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What Is the Democratic Peace Theory? Definition and Examples

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The Democratic Peace Theory states that countries with liberal democratic forms of government are less likely to go to war with one another than those with other forms of government. Proponents of the theory draw on the writings of German philosopher Immanuel Kant and, more recently, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson , who in his 1917 World War I message to Congress stated that “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Critics argue that the simple quality of being democratic in nature may not be the main reason for the historic tendency of peace between democracies.

Key Takeaways

• The Democratic Peace Theory holds that democratic countries are less likely to go to war with one another than non-democratic countries.
• The theory evolved from the writings of German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the adoption of the 1832 Monroe Doctrine by the United States.
• The theory is based on the fact that declaring war in democratic countries requires citizen support and legislative approval.
• Critics of the theory argue that merely being democratic may not be the primary reason for peace between democracies.

Democratic Peace Theory Definition

Dependent on the ideologies of liberalism , such as civil liberties and political freedom, the Democratic Peace Theory holds that democracies are hesitant to go to war with other democratic countries. Proponents cite several reasons for the tendency of democratic states to maintain peace, including:

• The citizens of democracies usually have some say over legislative decisions to declare war.
• In democracies, the voting public holds their elected leaders responsible for human and financial war losses.
• When held publicly accountable, government leaders are likely to create diplomatic institutions for resolving international tensions.
• Democracies rarely view countries with similar policies and form of government as hostile.
• Usually possessing more wealth that other states, democracies avoid war to preserve their resources.

The Democratic Peace Theory was first articulated by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay entitled “ Perpetual Peace .” In this work, Kant argues that nations with constitutional republic governments are less likely to go to war because doing so requires the consent of the people—who would actually be fighting the war. While the kings and queens of monarchies can unilaterally declare war with little regard for their subjects’ safety, governments chosen by the people take the decision more seriously.

The United States first promoted the concepts of the Democratic Peace Theory in 1832 by adopting the Monroe Doctrine . In this historic piece of international policy, the U.S. affirmed that it would not tolerate any attempt by European monarchies to colonize any democratic nation in North or South America.

The democratic peace theory does not claim that democratic countries are generally more peaceful than nondemocratic countries. However, the theory’s claim that democratic countries rarely fight each other is widely regarded as true by international relations experts and further supported by history. 

Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” essay remained largely unnoticed until the mid-1980s when the American international-relations scholar Michael Doyle cited it in arguing that the “zone of peace” envisioned by Kant had gradually become reality. After the Cold War, which pitted democratic states against communist states, the democratic peace theory became one of the most studied topics of research in international relations. This research has shown that while wars between non-democracies, or between democracies and non-democracies have been common, wars between democracies have been extremely rare.

Interest in the democratic peace theory has not been limited to the halls of academia. During the 1990s, U.S. President Bill Clinton featured it in many aspects of his administration’s foreign policy of spreading democracy throughout the world. Clinton’s foreign policy asserted that if the formerly autocratic nations of Eastern Europe and the collapsed Soviet Union converted to democracy, the United States and its allies in Europe would no longer need to restrain those countries militarily because democracies do not attack each other.

The democratic peace theory similarly influenced U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. U.S. policymakers believed that a zone of democracy equaled a zone of peace and security that supported President George W. Bush’s strategy of using military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s ruthless dictatorship in Iraq. Bush’s administration hoped that the democratization of Iraq would eventually result in the spread of democracy throughout the Middle East.

Democracies and War in the 1900s

Perhaps the strongest evidence supporting the Democratic Peace Theory is the fact that there were no wars between democracies during the 20th century.

As the century began, the recently ended Spanish-American War had seen the United States defeat the monarchy of Spain in a struggle for control of the Spanish colony of Cuba.

In World War I , the U.S. allied with the democratic European empires to defeat the authoritarian and fascist empires of Germany, Austro-Hungary, Turkey, and their allies. This led to World War II and eventually the Cold War of the 1970s, during which the U.S. led a coalition of democratic nations in resisting the spread of authoritarian Soviet communism .

Most recently, in the Gulf War (1990-91), the Iraq War (2003-2011), and the ongoing war in Afghanistan , the United States, along with various democratic nations fought to counter international terrorism by radical jihadist factions of authoritarian Islamist governments. Indeed, after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks , the George W. Bush administration based its use military force to topple Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq on the belief that it would bring democracy—thus peace—to the Middle East.

While the claim that democracies rarely fight each other has been widely accepted, there is less agreement on why this so-called democratic peace exists.

Some critics have argued that it was actually the Industrial Revolution that led to peace during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The resulting prosperity and economic stability made all of the newly modernized countries—democratic and nondemocratic—much less belligerent toward each other than in preindustrial times. Several factors arising from modernization may have generated a greater aversion to war among industrialized nations than democracy alone. Such factors included higher standards of living, less poverty, full employment, more leisure time, and the spread of consumerism. Modernized countries simply no longer felt the need to dominate each other in order to survive.

Democratic Peace Theory has also been criticized for failing to prove a cause-and-effect relationship between wars and types of government and the ease with which definitions of “democracy” and “war” can be manipulated to prove a non-existent trend. While its authors included very small, even bloodless wars between new and questionable democracies, one 2002 study contends that as many wars have been fought between democracies as might be statistically expected between non-democracies.

Other critics argue that throughout history, it has been the evolution of power, more than democracy or its absence that has determined peace or war. Specifically, they suggest that the effect called “liberal democratic peace” is really due to “realist” factors including military and economic alliances between democratic governments.

