Hmm. It doesn’t look to be well supported to me—at least not on the basis of reading the WP article and some statistics. Possibly reading the professional papers on this would change my mind, but I’m not going to spend the time to do it. The problems I see with the theory are:
Most democratic countries are inside a few political and cultural allied blocks—Western Europe, North America and to some extent South America. This must be controlled for.
There are few wars between two democratic countries, but there are many wars between a democracy and a non-democracy, and the democracy is often the initiator (per the WP article). If you look at how many wars democracies initiated against autocracies, vs. how many wars autocracies initiated against other autocracies, there’s no significant difference (again per WP article). To me that suggests that democracies preserve political capital by redirecting their wars against the outsiders, while not forgoing wars at all.
The definition of what should be counted as a democracy is problematic anyway. For instance, at the start of WW1 Germany was arguably the most democratic of the big countries after France. It was almost as democratic as the USA is today, which is sort of the entry-point standard for democracy (noone wants to publish a paper that classifies the USA as non-democratic). And yet any standard history book will treat WW1 as a conflict of the Good Democracies vs the Evil Autocracies. A similar argument applies to some WW2-era countries.
Oh, and US hegemony in Western hemisphere affairs. The US has started many more wars than the average for any country regardless of regime.
Most democratic countries are inside a few political and cultural allied blocks—Western Europe, North America and to some extent South America. This must be controlled for.
I’m not sure why you would want to control for this. Creating these kind of political and cultural blocks is one of the mechanisms by which democracies act and influence the world.
To me that suggests that democracies preserve political capital by redirecting their wars against the outsiders, while not forgoing wars at all.
Doesn’t this support the original statement, which was that it’s not a coincidence that “the most powerful military and economic global alliances consist mostly of democratic countries”?
I’m not sure why you would want to control for this. Creating these kind of political and cultural blocks is one of the mechanisms by which democracies act and influence the world.
Is there evidence that the democracy caused the creation of the blocks? To me it looks more like the blocks were there to begin with—for political and historical reasons—and because dominant members of the blocks were democratic and some of them strongly pushed for democracy in their foreign policy, democracy spread and lasted inside the blocks.
E.g., Western and Southern Europe has been almost entirely democratic post WW2 because the victors led by the US demanded it. If the Nazis had won, or if the USSR had conquered Western Europe, then they would not have been democratic. That’s another (and obvious) sense in which it’s a historical coincidence, not predictable beforehand, that Western Europe is democratic.
It’s true that the block(s) define themselves, today, as democratic and won’t allow tight integeration with non-democratic countries. But what countries are there whose regimes actually changed as a result of this policy? Probably a few and a few more where it was a factor, but AFAIK nothing much on a global scale.
To me that suggests that democracies preserve political capital by redirecting their wars against the outsiders, while not forgoing wars at all.
Doesn’t this support the original statement, which was that it’s not a coincidence that “the most powerful military and economic global alliances consist mostly of democratic countries”?
It’s a method by which such alliances maintain their power, but it’s hardly powerful enough to be the main reason they became paramount in the first place.
If during WW2 (and plausibly also during WW1), the US had been anti-democratic—then the post-war world would almost certainly not have contained any democratic countries in Europe. If we count countries and not people (which is reasonable when discussing alliances and power blocks), then a regime change in just one country would have (with significant probability) reversed the regime outcome for the whole world.
Hmm. It doesn’t look to be well supported to me—at least not on the basis of reading the WP article and some statistics. Possibly reading the professional papers on this would change my mind, but I’m not going to spend the time to do it. The problems I see with the theory are:
Most democratic countries are inside a few political and cultural allied blocks—Western Europe, North America and to some extent South America. This must be controlled for.
There are few wars between two democratic countries, but there are many wars between a democracy and a non-democracy, and the democracy is often the initiator (per the WP article). If you look at how many wars democracies initiated against autocracies, vs. how many wars autocracies initiated against other autocracies, there’s no significant difference (again per WP article). To me that suggests that democracies preserve political capital by redirecting their wars against the outsiders, while not forgoing wars at all.
The definition of what should be counted as a democracy is problematic anyway. For instance, at the start of WW1 Germany was arguably the most democratic of the big countries after France. It was almost as democratic as the USA is today, which is sort of the entry-point standard for democracy (noone wants to publish a paper that classifies the USA as non-democratic). And yet any standard history book will treat WW1 as a conflict of the Good Democracies vs the Evil Autocracies. A similar argument applies to some WW2-era countries.
Oh, and US hegemony in Western hemisphere affairs. The US has started many more wars than the average for any country regardless of regime.
I’m not sure why you would want to control for this. Creating these kind of political and cultural blocks is one of the mechanisms by which democracies act and influence the world.
Doesn’t this support the original statement, which was that it’s not a coincidence that “the most powerful military and economic global alliances consist mostly of democratic countries”?
Is there evidence that the democracy caused the creation of the blocks? To me it looks more like the blocks were there to begin with—for political and historical reasons—and because dominant members of the blocks were democratic and some of them strongly pushed for democracy in their foreign policy, democracy spread and lasted inside the blocks.
E.g., Western and Southern Europe has been almost entirely democratic post WW2 because the victors led by the US demanded it. If the Nazis had won, or if the USSR had conquered Western Europe, then they would not have been democratic. That’s another (and obvious) sense in which it’s a historical coincidence, not predictable beforehand, that Western Europe is democratic.
It’s true that the block(s) define themselves, today, as democratic and won’t allow tight integeration with non-democratic countries. But what countries are there whose regimes actually changed as a result of this policy? Probably a few and a few more where it was a factor, but AFAIK nothing much on a global scale.
It’s a method by which such alliances maintain their power, but it’s hardly powerful enough to be the main reason they became paramount in the first place.
If during WW2 (and plausibly also during WW1), the US had been anti-democratic—then the post-war world would almost certainly not have contained any democratic countries in Europe. If we count countries and not people (which is reasonable when discussing alliances and power blocks), then a regime change in just one country would have (with significant probability) reversed the regime outcome for the whole world.