by Gus diZerega
Here is an intriguing pattern ignored by almost everyone:
Every communist state whose Party came to power largely on its own and bordered another such state fought a serious armed conflict with its neighbor: Russia/China, China/Vietnam, Vietnam/Kampuchea. Albania and Yugoslavia were the only ‘exceptions.’ But Albania entered an alliance with Russia against Yugoslavia because Tito threatened to invade it to create a greater all-Balkan state. During this period Russia twice invaded satellites deemed insufficiently reliable: Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
At the same time no NATO state fought another, and since the fall of Communism, this peaceful pattern has continued. Again, without exception.
What is interesting about this pattern, ironically, is not that liberal democracies never fought one another, it is that ALL the Leninist states who were independent and bordered another such state threatened to or did make war on its neighbor.
One of the most important and least appreciated facts in human history is that liberal democracies have never fought wars with others of their own kind. In using this term, I include only countries with universal manhood suffrage in electing representatives (I could limit it to universal suffrage and my statement would still be supported, but the sample would be smaller). In addition, to be included, a democracy must have had two peaceful transfers of power and a war should include 100 or more casualties.
Why the Democratic Peace?
Given war’s universal presence throughout known history, what explains the democratic peace? Three explanations have been offered by political scientists.
First, maybe cultural similarities and norms can explain the democratic peace. But the evidence is lacking. The War of 1812 was fought with Britain, culturally the closest-to-us country in the world. Culturally the North and the South shared more in common with one another than either did with any other country. Buddhism appears the most peaceful of the major religions, but Buddhist monks were major supporters of the civil war (some called it a holy war) with Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka. This ideological explanation does not account for the pattern.
What of democratic institutions? Can they explain it? To a point, but only to a point. It is a challenge to build popular support for aggression. But it is not a big challenge, as our aggression against Iraq demonstrates, and there are many more examples of aggression by democracies. Just not against other democracies. I will argue below that it is the systemic framework within which these institutions exist that helps answer our question, and not the institutions themselves.
A third suggests it is not the form of government that matters, but economic self-interest. Major customers do not kill one another. And yet there are important counter examples. Wilhelmine Germany and Imperial Russia were major trading partners before WWI and trade between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was a major factor in each nation’s economy.
Democracies are spontaneous orders, states are organizations
Michael Polanyi and F. A. Hayek first developed the concept of “spontaneous order” as applied to the social sciences. Polanyi focused mostly on science, Hayek on the market. Even so, both explored other forms of it as they knew the example on which they focused was not unique.
What is a spontaneous order? It arises from at least formally voluntary interactions between equals. In other words, among people it arises under conditions of isonomia, of legal equality among equals. More explicitly, a spontaneous order can arise when all are free to apply common procedural rules to pursue any project of their choosing. Within such an order, any project is legitimately pursued so long as it is done so within this framework of common rules.
Different rules encourage different plans to be pursued within their context. In return, different plans generate different spontaneous orders. The market depends on agreement on the terms of mutually voluntary exchanges. It is a poor vehicle for encouraging and coordinating scientific work. Scientists seek to persuade other scientists about the nature of the world. This is a poor way to run a business. As has frequently been observed, the market generates a commodity economy whereas science generates a gift economy.
Hayek came very close to recognizing democracies as spontaneous orders. In Constitution of Liberty he wrote:
… democracy does not put power in the hands of the wisest and best informed and … the decision of a government of the elite may be more beneficial to the whole; but this need not prevent us from still giving democracy the preference. It is in its dynamic, rather than in its static, aspects that the value of democracy proves itself. As is true of liberty, the benefits of democracy will show themselves only in the long run, while its more immediate achievements may well be inferior to those of other forms of government.
The most important part of this observation is “It is in its dynamic, rather than in its static, aspects that the value of democracy proves itself. As is true of liberty, the benefits of democracy will show themselves only in the long run, while its more immediate achievements may well be inferior to those of other forms of government.” The same, of course, can be said of the market process. In a completely stable environment the case for central planning is strong, but when the environment is always changing, the freedom for anyone to take advantage of opportunities they see is decisively superior.
In this quotation we can also see why Hayek missed the implications of his argument. He equates democracy with majority rule. But the majority almost never ‘rules’ in a democracy, and when it does, that is when the government acts most undemocratically, as in wartime.