Sources and Further Reference

• Owen, J. M.  “ How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace .” International Security (1994).
• Schwartz, Thomas and Skinner, Kiron K. (2002) “ The Myth of the Democratic Peace .” Foreign Policy Research Institute.
• Gat, Azar (2006). “ The Democratic Peace Theory Reframed: The Impact of Modernity .” Cambridge University Press.
• Pollard, Sidney (1981). “ Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe, 1760–1970 .” Oxford University Press.
• Republic vs. Democracy: What Is the Difference?
• Democracy Promotion as Foreign Policy
• U.S. Policy in the Middle East: 1945 to 2008
• American Manifest Destiny and Modern Foreign Policy
• What Is Democracy? Definition and Examples
• Understanding the Bush Doctrine
• Impacts of the Iraq War on the Middle East
• What Is Interventionism? Definition and Examples
• Is Iraq a Democracy?
• What Is Foreign Policy? Definition and Examples
• What Is a Military Dictatorship? Definition and Examples
• What Is Public Choice Theory?
• Who Were the Democratic Presidents of the United States?
• What Is Autocracy? Definition and Examples
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• Why Did the United States Go to War with Iraq?

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Democratic Peace Theory

Introduction, general overviews.

• Early Empirical Work
• Casualties and Public Support for War
• Audience Costs
• Variation among Democratic Political Institutions
• Variation among Authoritarian Political Institutions
• Democracy and War Outcomes
• Democracy, Alliance, and Wars
• Democracies, Conscription, and War
• Normative Accounts
• Systemic Outlooks and the Effect of Peace on Democracy
• Constructivist Accounts
• Democratization
• Methodological Debates
• Common Interests
• Critiques of the Normative Account
• Critiques of Democracy and War Outcomes
• Secrecy and Covert Action
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• Formal Theory

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Democratic Peace Theory by Dan Reiter LAST REVIEWED: 25 October 2012 LAST MODIFIED: 25 October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756223-0014

Democratic peace is the proposition that democracies are more peaceful in their foreign relations. This idea dates back centuries, at least to Immanuel Kant and other 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers. In recent decades it has constituted a major research agenda, competing with and arguably supplanting other research agendas such as neo-realism. The democratic peace proposition has many possible empirical and theoretical forms. On the empirical side, some propose that democracies are more peaceful in their relations with all other states in the system (“monadic” democratic peace); some propose that democracies are more peaceful only in their relations with other democracies (“dyadic” democratic peace); others argue that the more democracies there are in a region or the international system, the more peaceful the region or international system will be (“systemic” democratic peace); and still others doubt the existence of any significant relationship between democracy and peace. Notably, most although not all empirical research on the democratic peace has employed quantitative methods of analysis. On the theoretical side, there are many different accounts of the relationship between democracy and peace, with most focusing on domestic political institutions, domestic political norms, and constructed identities. The democratic peace proposition is connected to many other propositions linking domestic politics and international relations, including that democracies are more likely to cooperate with each other, that democracies are more likely to win the wars they fight, that escalating military casualties degrade public support for war, that leaders initiate conflict to secure their domestic hold on power (the diversionary hypothesis), that democracies fight shorter wars, that different kinds of democracies experience different kinds of conflict behavior, that different kinds of authoritarian systems experience different kinds of conflict behavior, and others. The democratic peace also overlaps with related ideas such as the liberal peace and the commercial peace.

The democratic peace proposition has been lurking in Western thought for millennia, as Weart 1998 shows, but Kant 1991 provides its first modern formulation. The idea that global democracy would provide a solid foundation for global peace was restated in 1917 by Woodrow Wilson as a justification for American entry into World War I and then as part of his vision for a new world order. Modern political science first observed the dyadic democratic peace—that democracies tend not to fight each other—in the 1970s. The observation enjoyed greater attention in the 1980s in particular in two pathbreaking 1983 essays by Michael Doyle, reprinted in Doyle 2011 . It received fuller theoretical and empirical attention in the 1990s. Fukuyama 1992 , a famous argument that humanity had reached “the end of history,” incorporates the democratic peace proposition. Other scholars sought to develop the theory and push forward more advanced research designs in works such as Russett 1993 ; Ray 1995 ; and Rousseau, et al. 1996 . In the 2000s, proponents of the democratic peace responded to their critics and embedded the democratic peace in a broader Kantian peace ( Russett and Oneal 2001 ).

Doyle, Michael W. Liberal Peace: Selected Essays . New York: Routledge, 2011.

Contains a number of Doyle’s important essays, especially from the 1980s, that lay out the philosophical and theoretical basis of the democratic peace.

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man . New York: Free Press, 1992.

Presents a Hegelian argument that humanity has at last achieved its penultimate form of political and economic organization, liberal democracy. The definitive intellectual statement that Western values triumphed in the Cold War.

Huth, Paul K., and Todd L. Allee. The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Application of the democratic peace to territorial conflict in the 20th century. Presents a massive new data set on territorial conflicts.

Kant, Immanuel. Kant’s Political Writings . 2d ed. Edited by Hans S. Reiss. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Central essay is on the “perpetual peace,” which presents Kant’s vision as to how republics can maintain world peace. Originally published in 1796.

Ray, James Lee. Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

Provides an extensive literature review on democratic peace literature up to the early 1990s as well as case studies of the Fashoda Crisis and Spanish-American War.

Rousseau, David L., Christopher Gelpi, Dan Reiter, and Paul K. Huth. “Assessing the Dyadic Nature of the Democratic Peace, 1918–1988.” American Political Science Review 90.3 (1996): 512–533.

DOI: 10.2307/2082606

Important, early empirical test of the democratic peace, presenting important research design advances.Available online by subscription.

