather than a "negative" peace prevails among them. There is a big difference between the two, which does not make either of them less significant. As repeatedly pointed out here, all the above elements are deeply interconnected in the modern transformation, and each may have a contributing affect that has come into play and increased at different points in time. Among other things, this may explain why the democratic peace phenomenon has progressivelygained in strength. None of these elements is reducible to the other, and all of them interact in a mutually affecting and mutually reinforcing causalweb. Some readerswill undoubtedly find my argument problematic, because the effect of each of the above variablesis difficult to isolate, let alone measure.To achieve such isolation, variabilityamong the relevant cases is needed, yet it does not always exist. Affluent societies emerged only after World War II, and all have been liberal democracies. Had nondemocratic and capitalist Germany and Japan survivedWorld War II and become affluent, the effect of affluence could have been tested more effectively.If China becomes affluentwhile remaining nondemo46 I stand between the two poles represented by Mueller (fn. 27); and Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War(New York: Free Press, 1991).

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cratic,such a test may yet turn out to be more feasible.The same applies to metropolitan-servicesociety and largely also to the sexualrevolution, with the very limited test cases offered by the later Soviet Union and today's China. The complexity of the causal web is demonstrated in connection with the number of young males during the pax Britannica and today'sIslamic world. Women's franchiseis a factor alreadypointed out in earlierworks, and righthly so, because its potential contribution may be quite significant even though it is difficult to isolate. Indeed, to overlook all of the above potent developments because their effect cannot always be effectively isolated and measured evokes the proverbial images of the coin under the lamppost, the lack of evidence that is not an evidence of a lack, the dog that did not bark,and so on. A true generalized understandingof reality,alias theory,is achievable theoretical impoverishment is avoided only if it incorporates the relevant range of causal factors, including those that we can less fully isolate and measure, at least for the present. Conclusion: Past and Future The industrial-technological revolution has been transforming the world over the past two centuries. It is in the context of this radical transformationthat the idea of the democratic peace theory must be understood and- although basically true- amended. A far more complex causalprocess has been at work than a simple relationshipbetween an independent variable, liberalism/democracy,and a dependent one, the democratic peace. The emergence of the democratic peace phenomenon sometime during the nineteenth century has been linked, without further questioning, to the fact that liberal/democraticregimes began to evolve only then. But, indeed, they began to evolve on a country scale only at that point in time, rather than any earlier in history, precisely because of the modern transformation:the growth of "imagined communities''of print; a commercial-industrialeconomy; mass, urban, society; mass literacy; the bourgeois way of life; and growing abundance.The democraticpeace phenomenon has been intimately connected with these underlying processes and has increasedwith them. Indeed, all the liberal projections of peace whether based on democracy or on production and trade dependency- are mutually interconnected and are grounded the in, presuppose, sweeping changes to human existence generated by the industrial revolution. The democratic peace did not exist among premoderndemocratic and republicancity-states not because they were

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not democratic or even liberal enough politically but because they were unaffected by the modern transformation.This is the piece premodern, of the puzzle that Paine and Kant lacked in their visionarytracts,if only because they themselves predated most of that transformation. The modern transformationaccounts for the fact that not only liberal/democratic countries but all countries, once swept by the industrial-technological age, engaged in war far less than they previously did, a fact overlooked by the democratic peace theorists. Rather than the cost of war becoming prohibitive (it changed little, relativeto population and wealth), it was mainly the benefits of peace that increased dramaticallyonce the Malthusian trap was broken, tilting the overall balancebetween war and peace for economically ever-growing,marketoriented, increasinglyinterdependent industrializingand industrialsocieties, regardlessof their regime, for which wealth acquisitionceased to be a zero-sum game. This being acknowledged, the liberal/democratic countries' path to modernity has involved a distinctly greater aversion to war than that of nondemocratic and nonliberalcountries, because of the political, economic, social, and normative reasons specified above. These manifest themselves most strikinglywhen both sides to a potential conflict are liberal and democratic. Other factors that have derived from the modern transformationapply mostly to liberal democratic countries while being only variably connected to their regime. Such factors have been the staggering rise in the standardof living; the decrease in hardship,pain, and death; the dominance of metropolitan life and the service economy; the spreadof the consumer and entertainment society; sexual promiscuity,strikingly captured in the 1960s antiwar slogan "make love not war";women's franchise;and the shrinking ratio of young males in the population. How does the reframingof the democratic peace thesis offered here affect the current policy debate? After the collapse of the communist challenge and as the democratic peace theory took hold in the 1990s, the Wilsonian notion that the democratization of the world should be activelypursuedby the United States as a means for creating not only a Yet just but also a peaceful world gained widespreadcurrency. although there is much validity to the theory,it has tended to ignore some crucial factors, lending itself to simplistic interpretationsby political enthusiasts who lost sight of the massive intricacies involved. In the first place, as Wilson and his successors discovered in failed efforts to establish democracy through intervention, including military intervention, in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, democracyis neither desiredby all nor un-