Like markets and science, democracies include the entire system. They cannot be reduced to final outcomes any more than markets can be reduced to the exchange between a seller and the final consumer. Undemocratic governments preserve a sharp distinction between rulers and ruled. Democracies dissolve this distinction. They include citizens as voters and institutions such as political parties and the press which in no meaningful sense constitute the government. Had Hayek realized this, he would have identified democracies as spontaneous orders.
If scientists pursue agreement about the nature of the world and people in a market seek to make mutually beneficial exchanges, what do democracies seek? They seek among other things, agreement about the general rules governing mutually voluntary exchanges and relationships (such rules are simply assumed in most economics). Property rights, so essential for the market, need to be defined outside the market. Further, at times those definitions will need to be modified, as when air pollution reaches a point as to harm human health. Whoever defines them will tend to do so in a way favorable to their interests. Democracies give every citizen at some point a vote in this process.
Democracies are not states
The biggest failure of liberal political thought is to treat democracies as a kind of state. The state is an organization of rule, and it has been incorporated into and dissolved within a democracy. If the legislative function were dissolved into the legislative function it would become a state. Putin’s Russia is an example. It has a legislature, but it is powerless against the executive.
There is always a tension between the legislative core of a democracy and the executive functions it needs to implement its decisions. When the executive in a democracy can free itself from oversight, it can act aggressively in service to its own goals, goals not necessarily subject to democratic discussion. This is why so much US armed intervention is done secretly, when only a small internal budget is needed. American interventions against democratic Chile and governments becoming stable democracies, like Guatemala and Iran, were of this nature.
In short, these interventions took place when the executive could circumvent democratic processes and act like a dictator. When the democratic process gets involved, such violence is short-circuited, especially when both sides are democratic. In 1966, under de Gaulle, France left NATO’s core. De Gaulle said its missiles could point both ways. Lyndon Johnson took this as a direct challenge, as indeed it was. While both leaders sought to appear dominant, a pattern that would lead to escalation, this did not happen. Instead, civil society in US and France limited de Gaulle and Johnson’s efforts to escalate through their independent networks of cultural, scientific, economic, and simply personal relation. I imagine few readers today even know this happened.
In the absence of such networks within a democratic context, such disagreements led to at least serious border wars between Russia and China, China and Vietnam, and Vietnam and Kampuchea. Many thousands died.
Systems of peace and war
My argument carries two more implications beyond explaining why the democratic peace exists. First, systems of relationships actively shape the interactions of the people and organizations within them. Borders tend to weaken between democracies, as the European Union demonstrates. At the same time, occasionally a democratic region seeks independence from the larger democratic entity of which it is a part. This also has turned out to be peaceful: Britain and the EU, Slovakia and Czechoslovakia, and Norway and Sweden. If Quebec voted to leave Canada, few, if any, believe a civil war would result.
In addition, we must differentiate spontaneous orders from organizations and realize just how fundamentally different they are and the variety of ways they manifest. Liberal or isonomic principles generate spontaneous orders in science, economics, and politics. Sadly, this last example has been all but universally ignored because most liberals treat democracies as states. This blinds them to the ways they are not and perhaps the most important of them is the democratic peace.
Any attempt to reduce spontaneous orders to simple voluntary exchange by individuals (as many economists seek) will lead to bad explanations. Often very bad. We as individuals, as well as our organizations, are who we are and act as we do because in significant part due to the systems within which we act, and causality in systems goes both ways. The state as a system not only tends to concentrate power at the top, it also creates conditions where those at the top will take challenges as threats to their power, and act accordingly. Throughout the history of states frequent wars have been the result. This does not reflect human nature, it reflects human nature as shaped by a larger systemic context.
The democratic peace is the same kind of thing. Democracies do not elect better people. And the allure of power is always there. But the constraint on power by a democratic system have served, so far, to ensure no liberal democracies have ever fought one another in a war. In a time not only of nukes, but of increasingly autonomous and effective killing machines, the long-term future of the human race depends on the triumph of democratic government.
Gus diZerega has published numerous scholarly articles on complexity, spontaneous order, democracy, environmentalism, and interfaith issues. Send him mail.
Isonomia Quarterly 