Russett, Bruce. Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post–Cold War World . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

The first book-length treatment of the democratic peace. Lays out the normative and institutional explanations of the democratic peace and presents a variety of different forms of rigorous evidence demonstrating the dyadic democratic peace, including sophisticated analysis of post-1945 conflict behavior.

Russett, Bruce, and John R. Oneal. Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations . New York: Norton, 2001.

Embedded the democratic peace in a larger theoretical framework, the Kantian Peace, in which democracy, trade, international organization, and peace all mutually reinforce each other. Presented more sophisticated empirical tests, addressing many 1990s theoretical and empirical critiques. Also see Democratization .

Weart, Spencer R. Never at War: Why Democracies Will Never Fight One Another . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Summarizes several years of work on democratic peace theory. Presents a narrative rather than statistical empirical tests. One main contribution is the analysis of democratic peace in pre-Napoleonic times, including ancient Greece and medieval Italy. Discusses the phenomena of democratic aggression and imperialism.

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Democratic Peace or Liberal Peace: The Debate

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Philip A. Schrodt, Democratic Peace or Liberal Peace: The Debate, International Studies Review , Volume 6, Issue 2, June 2004, Pages 292–294, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1521-9488.2004.00405.x

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Over the past two decades, the “democratic peace” hypothesis—namely, that wars do not occur between democracies—has received a great deal of attention; James Ray (1995) and Steve Chan (1997) provide thorough reviews of this literature. Closely related—in fact one of the strongest candidates for an alternative explanation—is the “liberal peace” hypothesis, which posits that economic development and mutual trade are powerful inhibitors of war (see, for example, Keohane and Nye 1977; Russett and Oneal 2001). Both of these hypotheses have distinguished pedigrees in qualitative liberal political theory and can be traced to the beginnings of the nineteenth century. Both hypotheses are sufficiently simple that they have been invoked in public policy debates. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, for example, reformulated the liberal peace hypothesis in 1996 in the following terms: “Countries that both have McDonald's restaurants don't fight each other.” Both hypotheses have been used to explain the transition from the fratricidal Western Europe of the first half of the twentieth century to Europe's present status as a zone of peace.

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Introducing Liberalism in International Relations Theory

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Liberalism is a defining feature of modern democracy, illustrated by the prevalence of the term ‘liberal democracy’ as a way to describe countries with free and fair elections, rule of law and protected civil liberties. However, liberalism – when discussed within the realm of IR theory – has evolved into a distinct entity of its own. Liberalism contains a variety of concepts and arguments about how institutions, behaviours and economic connections contain and mitigate the violent power of states. When compared to realism, it adds more factors into our field of view – especially a consideration of citizens and international organisations. Most notably, liberalism has been the traditional foil of realism in IR theory as it offers a more optimistic world view, grounded in a different reading of history to that found in realist scholarship.

The basics of liberalism

Liberalism is based on the moral argument that ensuring the right of an individual person to life, liberty and property is the highest goal of government. Consequently, liberals emphasise the wellbeing of the individual as the fundamental building block of a just political system. A political system characterised by unchecked power, such as a monarchy or a dictatorship, cannot protect the life and liberty of its citizens. Therefore, the main concern of liberalism is to construct institutions that protect individual freedom by limiting and checking political power. While these are issues of domestic politics, the realm of IR is also important to liberals because a state’s activities abroad can have a strong influence on liberty at home. Liberals are particularly troubled by militaristic foreign policies. The primary concern is that war requires states to build up military power. This power can be used for fighting foreign states, but it can also be used to oppress its own citizens. For this reason, political systems rooted in liberalism often limit military power by such means as ensuring civilian control over the military.

Wars of territorial expansion, or imperialism – when states seek to build empires by taking territory overseas – are especially disturbing for liberals.   Not only do expansionist wars strengthen the state at the expense of the people, these wars also require long-term commitments to the military occupation and political control of foreign territory and peoples. Occupation and control require large bureaucracies that have an interest in maintaining or expanding the occupation of foreign territory. For liberals, therefore, the core problem is how to develop a political system that can allow states to protect themselves from foreign threats without subverting the individual liberty of its citizenry. The primary institutional check on power in liberal states is free and fair elections via which the people can remove their rulers from power, providing a fundamental check on the behaviour of the government. A second important limitation on political power is the division of political power among different branches and levels of government – such as a parliament/congress, an executive and a legal system. This allows for checks and balances in the use of power.

Democratic peace theory is perhaps the strongest contribution liberalism makes to IR theory. It asserts that democratic states are highly unlikely to go to war with one another. There is a two-part explanation for this phenomenon. First, democratic states are characterised by internal restraints on power, as described above. Second, democracies tend to see each other as legitimate and unthreatening and therefore have a higher capacity for cooperation with each other than they do with non-democracies. Statistical analysis and historical case studies provide strong support for democratic peace theory, but several issues continue to be debated. First, democracy is a relatively recent development in human history. This means there are few cases of democracies having the opportunity to fight one another. Second, we cannot be sure whether it is truly a ‘democratic’ peace or whether some other factors correlated with democracy are the source of peace – such as power, alliances, culture, economics and so on. A third point is that while democracies are unlikely to go to war with one another, some scholarship suggests that they are likely to be aggressive toward non-democracies – such as when the United States went to war with Iraq in 2003. Despite the debate, the possibility of a democratic peace gradually replacing a world of constant war – as described by realists – is an enduring and important facet of liberalism.

