Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Online

Authors: Steven Pinker

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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (63 page)

The second selling point for the Democratic Peace is a factoid that is sometimes elevated to a law of history. Here it is explained by the former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair in a 2008 interview on
The Daily Show
with Jon Stewart:

Stewart:
Our president—have you met him? He’s a big freedom guy. He believes if everyone was a democracy, there’d be no more fighting.
Blair:
Well, as a matter of history, no two democracies have gone to war against each other.
Stewart:
Let me ask you a question. Argentina. Democracy?

FIGURE 5–23.
Democracies, autocracies, and anocracies, 1946–2008
Source:
Graph adapted from Marshall & Cole, 2009. Only countries with a 2008 population greater than 500,000 are counted.

Blair:
Well, it’s a democracy. They elect their president.
Stewart:
England. Democracy?
Blair:
More or less. It was when I was last there.
Stewart:
Uh . . . didn’t you guys fight?
Blair:
Actually, at the time Argentina was not a democracy.
Stewart:
Damn it! I thought I had him.

If developed countries became democratic after World War II, and if democracies never go to war with one another, then we have an explanation for why developed countries stopped going to war after World War II.

As Stewart’s skeptical questioning implies, the Democratic Peace theory has come under scrutiny, especially after it provided part of the rationale for Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. History buffs have delighted in coming up with possible counterexamples; here are a few from a collection by White:

• Greek Wars, 5th century BCE: Athens vs. Syracuse

• Punic Wars, 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE: Rome vs. Carthage

• American Revolution, 1775–83: United States vs. Great Britain

• French Revolutionary Wars, 1793–99: France vs. Great Britain, Switzerland, the Netherlands

• War of 1812, 1812–15: United States vs. Great Britain

• Franco-Roman War, 1849: France vs. Roman Republic

• American Civil War, 1861–65: United States vs. Confederate States

• Spanish-American War, 1898: United States vs. Spain

• Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1901: Great Britain vs. Transvaal and the Orange Free State

• First India-Pakistan War, 1947–49

• Lebanese Civil War, 1978, 1982: Israel vs. Lebanon

• Croatian War of Independence, 1991–92: Croatia vs. Yugoslavia

• Kosovo War, 1999: NATO vs. Yugoslavia

• Kargil War, 1999: India vs. Pakistan

• Israel-Lebanon War, 2006
²²⁰

Each counterexample has prompted scrutiny as to whether the states involved were truly democratic. Greece, Rome, and the Confederacy were slaveholding states; Britain was a monarchy with a minuscule popular franchise until 1832. The other wars involved fledgling or marginal democracies at best, such as Lebanon, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, and 19th-century France and Spain. And until the early decades of the 20th century, the franchise was withheld from women, who, as we will see, tend to be more dovish in their voting than men. Most advocates of the Democratic Peace are willing to write off the centuries before the 20th, together with new and unstable democracies, and insist that since then no two mature, stable democracies have fought each other in a war.

Critics of the Democratic Peace theory then point out that if one draws the circle of “democracy” small enough, not that many countries are left in it, so by the laws of probability it’s not surprising that we find few wars with a democracy on each side. Other than the great powers, two countries tend to fight only if they share a border, so most of the theoretical matchups are ruled out by geography anyway. We don’t need to bring in democracy to explain why New Zealand and Uruguay have never gone to war, or Belgium and Taiwan. If one restricts the database even further by sloughing off early pieces of the time line (restricting it, as some do, to the period after World War II), then a more cynical theory accounts for the Long Peace: since the start of the Cold War, allies of the world’s dominant power, the United States, haven’t fought each other. Other manifestations of the Long Peace—such as the fact that the great powers never fought each other—were never explained by the Democratic Peace in the first place and, according to the critics, probably came from mutual deterrence, nuclear or conventional.
²²¹

A final headache for the Democratic Peace theory, at least as it applies to overall war-proneness, is that democracies often don’t behave as nicely as Kant said they should. The idea that democracies externalize their law-governed assignment of power and peaceful resolution of conflicts doesn’t sit comfortably with the many wars that Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium fought to acquire and defend their colonial empires—at least thirty-three between 1838 and 1920, and a few more extending into the 1950s and even 1960s (such as France in Algeria). Equally disconcerting for Democratic Peaceniks are the American interventions during the Cold War, when the CIA helped overthrow more-or-less democratic governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and Chile (1973) which had tilted too far leftward for its liking. The advocates reply that European imperialism, though it did not vanish instantaneously, was plummeting abroad just as democracy was rising at home, and that the American interventions were covert operations hidden from the public rather than wars conducted in full view and thus were exceptions proving the rule .
²²²

When a debate devolves into sliding definitions, cherry-picked examples, and ad hoc excuses, it’s time to call in the statistics of deadly quarrels. Two political scientists, Bruce Russett and John Oneal, have breathed new life into the Democratic Peace theory by firming up the definitions, controlling the confounding variables, and testing a quantitative version of the theory: not that democracies
never
go to war (in which case every putative counterexample becomes a matter of life or death) but that they go to war
less often
than nondemocracies, all else being equal.
²²³

Russett and Oneal untangled the knot with a statistical technique that separates the effects of confounded variables: multiple logistic regression. Say you discover that heavy smokers have more heart attacks, and you want to confirm that the greater risk was caused by the smoking rather than by the lack of exercise that tends to go with smoking. First you try to account for as much of the heart attack data as you can using the nuisance factor, exercise rates. After looking at a large sample of men’s health records, you might determine that on average, every additional hour of exercise per week cuts a man’s chance of having a heart attack by a certain amount. Still, the correlation is not perfect—some couch potatoes have healthy hearts; some athletes collapse in the gym. The difference between the heart attack rate one would predict, given a certain rate of exercise, and the actual heart attack rate one measures is called a
residual
. The entire set of residuals gives you some numbers to play with in ascertaining the effects of the variable you’re really interested in, smoking.

