Democracy and War: The End of an Illusion?

by Errol A. Henderson

Errol Henderson critically examines what has been called the closest thing to an empirical law in world politics, the concept of the democratic peace. Henderson tests two versions of the democratic... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1588260763
• ISBN13: 9781588260765
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
• Length: 191 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Fine demolition of recent justification for imperial wars

Certain academics have developed the `Democratic Peace Proposition' (DPP) which purports to prove that democratic states are less likely to fight wars than undemocratic states. Presidents Clinton and Bush have used the DPP to justify their wars of aggression. They claimed that their attacks were really wars for peace because by imposing democracy they increased the forces for peace. Like `humanitarian intervention', this notion of peace through war fails in practice. Henderson's study proves that those states labelled democracies, especially the US and British states, are in fact more likely to start wars than non-democracies. He also shows in particular that, contrary to US/British state propaganda, Muslim states are not more bellicose than others. But what counts as a war? Previous research into the DPP has only counted wars between states as wars. This let imperial states like Britain, France and the USA off the hook by excluding all their wars against colonised peoples. To imperialism, some wars and some people's deaths don't count, so neither the wars nor the deaths are counted. What counts as a democracy? The DPP also assumes that we know which states are democratic and which aren't. So the USA, whose President was chosen in 2000 only by a majority of the Supreme Court, not by the people, will be called democratic, whereas Cuba, the most democratic state in the world, would not. There was peace between the USA and the USSR from 1921 - the end of the Wars of Intervention - to 1991. Does the DPP then mean that the Soviet Union must have been democratic? Or did some other factor, the Soviet nuclear bomb for instance, deter the US state from attacking? As for Britain, how democratic is a state whose leader gets away with making and carrying out a secret agreement with a foreign power to attack another state illegally?