We currently live in an international system structured by the liberal world order built after the Second World War (1939–1945). The international institutions, organisations and norms (expected behaviours) of this world order are built on the same foundations as domestic liberal institutions and norms; the desire to restrain the violent power of states. Yet, power is more diluted and dispersed internationally than it is within states. For example, under international law, wars of aggression are prohibited. There is no international police force to enforce this law, but an aggressor knows that when breaking this law it risks considerable international backlash. For example, states – either individually or as part of a collective body like the United Nations – can impose economic sanctions or intervene militarily against the offending state. Furthermore, an aggressive state also risks missing out on the benefits of peace, such as the gains from international trade, foreign aid and diplomatic recognition.

The fullest account of the liberal world order is found in the work of Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry (1999), who describe three interlocking factors:

First, international law and agreements are accompanied by international organisations to create an international system that goes significantly beyond one of just states. The archetypal example of such an organisation is the United Nations, which pools resources for common goals (such as ameliorating climate change), provides for near constant diplomacy between enemies and friends alike and gives all member states a voice in the international community.

Second, the spread of free trade and capitalism through the efforts of powerful liberal states and international organisations like the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank creates an open, market-based, international economic system. This situation is mutually beneficial as a high level of trade between states decreases conflict and makes war less likely, since war would disrupt or cancel the benefits (profits) of trade. States with extensive trade ties are therefore strongly incentivised to maintain peaceful relations. By this calculation, war is not profitable, but detrimental to the state.

The third element of the liberal international order is international norms. Liberal norms favour international cooperation, human rights, democracy and rule of law. When a state takes actions contrary to these norms, they are subject to various types of costs. However, international norms are often contested because of the wide variation in values around the globe. Nevertheless, there are costs for violating liberal norms. The costs can be direct and immediate. For example, the European Union placed an arms sale embargo on China following its violent suppression of pro-democracy protesters in 1989. The embargo continues to this day. The costs can also be less direct, but equally as significant. For example, favourable views of the United States decreased significantly around the world following the 2003 invasion of Iraq because the invasion was undertaken unilaterally (outside established United Nations rules) in a move that was widely deemed illegitimate.

Most liberal scholarship today focuses on how international organisations foster cooperation by helping states overcome the incentive to escape from international agreements. This type of scholarship is commonly referred to as ‘neoliberal institutionalism’ – often shortened to just ‘neoliberalism’. This often causes confusion as neoliberalism is also a term used outside IR theory to describe a widespread economic ideology of deregulation, privatisation, low taxes, austerity (public spending cuts) and free trade. The essence of neoliberalism, when applied within IR, is that states can benefit significantly from cooperation if they trust one another to live up to their agreements. In situations where a state can gain from cheating and escape punishment, defection is likely. However, when a third party (such as an impartial international organisation) is able to monitor the behaviour of signatories to an agreement and provide information to both sides, the incentive to defect decreases and both sides can commit to cooperate. In these cases, all signatories to the agreement can benefit from absolute gains. Absolute gains refer to a general increase in welfare for all parties concerned – everyone benefits to some degree, though not necessarily equally. Liberal theorists argue that states care more about absolute gains than relative gains. Relative gains, which relate closely to realist accounts, describe a situation where a state measures its increase in welfare relative to other states and may shy away from any agreements that make a competitor stronger. By focusing on the more optimistic viewpoint of absolute gains and providing evidence of its existence via international organisations, liberals see a world where states will likely cooperate in any agreement where any increase in prosperity is probable.

Liberal theory and American imperialism

One of the more interesting illustrations of liberalism comes from the foreign policy of the United States during the early twentieth century. During this period, the United States was liberal, but according to the dominant historical narrative, also imperialistic (see Meiser 2015). So, there appears to be a contradiction. If we take a closer look we see that the United States was more restrained than commonly believed, particularly relative to other great powers of that era. One simple measure is the level of colonial territory it accrued compared to other great powers. By 1913, the United States claimed 310,000 square kilometres of colonial territory, compared to 2,360,000 for Belgium, 2,940,000 for Germany and 32,860,000 for the United Kingdom (Bairoch 1993, 83). In fact, the bulk of American colonial holdings was due to the annexation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, which it inherited after defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The United States exhibited such restraint because, as suggested by liberal theory, its political structure limited expansionism. Examining US–Mexico relations during the early twentieth century helps illustrate the causes of this American restraint.

In the spring of 1914, the United States invaded the Mexican city of Veracruz because of a dispute over the detention of several American sailors in Mexico. However, US–Mexican relations were already troubled because of President Woodrow Wilson’s liberal belief that it was the duty of the United States to bring democracy to Mexico, which was a dictatorship. The initial objectives of the American war plan were to occupy Veracruz and neighbouring Tampico and then blockade the east coast of Mexico until American honour was vindicated – or a regime change occurred in Mexico. After American forces landed in Veracruz, senior military leaders and Wilson’s top diplomatic advisor in Mexico advocated an escalation of the political objectives to include occupation of Mexico City – there were also vocal proponents who advocated the full occupation of Mexico. Wilson did not actually follow any of the advice he received. Instead, he reduced his war aims, halted his forces at Veracruz and withdrew US forces within a few months. Wilson exercised restraint because of American public opposition, his own personal values, unified Mexican hostility and the military losses incurred in the fighting. International opinion also appears to have influenced Wilson’s thinking as anti-Americanism began to sweep through Latin America. As Arthur Link points out, ‘Altogether, it was an unhappy time for a President and a people who claimed the moral leadership of the world’ (Link 1956, 405).

