Summary:
Mature democracies may not fight each other. But
immature democracies, an important new book argues, can be quite bellicose. Unfortunately,
Iraq might end up fitting the pattern.
WHO SAYS DEMOCRACIES DON'T FIGHT?
Seldom if ever has the hostility between academics and the U.S.
president been so pronounced. Of course, political scientists always seem to complain
about the occupant of the White House, and Republicans fare worse than Democrats:
Herbert Hoover was called callous, Dwight Eisenhower a dunce, Richard Nixon evil,
Ronald Reagan dangerous, and George H.W. Bush out of touch. But professors have
consigned George W. Bush to a special circle of their presidential hell. And the
White House seems to return the sentiment.
According to the academics, Bush's chief transgressions have had
to do with foreign policy, especially the Iraq war -- a mess that could have been
avoided if only the president and his advisers had paid more attention to those
who devote their lives to studying international relations.
The irony of this argument is that few other presidents -- certainly
none since Woodrow Wilson, a former president of the American Political Science
Association, scribbled away in the Oval Office -- have tied their foreign policies
more explicitly to the work of social science. The defining act of Bush's presidency
was grounded in a theory that the political scientist Jack Levy once declared was
"as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations," namely,
that democracies do not fight one another.
The theory, which originated in the work of the eighteenth-century
philosopher Immanuel Kant and was refined in the 1970s and 1980s by several researchers
working independently, has, since the 1990s, been one of the hottest research areas
in international relations. Although some skeptics remain and no one agrees about
why exactly it works, most academics now share the belief that democracies have
indeed made a separate peace. What is more, much research suggests that they are
also unusually likely to sign and honor international agreements and to become economically
interdependent.
The administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton
made frequent appeals to the theory in public, and it seems to have informed their
support for democratization in former communist lands and in Haiti. The current
Bush administration, however, has gone much further in its faith in the idea, betting
the farm that the theory holds and will help Washington achieve a peaceful, stable,
and prosperous Muslim world as, over time, Iraq's neighbors, following Iraq's example,
democratize. The United States' real motives for attacking Iraq may have been complex,
but "regime change" -- the replacement of Saddam Hussein's gruesome tyranny with
a democracy -- was central to Washington's rhetoric by the time it began bombing
Baghdad in March 2003.
Why has a president who set his defining policy around one of
political science's crown jewels come in for so much venom from the same academics
who endorse the idea? After all, a host of peer-reviewed journal articles have implicitly
supported the president's claim that a democratic Iraq would not threaten the United
States or Israel, develop weapons of mass destruction, or sponsor terrorism. Are
professors simply perpetual critics who refuse to take responsibility for the consequences
of their ideas? Or does Bush hatred trump social science?
The Bush administration's desire to break with its predecessors
and alter the authoritarian status quo in the Middle East was admirable. But the
White House got its science wrong, or at least not completely right: the democratic
peace theory does not dictate that the United States can or should remake Iraq into
a democracy. In Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War, the veteran
political scientists Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder make two critical points.
Not only is turning authoritarian countries into democracies extremely difficult,
much more so than the administration seems to have anticipated. The Middle East
could also become a much more dangerous place if Washington and the rest of the
world settle for a merely semidemocratic regime in Baghdad. Such an Iraq, Mansfield
and Snyder imply, would be uncommonly likely to start wars -- a bull in the Middle
Eastern china shop. Unfortunately, such an Iraq may also be just what we are likely
to end up with.
ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACIES
At first glance, the realists' critique of the Iraq war is easier
to understand than that of the democratic peace theorists. Indeed, realism -- which
holds that a country's type of government has no systematic effects on its foreign
policy -- is enjoying a revival in Washington these days, precisely because of the
war. According to the realists, the best way to have dealt with Saddam would have
been not to overthrow him but to use coercive bargaining: to have threatened him
with annihilation, for example, if he ever used nuclear weapons.
Even the democratic peace theory, however, does not necessarily
prescribe the use of force to transform despotisms such as Iraq into democracies.
