The events of the 1980s demonstrated the falsity of this claim. The
societies of ‘really-existing socialism’ proved unable to keep up with liberal
capitalist societies in the provision of consumer goods, and their citizens
became increasingly unwilling to accept that party rule could substitute for
genuinely representative government. Eventually these regimes collapsed
and have been replaced by political systems which are, at least in principle,
liberal democratic. Fukuyama describes the victory of these principles as
‘the End of History’, employing Hegelian categories which suggest that the
triumph of ‘liberalism’ amounts to the firm establishment of the only kind
of human freedom that is possible. Since ‘History’
was about the shaping
and development of human freedom and since this task is now complete,
History is over (indeed, Hegel believed that History ended in 1807, so
we have been living in post-historical time for nearly two centuries). This
piece of Hegelian language is perhaps unfortunate and certainly off-putting;
the key point is that there is not now (and, more importantly, will not be in
the future) any
systematic alternative to liberalism: non-liberal regimes will
persist on an ad hoc, contingent basis, but without being able to mount a
coherent challenge to liberalism. It should be noted that this is
not the tri-
umphalist position it is often taken to be – Fukuyama actually regrets the
emergence of a politics in which all the big issues have been solved.
History ends,
according to Fukuyama, but this does not mean that there
will be no future events; international relations will continue but will no
longer involve the big issues, which are now settled. Others argue that
although international relations will continue, they will do so on a different
basis. The
Democratic Peace thesis states that democratic states, while as
war-prone in general as any other kind of state, do not fight each other – an
argument we have met before in Chapter 4 in the
context of a more general
discussion of the relationship between domestic and international struc-
tures, but an argument that seemed likely to take on a new salience in the
post-Cold War era. Major research projects in the 1980s and 1990s found
the basic hypothesis to be remarkably ‘robust’ – which is to say that what-
ever definition of democracy is employed, and however war is defined, the
result comes out in much the same way. Constitutionally stable democracies
do not fight each other, although they do engage in as much war as other
states with non-democracies. Clearly, the more sophisticated and sensitive
the indicators are, the more likely it is that there
will be minor exceptions to
the proposition, or ‘near-misses’ as Russett (1993) puts it, and it may be that the
law-like statement that democracies never fight one another will not stand.
Nonetheless, the research suggests that the general proposition is perhaps
the best supported empirical hypothesis that contemporary International
Relations can offer.
A statistically well-supported hypothesis is not the same thing as an
explanation; how do we account for the democratic peace? Russett offers
The International Politics of Identity
189
two possible explanations. First, there is the
cultural–normative model.
In stable democracies, decision-makers will expect to be able to resolve
internal conflicts by compromise
and without violence, and, hypothetically,
they will carry over this expectation when dealing with decision-makers in
other stable democracies which have similarly non-violent conflict-resolving
mechanisms. Conversely, decision-makers in non-democratic systems are
more likely to use and threaten violence in domestic conflict resolution, and
this attitude is also likely to spill over internationally. Knowing this, and to
avoid being exploited, democracies will adopt non-democratic norms
in dealing with non-democracies.
A second model stresses structural–
institutional factors. Systems of checks and balances, and the need to gen-
erate public consent, will slow down decisions to use large-scale violence,
and reduce the likelihood that such decisions will be taken. Recognizing
this, leaders of other democratic states will not fear surprise attacks, and
will allow peaceful conflict-resolution methods to operate. Leaders of non-
democratic states, on the other hand, are less constrained, and can more
easily initiate large-scale violence. Being aware
that democratic leaders do
not have this option they may be tempted to exploit what they see as a
weakness – but being aware that this is so, leaders of democracies may set
aside institutional constraints when dealing with non-democracies in order
to avoid being exploited. These two models are not the only explanations
for the democratic peace that could be offered – although others, such as
that of David Lake (1992), can be assimilated to one or the other – and
neither are they entirely separable; as Russett remarks, norms underlie and
are buttressed by institutions. Probably a later account will merge the two.
In
any event, what is striking about the thesis is the support it gives (or,
perhaps, gave) to the idea that a universal
liberal internationalist world
order might now be possible. From the vantage point of 1989 it looked as
if the history of ideological conflicts was coming to an end, and if the now
dominant liberal capitalist states are unlikely to engage in violent conflict
with each other, then it was not unreasonable to expect an era of relative
peace and security would dawn. Instead, of course, the last two decades
have seen the wholesale revival of political identities
based on ethnicity and
religion, and not simply in the developing world – the hopes for a new kind
of international relations post-1989 have largely been dashed. What
happened, and why?
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