By 1919, a pro-interventionist coalition developed in the United States built on frustration with President Wilson’s prior restraint and new fears over the Mexican Constitution of 1917, which gave the Mexican people ownership of all subsoil resources. This potentially endangered foreign ownership of mines and oilfields in Mexico. Interventionists wanted to turn Mexico into an American protectorate – or at least seize the Mexican oil fields. This coalition moved the country toward intervention while Wilson was distracted by peace negotiations in Europe and then bedridden by a stroke. The path to intervention was blocked only after Wilson recovered sufficiently to regain command of the policy agenda and sever the ties between the interventionists. Wilson had two main reasons for avoiding the more belligerent policy path. First, he saw the Houses of Congress (with the support of some members of the executive branch) attempting to determine the foreign policy of the United States, which Wilson viewed as uncon- stitutional. In the American system, the president has the authority to conduct foreign policy. His assertion of authority over foreign policy with Mexico was therefore a clear attempt to check the power of Congress in policymaking. Second, Wilson was determined to maintain a policy consistent with the norm of anti-imperialism, but also the norm of self-determination – the process by which a country determines its own statehood and chooses its own form of government. Both of these norms remain bedrocks of liberal theory today.

US relations with Mexico in this case show how institutional and normative domestic structures restrained the use of violent power. These institutional restraints can break down if the political culture of a society does not include a strong dose of liberal norms. For example, anti-statism (a belief that the power of the government should be limited) and anti-imperialism (a belief that conquest of foreign peoples is wrong) are liberal norms. A society infused by liberal norms has an added level of restraint above and beyond the purely institutional limitations on state power. A liberal citizenry will naturally oppose government actions that threaten individual liberty and choose represen-  tatives that will act on liberal preferences. The institutional separation of powers in the United States allowed Wilson to block the interventionist efforts of Congress and others. The liberal norm of anti-imperialism restrained American expansion through the mechanisms of public opinion and the personal values of the president of the United States. Institutions and norms worked symbiotically. International opinion put additional pressure on American political leaders due to increasing trade opportunities with Latin American countries throughout the early 1900s. Precisely as liberal theory details, the absolute gains and opportunities offered by trade, together with preferences for self-determination and non-interference, acted as a restraint on US expansionism toward Mexico in this most imperial of periods in world history.

A core argument of liberalism is that concentrations of unaccountable violent power are the fundamental threat to individual liberty and must be restrained. The primary means of restraining power are institutions and norms at both domestic and international level. At the international level institutions and organisations limit the power of states by fostering cooperation and providing a means for imposing costs on states that violate international agreements. Economic institutions are particularly effective at fostering cooperation because of the substantial benefits that can be derived from economic interdependence. Finally, liberal norms add a further limitation on the use of power by shaping our understanding of what types of behaviour are appropriate. Today, it is clear that liberalism is not a ‘utopian’ theory describing a dream world of peace and happiness as it was once accused of being. It provides a consistent rejoinder to realism, firmly rooted in evidence and a deep theoretical tradition.

Find out more about this, and many other, International Relations theories with a range of multimedia resources compiled by E-IR .

Full references for citations can be found in the PDF version, linked at the top of this page.

Further Reading on E-International Relations

• Hegemony and Diversity in the ‘Liberal International Order’: Theory and Reality
• Out of Illusion, Weakness: Liberalism and Its Blind Spots
• Fear as Driver of International Relations
• Jan Smuts, Jawaharlal Nehru and the Legacies of Liberalism
• Norms, Norm Violations, and IR Theory
• America’s Democratic Shortcomings and the Liberal International Order

Jeffrey W. Meiser is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Portland, USA.

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Liberal Peace and Its Critiques

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The ‘liberal peace’ has undergone a crisis of legitimacy at the level of the everyday in post-conflict environments. In many such environments, different groups, often locally constituted, perceive it to be ethically bankrupt, subject to double standards, coercive and conditional, acultural, unconcerned with social welfare, and unfeeling and insensitive towards its subjects. It is tied to Western and liberal conceptions of the state, to institutions, and not to the local, everyday environment. It has diverted attention away from a search for refinements, for alternatives, for hybrid forms of peace, or for empathetic strategies. From these strategies a post-liberal peace might emerge via critical research agendas for peacebuilding and for policymaking, termed here, eirenist. This opens up a discussion of an everyday ‘post-liberal peace’ and critical policies for peacebuilding.

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Richmond, O.P. (2021). Liberal Peace and Its Critiques. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11795-5_186-1

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The Rise and Fall of Liberal Democratic Peace Theory

Liberal democratic peace theory (LDP), formulated largely in the 1960s-1980s, is viewed as one of the great wonders of liberalism and a major point cited in favor of evangelizing liberalism to the rest of the world.

The basic thesis is that liberal democratic states tend not to go to war with one another, because of the structural and/or normative features of liberal democratic states. That is, liberalism as such is directly responsible for the miraculous track record of peace that we’ve seen post-World War II, especially in Europe and North America.

In the post-World War II environment and doubly so in the post-Cold War environment, more and more of the world was moving towards liberal democracy. This was cause for excitement; world peace was on the horizon. The Soviet Union had fallen, dictatorships were collapsing, and the number of democracies was skyrocketing. Noted historian Spencer Weart boldly claimed that a “preponderance of democracies will transform the entire system of international relations.”

The arc of history was bending in the direction of liberalism and towards the democratic peace.

But something happened in the early 2000s. The unfolding of history as liberalism had been disrupted. The attacks of September 11, the subsequent bungling of intelligence regarding WMDs, the United States’ decision to drag its NATO allies into a series of embarrassing and ultimately ineffectual wars in the Middle East, numerous botched attempts at regime change and nation-building, and aggressive ideological demands as pre-conditions for diplomacy, have devastated the credibility of the U.S.-driven, Western liberal order. In some areas, history is now forking from the liberal path with a surprising confidence.