Now you capitalize on a second source of wiggle room. On average, heavy smokers exercise less, but some of them exercise a lot, while some nonsmokers hardly exercise at all. This provides a second set of residuals: the discrepancies between the men’s actual rate of smoking and the rate one would predict based on their exercise rate. Finally, you see whether the residuals left over from the smoking-exercise relationship (the degree to which men smoke more or less than you’d predict from their exercise rate) correlate with the residuals left over from the exercise–heart attack relationship (the degree to which men have more or fewer heart attacks than you’d predict from their exercise rate). If the residuals correlate with the residuals, you can conclude that smoking correlates with heart attacks, above and beyond their joint correlation with exercise. And if you measured smoking at an earlier point in the men’s lives, and heart attacks at a later point (to rule out the possibility that heart attacks make men smoke, rather than vice versa), you can inch toward the claim that smoking
causes
heart attacks. Multiple regression allows you to do this not just with two tangled predictors, but with any number of them.

A general problem with multiple regression is that the more predictors you want to untangle, the more data you need, because more and more of the variation in the data gets “used up” as each nuisance variable sucks up as much of the variation as it can and the hypothesis you’re interested in has to make do with the rest. And fortunately for humanity, but unfortunately for social scientists, interstate wars don’t break out all that often. The Correlates of War Project counts only 79 full-fledged interstate wars (killing at least a thousand people a year) between 1823 and 1997, and only 49 since 1900, far too few for statistics. So Russett and Oneal looked at a much larger database that lists militarized interstate disputes—incidents in which a country put its forces on alert, fired a shot across a bow, sent its warplanes scrambling, crossed swords, rattled sabers, or otherwise flexed its military muscles.
²²⁴Assuming that for every war that actually breaks out there are many more disputes that stop short of war but have similar causes, the disputes should be shaped by the same causes as the wars themselves, and thus can serve as a plentiful surrogate for wars. The Correlates of War Project identified more than 2,300 militarized interstate disputes between 1816 and 2001, a number that can satisfy even a data-hungry social scientist.
²²⁵

Russett and Oneal first lined up their units of analysis: pairs of countries in every year from 1886 to 2001 that had at least some risk of going to war, either because they were neighbors or because one of them was a great power. The datum of interest was whether in fact the pair had had a militarized dispute that year. Then they looked at how democratic the
less
democratic member of the pair was the year before, on the assumption that even if a democratic state is war-averse, it still might be dragged into a war by a more belligerent (and perhaps less democratic) adversary. It hardly seems fair to penalize democratic Netherlands in 1940 for getting into a war with its German invaders, so the Netherlands-Germany pair in 1940 would be assigned the rock-bottom democracy score for Germany in 1939.

To circumvent the temptation of data snooping when deciding whether a state was democratic, especially states that call themselves “democracies” on the basis of farcical elections, Russett and Oneal got their numbers from the Polity Project, which assigns each country a democracy score from 0 to 10 based on how competitive its political process is, how openly its leader is chosen, and how many constraints are placed on the leader’s power. The researchers also threw into the pot some variables that are expected to affect military disputes through sheer realpolitik: whether a pair of countries were in a formal alliance (since allies are less likely to fight); whether one of them is a great power (since great powers tend to find trouble); and if neither is a great power, whether one is considerably more powerful than the other (because states fight less often when they are mismatched and the outcome would be a foregone conclusion).

So are democracies less likely to get into militarized disputes, all else held constant? The answer was a clear yes. When the less democratic member of a pair was a full autocracy, it doubled the chance that they would have a quarrel compared to an average pair of at-risk countries. When both countries were fully democratic, the chance of a dispute fell by more than half.
²²⁶

In fact, the Democratic Peace theory did even better than its advocates hoped. Not only do democracies avoid disputes with each other, but there is a suggestion that they tend to stay out of disputes across the board.
²²⁷And the reason they don’t fight each other is not just that they are birds of a feather: there is no Autocratic Peace, a kind of honor among thieves in which autocracies also avoid disputes with each other.
²²⁸The Democratic Peace held not only over the entire 115 years spanned by the dataset but also in the subspans from 1900 to 1939 and from 1989 to 2001. That shows that the Democratic Peace is not a by-product of a Pax Americana during the Cold War.
²²⁹In fact, there were never any signs of a Pax Americana or a Pax Britannica: the years when one of these countries was the world’s dominant military power were no more peaceful than the years in which it was just one power among many.
²³⁰Nor was there any sign that new democracies are stroppy exceptions to the Democratic Peace—just think of the Baltic and Central European countries that embraced democracy after the Soviet empire collapsed, and the South American countries that shook off their military juntas in the 1970s and 1980s, none of which subsequently went to war.
²³¹Russett and Oneal found only one restriction on the Democratic Peace: it kicked in only around 1900, as one might have expected from the plethora of 19th-century counterexamples.
²³²

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