Indeed, by itself, the argument that democracies do not fight one another does not
have any practical implications for the foreign policymaker. It needs an additional
or minor premise, such as "the United States can make Iraq into a democracy at an
acceptable cost." And it is precisely this minor premise about which the academy
has been skeptical. No scholarly consensus exists on how countries become democratic,
and the literature is equally murky on the costs to the United States of trying
to force them to be free.
This last part of the puzzle is even more complicated than it
first appears. Enter Mansfield and Snyder, who have been contributing to the democratic
peace debate for a decade. Their thesis, first published in 1995, is that although
mature democracies do not fight one another, democratizing states -- those in transition
from authoritarianism to democracy -- do, and are even more prone to war than authoritarian
regimes. Now, in Electing to Fight, the authors have refined their argument. As
they outline in the book, not only are "incomplete democratizing" states -- those
that develop democratic institutions in the wrong order -- unlikely ever to complete
the transition to democracy; they are also especially bellicose.
According to Mansfield and Snyder, in countries that have recently
started to hold free elections but that lack the proper mechanisms for accountability
(institutions such as an independent judiciary, civilian control of the military,
and protections for opposition parties and the press), politicians have incentives
to pursue policies that make it more likely that their countries will start wars.
In such places, politicians know they can mobilize support by demanding territory
or other spoils from foreign countries and by nurturing grievances against outsiders.
As a result, they push for extraordinarily belligerent policies. Even states that
develop democratic institutions in the right order -- adopting the rule of law before
holding elections -- are very aggressive in the early years of their transitions,
although they are less so than the first group and more likely to eventually turn
into full democracies.
Of course, politicians in mature democracies are also often tempted
to use nationalism and xenophobic rhetoric to buttress their domestic power. In
such cases, however, they are usually restrained by institutionalized mechanisms
of accountability. Knowing that if they lead the country into a military defeat
or quagmire they may be punished at the next election, politicians in such states
are less likely to advocate a risky war. In democratizing states, by contrast, politicians
know that they are insulated from the impact of bad policies: if a war goes badly,
for example, they can declare a state of emergency, suspend elections, censor the
press, and so on. Politicians in such states also tend to fear their militaries,
which often crave foreign enemies and will overthrow civilian governments that do
not share their goals. Combined, these factors can make the temptation to attack
another state irresistible.
Mansfield and Snyder present both quantitative and case-study
support for their theory. Using rigorous statistical methods, the authors show that
since 1815, democratizing states have indeed been more prone to start wars than
either democracies or authoritarian regimes. Categorizing transitions according
to whether they ended in full democracies (as in the U.S. case) or in partial ones
(as in Germany in 1871-1918 or Pakistan throughout its history), the authors find
that in the early years of democratic transitions, partial democracies -- especially
those that get their institutions in the wrong order -- are indeed significantly
more likely to initiate wars. Mansfield and Snyder then provide several succinct
stories of democratizing states that did in fact go to war, such as the France of
Napoleon III (1852-70), Serbia between 1877 and 1914, Ethiopia and Eritrea between
1998 and 2000, and Pakistan from 1947 to the present. In most of these cases, the
authors find what they expect: in these democratizing states, domestic political
competition was intense. Politicians, vying for power, appeased domestic hard-liners
by resorting to nationalistic appeals that vilified foreigners, and these policies
often led to wars that were not in the countries' strategic interests.
Although their argument would have been strengthened by a few
comparative studies of democratizing states avoiding war and of full democracies
and authoritarian states starting wars, Mansfield and Snyder are persuasive. In
part this is because they carefully circumscribe their claims. They acknowledge
that some cases are "false positives," that is, wars started by states that have
wrongly been classified as democratizing, such as the Iran-Iraq War, started by
Iraq in 1980. They also answer the most likely objections to their argument. Some
skeptics, for example, might counter that Mansfield and Snyder get the causality
reversed: it is war or the threat of it that prevents states from becoming mature
democracies. Others might argue that democratizing states become involved in more
wars simply because their internal instability tempts foreign states to attack them -- in
other words, that democratizers are more sinned against than sinning. Analyzing
data from 1816 through 1992, Mansfield and Snyder put paid to these alternative
explanations. Bad domestic institutions usually precede wars, rather than vice versa,
and democratizing states usually do the attacking.