Axios declared 2018 the year of the strongman , but it can also be called the year of liberalism in crisis. Russia, Egypt, China, Poland, Hungary, the Philippines, and Turkey—among others—have gained a renewed sense of self and conviction in their opposition to liberalism, as opposed to merely carving out for themselves an unprincipled exception to liberalism and ceding it the moral high ground. Even in Europe, where liberal democracy claims some of its greatest accomplishments, liberalism is beginning to unravel on the periphery in countries like Poland, Hungary, and Italy. Jair Bolsonaro, who notably expressed sympathy for a military dictatorship, has done tremendously well so far in the Brazilian presidential election.

Neither soft, nor hard evangelism of liberalism is working the way it used to.

For liberal theorists, the prospect of a liberal democratic world peace is now questionable. The Economist has put out a call to arms  to defend liberalism as the most successful idea of the last 400 years. Whether this call results in anything substantial remains to be seen. But there is a palpable sense that liberalism is facing a serious new opposition.

Despite this trend, liberalism’s theorists have a hope encapsulated by Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry’s 2009 pronouncement that “liberal states should not assume that history has ended, but they can still be certain that it is on their side.”

And yet, in the nine years following this bold pronouncement, history has not been especially kind to liberalism.

Texas A&M political science professor Christopher Layne, writing in early 2018, has summed up the current situation aptly , namely that China as an increasingly self-aware superpower is already reshaping the world order away from Pax Americana:

The US foreign policy establishment does not grasp this, and, instead, has invested the idea of a ‘rules-based, institutionalized’ international order with a talismanic quality. It claims that rules and institutions are politically neutral, and, ipso facto, beneficial for all. However, in international politics, who rules makes the rules. Rules and institutions reflect the distribution of power in the international system. A power transition is taking place in the early twenty-first century: US power is in relative decline and China is rising quickly. No international order—not even the Pax Americana—lasts forever. The liberal world order cannot survive the erosion of US hegemonic power. It is this structural change, not Donald Trump, that threatens the post-Second World War international order’s survival. It requires a huge leap of faith to believe that a risen China will continue to subordinate itself to the Pax Americana.

Which brings us to the question: given that the prospect of an expanded democratic peace is starting to hit some hard limits, how well does liberal democratic peace theory actually explain the peace that has existed among liberal democratic states?

Although LDP theory is taken as an empirical law in international relations, it has picked up a number of qualifications, making the theory far less interesting than first presented. Here are various renditions of the theory since its modern inception in the 1960s:

Claim 1: liberal democracies go to war less than non-liberal democracies.

The most significant abandonment in the field has been of the monadic hypothesis: that liberal democratic states are less likely to go to war compared to non-liberal democratic states. Henry Farber and Joanne Gowa have convincingly shown that, statistically, democracies on average have the same probability of going to war as non-democracies. At this point, no one holds the monadic hypothesis.

Claim 2: no liberal democracy has fought another liberal democracy since 1816 (notably after 1812)

This claim from Michael Doyle has increasingly fallen out of favor. There weren’t many democracies prior to 1945, and so the number of dyadic pairs of liberal democratic countries that could have gone to war was extremely limited. For example, Doyle excludes Great Britain from counting as a liberal democracy until 1832 and denies that the Spanish-American War of 1898 should count, even though the Polity II data set lists Spain as a democracy in 1898. Others have argued that the Second Philippines War of 1899 shouldn’t count either, as at the time the Philippines hadn’t held an election yet. This strong claim has largely been dropped because of a) exception cases that require new qualifications to explain, and b) the fact that there weren’t enough existing liberal democracies to achieve significance. All totaled, there are around 50 exception cases suggested in the literature.

Claim 3: mature liberal democracies tend not to go to war/don’t go to war with one another

Although Peru and Ecuador fought while both were liberal democracies, some maintain that the war occurred before the “pacifying effects” of liberal democracy had enough time to work, meaning maturity was lacking. Yet another qualification. Interestingly, the U.S. intervened militarily to topple Salvador Allende after he was democratically elected in Chile. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1981, but at the time, Lebanon’s government was in disarray. R.J. Rummel states that the Israeli attack on the United States’ USS Liberty in 1967 counts as conflict below the level of war, but argued that Israel at the time was “only partially free.” That Finland joined up with the fascists from 1941 to 1944 apparently shouldn’t count, as no Finnish troops attacked troops from a liberal democratic country, though Great Britain bombed Finland in 1941.

Claim 4: mature liberal democracies in the post-1945 era don’t go to war with one another

The addition of the ‘post-1945 era’ qualification came later in the development of LDP theory, and while it may be a disappointing qualification, it may be necessary, given the small-N universe of liberal democracies before 1945. Bruce Russett admits that “the absence of murderous quarrels between democracies was not too surprising, and may need—at least for the pre-1945 era—little further explanation.”

Claim 5: mature liberal democracies in the post-1945 era don’t go to war with one another, but for normative reasons, not structural reasons

It’s claimed that the structural elements of liberal democratic states, namely separation of powers, checks and balances, elections, the free press, etc. should result in less war in general, but this is essentially equivalent to the monadic hypothesis, which has been largely abandoned. So, it might be possible to explain the absence of war through the normative mechanisms of liberal democratic states, as opposed to structural elements. Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett argue that while there is some support for the structural model, the normative model has more support and better consistency .

The above examples illustrate continuing iterations of the theory. This trajectory is by no means perfectly linear, nor is there consensus on how many qualifications are required, but the fact that these qualifications have continued to pile on is evidence that LDP theory is now much closer to triviality than when first introduced.

But on some level, LDP seems intuitive, first because we’re naturally more amenable to arguments that uphold our traditions of liberalism, and second because both North America and Europe are now overwhelmingly comprised of liberal democratic states and have enjoyed a near-unparalleled level of peace and prosperity over the last 70 years.

