#10 - JRL 8058
Moscow Times
February 10, 2004
Democracy and War
By Andrew Kuchins
Andrew Kuchins is director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. This comment first
appeared in Vedomosti.
Politics and international relations are hardly exact sciences, but the notion that democracies do not go to war with each other is one of the most widely accepted and empirically verified "laws" that exists in the field of political science. Scholars refer in shorthand to this argument as the ="democratic peace," and it is part of a wider set of liberal theories of international relations.
One variation suggests that greater economic interdependence between states promotes more peaceful relations; another corollary posits that the more deeply engaged states are with multilateral international organizations, the less likely they are to go to war. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman promoted what he called the "Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention" that argues that no two countries that have McDonald's restaurants have ever gone to war. As an avid golfer, my personal favorite liberal peace theory indicates that countries with more than one golf course per million in population have never gone to war with each other. With McDonald's springing up all the time, Russia is in good shape on the "Golden Arches Theory," but with only one full golf course and a population of 145 million, there may be cause for concern.
The track records of peace theories that correlate rising income, trade levels and multilateral institutional engagement, however, are not nearly as strong as the idea of the democratic peace. So powerful is this idea that it was a major pillar of the Clinton administration's foreign policy to promote democracy abroad. While this rationale was always very skeptically received in Russia, a major conceptual driving force behind the Clinton administration's decision to expand NATO eastward was that it would promote the enlargement of a democratic Europe which would be more stable and peaceful.
Similarly, post-Cold War U.S. policy toward Russia also rests partially on the view that a democratic Russia is very unlikely to present security threats to its neighbors, Europe, and the U.S., while a totalitarian Soviet Union was a grave security challenge to the democratic West for more than 40 years. The current Bush administration's efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East rest on the assumption that states in the region will conduct more peaceful foreign policies if they are democracies rather than dictatorships.
But while history does support the view that mature, stable democracies are highly unlikely to go to war with each other, the picture looks very different for countries trying to make the transition from authoritarian dictatorship to democracy. Important research conducted in the 1990s by American scholars Jack Snyder and Edward Mansfield concluded not only that democratizing countries are more likely to go to war than democratic states, but that they are also less peaceful than stable authoritarian regimes. Further, they found that states making the huge leap from total autocracy to broad-based mass democracy are twice as likely to fight wars as those that remain authoritarian; and that moving backward in the democratization process, as opposed to no regime change, similarly increases the probability of war.
The explanation for this dangerous phenomenon is that increased political participation is virtually always accompanied by the rise of nationalism. In their 1995 Foreign Affairs article, writing about this dangerous pattern, Mansfield and Snyder concluded that, "As in so many previous cases, nationalism proved to be a way for militarist elite groups to appear populist in a democratizing society while obstructing the advance to full democracy." We have unfortunately witnessed this kind of dynamic all too often since the end of the Cold War, but perhaps nowhere as tragic for Europe as in the former Yugoslavia.
The irony, however, is that democratization does not increase the chances for war because that is what the people desire. These states are war-prone due to the perverse political incentives for elites to unleash nationalist sentiments to mobilize political support. And in many democratizing countries -- again, Serbia is a powerful example -- state-controlled media are enlisted to inflame the voters.
Our explanation, however, is incomplete without remembering that democratizing countries typically suffer from poorly developed political institutions and weak political parties. Opening the political process allows more and diverse interests to have a voice, but the lack of strong institutions and parties makes it harder to mitigate and reconcile fundamental differences. Political coalitions emerge, but they are unstable and often resort to nationalist appeals to hold constituents together. Not surprisingly, military and related security interest groups will seek to strengthen their domestic political strength in a weak institutional environment, and the residual appeal of nationalism can often result in the emergence of more belligerent coalitions that increase the likelihood of war. Once the genie of nationalism is out of the bottle in weakly institutionalized democracies, it is difficult to control.
International policymakers face a real conundrum in that efforts to promote regime change in authoritarian states may actually result in increasing short-term dangers. This is the crux of the challenge that the U.S. and the international community faces in transforming Saddam Hussein's totalitarian Iraq into a stable and peaceful democracy. Maybe we will find ourselves more satisfied and the region more peaceful with a transition in Iraq from a hard to soft authoritarianism, rather than a weakly institutionalized and unstable democracy.
The volatile mix of nationalism in weakly institutionalized democracies is also a major reason why the U.S. and many European governments remain concerned about Russia's ongoing transition. Political parties, despite the powerful performance of United Russia, remain poorly consolidated and key democratic institutions, such as the parliament and an independent judiciary, are weak. Nationalist appeals found greater resonance than ever in the December parliamentary elections. Political stability increasingly rests on the ability of one man to manage a very broad and diverse coalition.
That is why my policy advice for Russians is to build more golf courses fast!