Where does Electing to Fight leave realism, the dominant theory
of international conflict? The quantitative data support the realist claims that
major powers are more likely to go to war than minor ones and that the more equal
are the great powers, the more likely are wars among them. But democratization makes
war more likely even after one takes these factors into account. Furthermore, the
case studies suggest that democratizing states very often lose more than they gain
from the wars they begin, which implies that they do not respond to international
incentives as rationally as realism would expect. That said, notwithstanding its
preference for viewing states from the inside, the Mansfield-Snyder theory is still
"realist" in the general sense that it assumes that politicians and other actors
are rationally self-interested. Their self-interest simply involves building and
maintaining domestic power as well as external security -- and sometimes trading
some of the latter in order to gain the former.
The authors' conclusions for foreign policy are straightforward.
The United States and other international actors should continue to promote democracy,
but they must strive to help democratizing states implement reforms in the correct
order. In particular, popular elections ought not to precede the building of institutions
that will check the baleful incentives for politicians to call for war. Mansfield
and Snyder are unsparing toward well-intentioned organizations that have pressured
authoritarian governments to rush to elections in the past -- often with disastrous
consequences. As the authors show, for example, it was organizations such as the
World Bank and the National Democratic Institute that pushed Burundi and Rwanda
to increase popular sovereignty in the early 1990s -- pressure that, as Mansfield
and Snyder argue, helped set off a chain of events that led to genocide. Acknowledging
their intellectual debt to writers such as Samuel Huntington (particularly his 1968
book Political Order in Changing Societies) and Fareed Zakaria, Mansfield and Snyder
have written a deeply conservative book. Sounding like Edmund Burke on the French
Revolution but substituting statistics and measured prose for rhetorical power,
the authors counsel against abruptly empowering people, since premature elections
may well usher in domestic upheavals that thrust the state outward against its neighbors.
BACK IN BAGHDAD
This brings the conversation back to Iraq, and in particular the
notion that the United States can turn it into a democracy at an acceptable cost.
In effect, Mansfield and Snyder have raised the estimate of these costs by pointing
out one other reason this effort may fail -- a reason that few seem to have thought
of. Forget for a moment the harrowing possibility of a Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish civil
war in Iraq. Set aside the prospect of a Shiite-dominated state aligning itself
with Iran, Syria, and Lebanon's Hezbollah. What if, following the departure of U.S.
troops, Iraq holds together but as an incomplete democratizer, with broad suffrage
but anemic state institutions? Such an Iraq might well treat its own citizens better
than the Baathist regime did. Its treatment of its neighbors, however, might be
just as bad.
Although Saddam was an unusually bellicose and reckless tyrant,
attacking Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990 and engaging in foolish brinkmanship with
the United States, as Mansfield and Snyder imply, a democratic Iraq may be no less
bellicose and reckless. In the near future, intensely competitive elites there -- secularists,
leftists, moderates, and both Shiite and Sunni Islamists -- could compete for popularity
by stirring up nationalism against one or more of Iraq's neighbors. And Iraq lives
in a dangerous neighborhood. Already, Iraqi Shiite parties have been critical
of Sunni-dominated Jordan; Iraqi Sunni parties, of Shiite-dominated Iran; and Iraqi
Kurdish parties, of Turkey.
One hopes that the White House contemplated this scenario prior
to March 2003. Whether it did or not, the possibility must be considered now, by
U.S. civilian and military leaders, academics, and U.S. allies who agree with those
academics. If Mansfield and Snyder are correct about the bellicose tendencies of
young, incompletely democratized states, the stakes of Iraq's transition are higher
than most have supposed. They are high enough, in fact, that those who called so
loudly in the 1990s for an end to UN sanctions because Iraqis were dying but who
are silent about the Iraqis who are dying now ought to reconsider their proud aloofness
from the war. An aggressive Iraq, prone to attack Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria,
or Israel, is in no one's interest. The odds may be long that Iraq will ever turn
into a mature democracy of the sort envisaged by the Bush administration. But those
odds are lengthened by the refusal of those states in Europe and the Middle East
that could make a difference actually to do so.