While it is true that there is an empirical track record of peace and prosperity between liberal democratic states in Europe and North America, the absence of war does not automatically vindicate the theory. Zero is not necessarily statistically significant, since that result might simply be predicted by random chance, as is the case with lightning strikes. People are struck by lightning all the time, but none of my friends have ever been. In general, the statistical approach adopted by much of the literature is somewhat methodologically wrong-headed; it assumes statistical properties which don’t necessarily hold in fat-tailed structural processes like war.

Aside from issues of statistical significance, the objective is to scrutinize the causal mechanisms supporting LDP theory—a fundamental step of theory-building. While there are a host of mechanisms adopted to explain democratic peace, astonishingly little research has been conducted into whether these mechanisms of liberalism actually work to guarantee the peace.

Michael Doyle’s recent expression of LDP theory in the article “Three Pillars of the Liberal Peace” stands out as a careful explication of the causal logic underlying LDP theory.

For Doyle, there are three mechanisms at play, all of which must be in operation simultaneously to generate the peace. The first mechanism is that LD states are accountable to voters, especially the median voter. As such, these states “preclude monarchs or dictators turning their potentially aggressive interests into public policy while assuming that the costs will be borne by a subordinate public.”

The second mechanism is that liberal principles or norms entail respect for legitimate individual rights, which are externalized in foreign policy. As Doyle puts it, “Domestically just republics…presume foreign republics to be also consensual, just, and therefore deserving of the accommodation that the individuals that compose them deserve.” The free press in liberal democratic states also helps to hold officials accountable to liberal principles.

The third mechanism is that commerce between liberal democratic states binds them together in a way that strongly discourages war.

The first mechanism of accountability assumes that voters pay close attention to war, don’t like war, and can’t be manipulated into bearing the costs of war. These assumptions seem implausible when examining America’s track record over just the last two decades. Yemen, as just one example out of countless , probably does not even register as a country to the median voter. The U.S. is currently at war in at least seven different countries.

The first mechanism also assumes voters who are able to accurately assess the success or failure of policies, accurately assign responsibility for success or failure, and then electorally reward or punish elites. This concept is known as retrospective voting. In retrospective voting, voters cast ballots based on results, not policies. Outcomes, so it goes, function as a heuristic for voters to rely on to overcome policy ignorance and compel liberal to act beneficially.

But in a 2013 study, Bryan Caplan et al. determined that voters systematically overestimate the influence of politicians on the economy and systematically underestimate their influence on education and the federal budget. The prognosis for retrospective voting is grim: “As long as ignorant and irrational voters know enough to properly reward success and punish failure, democracy can still work well. Unfortunately, retrospective voting requires a largely undefended assumption: Voters’ beliefs about political influence are unbiased.” That is, voters overestimate, underestimate, and misallocate influence.

Numerous other studies have examined voters’ strange propensity to vote out incumbents based on bad circumstances out of incumbents’ control. One such study found that voters punished U.S. governors in oil-producing states based on fluctuating world oil prices. Another determined that the success or failure of incumbent politicians in Latin America was based on U.S. interest rates, in addition to international commodity prices. V oters also c onsistently punish incumbents for droughts and floods .

While the above work undermines retrospective voting in the abstract, Sebastian Rosato looked specifically at voter behavior in the context of lost wars and found that both liberal democratic and autocratic leaders have similar chances of being removed from power for losing wars, but not a single one of the liberal democratic leaders was actually punished. In contrast, 29 percent of autocratic leaders were either killed, imprisoned, or exiled. For wars that are costly, but not lost, that is, wars where there is one fatality per 2,000 population, autocrats were removed from power 35 percent of the time. They were also punished in 27 percent of cases. Democratic leaders, on the other hand, get off a lot easier, and were only removed 27 percent of the time and punished in just 7 percent of cases.

Such findings cast doubt on the first pillar for explaining the peace.

The second pillar focuses on the externalization of liberal democratic norms and principles to the international arena via media publicity and other avenues, which causes liberal democratic states to treat other liberal democratic states with trust and respect, even in cases where there are serious clashes of interests.

But norm externalization has not applied in crucial cases. In a 1994 paper, Christopher Layne used process-tracing to determine that liberal norms and principles did not explain any part of why near-miss wars did not occur between the United States and Britain in 1861, France and Great Britain in 1898, and France and Germany in 1923, as public opinion was not pacific and elites did not refrain from making threats, among other indicators.

Additionally, if liberal democratic norms operate internationally to prevent conflict, a fortiori they should operate domestically. But according to Håvard Hegre, once GDP per capita is controlled for, it turns out that democratic states are no less likely to suffer from internal conflict , compared to autocracies. The historical record also indicates that the U.S. aggressively intervened in democracies and subsequently installed autocratic regimes. Several recent and notable interventions were: Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia in 1957, British Guyana in 1961, Brazil in 1961 and 1964, Chile in 1973, and Nicaragua in 1984.

Doyle’s response is two-fold: first, the democracies weren’t democratic enough or weren’t fully liberal democratic states, and second, these U.S. interventions were covert, meaning that elites subverted a crucial liberal democratic mechanism.

The first response could arguably apply to Iran, Indonesia, and Nicaragua, which at the time were quite immature democracies, but certainly the regimes at the time were more democratic than previous regimes. The other states, however, were much more democratic.

The second response about covert action misses the point. If the mechanisms to explain such an outcome do not work as described in even a small number of cases, so much the worse for the mechanisms. Appeal to covert action to save the mechanism is simply an admission of its limited explanatory power.