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conditionally sustainable.Contrary to a widely held view in the West, democraticfreedom is not merely a neutral mechanism for best achieving any chosen value; it is itself an ideological choice, incorporating a whole set of values that many societies and cultures find to be deeply in conflict with other values they cherish more dearly Furthermore, the adoption of democracy is not merely an act of will but has rather tended to occur on a country scale in conjunction with economic and social modernization. As Wilson himself came to appreciate,"the real cause of the trouble in Mexico was not political but economic"; elections would not address "the prime cause of all political difficulties" there, the highly unequal pattern of land distribution and, hence, of social relations. Consequently, the president grew skeptical about the ability of foreign intervention to generate real change.47 The forceful democratization of Germany and Japan after World War II, the most successful cases of democratization in the twentieth century, had been made possible by more than the political circumstances of defeat in total war and the communist threat. While considerable culturalresistance to democracy and liberalism had to be overcome in both countries, both possessed a modern economic and social infrastructure upon which a fiinctioning liberal democracy could While the attempt to bring democratization to countriesbe built.48 such as those of the Arab world- that lack both a liberal tradition and countries that are largely tribal a modern socioeconomic infrastructure, and fraughtwith ethnic and religious cleavages,should persist, its limitations must be recognized. It will be a gradual process, as it was even in the United States, Britain, and France, and it can backfireunder excessive pressure,threatening stability in existing moderately pluralistic state-societies, where the main opposition is not liberal and democratic but Islamist and often undemocratic and radical. Not only public discussion but also much of the scholarlywork seems to have lost sight of the fact that even the United States, Britain, and France became liberal and parliamentarydecades, if not centuries, before turning democratic.In all these countries before modernization it was feared (and in France, for example, demonstrated in the wake of both the Great and 1848 Revolutions) that the people's choice if given the vote would not
47Thomas Knock, To End All Wars:WoodrowWilson and the Questfor a New WorldOrder (New York:

Mission: UnitedStates The OxfordUniversityPress,1992), 26-28; and generally, Tony Smith,Americas

and Worldwide Strugglefor Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1994), chap.3.
48Cf.

(Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell UniversityPress,2004), 38-39, 92-93. first Century

very similarly Francis Fukuyama, State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-

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be liberalism or, indeed, democracy,let alone a moderate and peaceful regime Second, the democraticpeace phenomenon tends to be much weaker in the early stages of liberalization,democratization,and economic development. Thus it is not at all clear that the democratization of Arab and Muslim states would ipso facto reduce the militancy of their societies. As in nineteenth-century Europe, and contraryto the prevailing cliche, public opinion in Arab states tends to be moremilitant than that of the semiautocratic state rulers, who struggle to keep a lid on such popular pressures.The semidemocratic Islamic regime in Iran that replaced the autocraticShah in a popularrevolution has been highly militant, no different in this respect from RevolutionaryFrance'srepublican regime. Although presidential candidates in Iran must be approvedby the the religious authorities who disqualify those whose Islamic credentials are suspect, it is still the case that the more fundamentalistand militant candidate Ahmadinejad won a sweeping victory over the relatively moderate Rafsanjaniin the 2005 popular elections. Popular support for Iran'snuclear program transcends social and political divides. In the first democraticAlgerian elections ever,held in 1992, the radical Islamic front won, leading to the army'sintervention to cancel the elections' results and to a murderouscivil war.The consequences of the victory of the Shia coalition in the January2005, post-Saddam Hussein, free Iraqi elections are too early to determine at the time of writing. The same applies to the results of free elections in Palestinian territory, where the militant Islamic movement Hamas enjoys strong popular support. (As this article was under review in January2006, the Hamas won the Palestinian elections, seemingly validating the above observation.) The peace treaties that the rulers of Egypt and Jordan signed with Israel are unpopularwith public opinion in these Arab countries. Obviously, while sharing a great deal, Arab and Muslim countries are not a monolith, and the consequences of democratizationin them may diverge accordingly.A discerning approachis therefore called for. Democratization, advanced as a remedy for such societies, should be understood as part of a far more complex causal web, whereby economic and social modernization is very much intertwined with successful democratization and liberalization, all of them affecting the growth of a democratic peace.