The third and final pillar concerns the claim of conflict-reducing interdependencies between nations caused by trade, but even if this is true—and the literature is mixed on this point—trade is not exclusive to liberalism. And the argument that free trade specifically is necessary for this mechanism to work is 1) putting an enormous amount of stock in the difference between “free” and “unfree” trade, and 2) missing the point that free trade may be best understood here as a proxy either for liberal democratic states in the same military alliance or for the relationship between a liberal democratic state and a small vassal state, in which no military conflict is necessary to achieve desired economic domination.

For Doyle, the underlying mechanisms must always be in play for LDP theory to work. But this position is dangerously close to a tautology, as the second mechanism holds that liberal democratic states’ liberal principles of respect, trust, and the recognition of legitimate individual rights are externalized in its foreign policy. What this effectively translates to is that it necessarily has to be the case that liberal democratic states treat other liberal democratic states with respect and trust for there to be a low likelihood of war, which is uninformative.

If the causal logic of these mechanisms is broken, or if there are numerous historical case studies in which these mechanisms actually do not prevent war or explain near-misses between liberal democratic states, then other candidate mechanisms should be explored to explain the democratic peace.

One way of trying to answer the question of what best explains the lack of war in Europe and North America is to imagine hypothetical scenarios from the perspective of elite decision-makers in a dyad and come up with plausible conditions under which war might emerge. What conditions would have to obtain in the current geopolitical environment for Germany to go to war with France, or England to go to war with France, or Germany to go to war with Greece, etc.?

Let’s start with the last hypothetical, although it will sound odd because war in Western Europe is almost inconceivable in the post-World War II environment.

But imagine we broaden the circle and German decision-makers become so incensed with Greece’s lack of fiscal continence that Germany decides to invade Greece.

First, Germany’s military is currently not capable of launching and sustaining a land or air war in Europe.

Second, both Germany and Greece belong to the same U.S.-engineered military alliance, NATO, and so other NATO member states would be obliged to defend Greece.

Third, in order to get to the point where the proposal of war in this instance would even be on the table, the German state would have to be filled with—and German voters would have to vote for—an entirely new elite dominated by an entirely new and aggressive way of thinking. The United States engineered the post-World War II environment specifically to ensure this does not occur, and continually maintains this environment with both hard and soft power—the former via its enduring military presence on the continent and the latter via diplomatic censure and its many U.S.-funded or coordinated non-governmental organizations.

Replace Greece in this example with France, and an additional point of consideration appears: France has nuclear weapons.

For any other conceivable dyad, many or most of these considerations will also apply, and none have any strong relationship with liberal principles or mechanisms, with the exception in this case of the liberal character of the German elite. However, this of course is due to the fact that a large part of Germany was a U.S. vassal state immediately after 1945 and still maintains much of that character as a militarily and diplomatically-occupied country.

It would be a mistake to think of foreign policy decision-makers as purely motivated by power, just like it would be a mistake to conceive of them as purely utility maximizers. Humans in general are motivated by a multiplicity of goods and possess a certain baseline level of sociability. But the claim is that the motivations of sociability for peace are downstream of identity relations, and identity relations in the post-1945 era emphatically were constructed as part of Pax Americana, the new, U.S.-led order.

Moreover, due to the way sovereignty is de facto distributed in the post-World War II environment, Germany is not quite the right unit for war and is part of an arguably post-national order. While Germany is technically considered to be a sovereign state, the idea of it practically exercising this sovereignty to invade Greece and get away with it is not very plausible. The long arm of the U.S., NATO, the European Union, and the United Nations would put a stop to such a move.

The more appropriate unit for war is more like NATO versus a rogue liberal democratic state or a rogue NATO member state—perhaps Turkey.

If NATO did in fact go to war against its member state Turkey, democratic peace theorists might claim that this is no way counts as a point against their thesis. After all, Turkey isn’t exactly a shining example of liberal democracy.

But what they’re missing is that regime character is downstream of power relations and historical processes. In the West, liberal democracy is the only game in town, and the extent to which other countries have adopted liberal democracy is a reliable indicator of the extent to which they have become integrated into the U.S.-dominated geopolitical order. The process of “becoming liberal,” in other words, is virtually indistinguishable historically from “integration into the U.S.-dominated geopolitical order.”

And integration has not been a passive process. Non-democracies, as Christopher Hobson has noted , have historically been labeled threatening, both behaviorally and ontologically by the West. In what almost follows naturally from this labeling process, the West has taken upon itself to employ coercive democratization or sanctions to subordinate recalcitrant polities, often resulting in worse developmental indicators in these countries, which again reinforces the superiority of liberal democracies over other competing systems. We can see this process currently at play in Iraq, Iran, Russia, and North Korea, among many others.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of examining a parallel universe identical to ours with the exception that geopolitical historical processes have no impact on regime character, such that it can be observed that states adopt liberal democracy in a vacuum and then exhibit the democratic peace among one another. In other words, we have a problem of collinearity. Still, that doesn’t mean a case for LDP can’t be made in the actual world. However, there are few convincing case studies of countries adopting liberal democracy in the absence of other pacifying factors, such as power relations during the Cold War, in which countries either sorted themselves or were sorted into blocs based on alliance with the Western order or the Soviet order.

The world order is changing. Liberal democratic peace theory is slowly losing relevance. Liberal evangelism feels passé, given recent regime change failures in the Middle East and North Africa, and backsliding in Eastern Europe. Theorists may soon have to confront the possibility that liberal democratic regimes, rather than demonstrating intrinsic benefits of liberalism, are little more than the preferred regime-type of Pax Americana.

Jonah Bennett is the co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Palladium Magazine. You can follow him at @BennettJonah .