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Democracies can be warmongers too Samuel Brittan: Financial Times: 04/06/04 The best defence of democracy is still Winston Churchill's: it is the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been tried. At least it provides a non-violent way of changing governments. Many would, however, regard such views as too conservative and believe democracy can achieve more. When it was being gradually introduced into Britain in the 19th century there were both fears and hopes that it would lead to an assault on property and massive redistribution to the populace. Recently some US-based economists have attempted to investigate the effects of democracy in the second half of the 20th century*. They have tried to control for the influence of other factors such as gross domestic product and age distribution and still "find no significant correlation between democracy and the amount of spending on pensions or welfare". The one difference is that democracies have less redistributive personal taxes. Their own explanation is that economic and social policies are mostly the outcome of trade-offs such as efficiency versus equity, or conflicts that are basic to human nature and not specific to particular institutions. They do, however, find big differences in other areas. Authoritarian regimes are more likely to torture, execute, regulate religion and censor the press. Democratic competition requires some freedom and personal safety and is thus an influence for tolerance. If this study is right, there is not much difference in areas where majority voting might be expected to have the most direct impact. How can this finding be reconciled with the widespread belief that democracies have a big effect on the more remote area of foreign policy - in particular that they do not wage aggressive war? My search for evidence has led me to a landmark study, Grasping the Democratic Peace, by Bruce Russett, the US political scientist**. He is careful to limit himself to a much narrower proposition: that democracies do not wage war against each other. His main evidence is a table of disputes between 1946 and 1986 showing no wars between democratic states and 32 wars when one or other parties to the dispute was non-democratic. But Prof Russett is sensible enough to go well beyond this table. He even has a chapter on ancient Greece in which he tries to differentiate between states such as Athens that were relatively democratic and more autocratic states. He admits that the demos "could be fully as impulsive and warlike as oligarchs and generals". His greatest difficulty is in covering the period before the first world war, when many countries were somewhere between democracies and autocracies. Admitting, for instance, that the Spanish-American war of 1898 was a hard case, he points to the corrupt nature of Spanish elections at the time. He deals with the first world war by emphasising the limited power of the Reichstag, which could be overridden by the Kaiser on many matters. This frankly will not do if we want to move from formal theories to the realities of popular pressure. To the chagrin of those who believed that wars were capitalist conspiracies, the social democrats in the Reichstag voted overwhelmingly for war credits. No reader of the memoirs of Bertrand Russell can forget his sense of isolation when he walked the streets of London in 1914 among a population that was overwhelmingly bellicose. There may, however, be some support for the view that the mass public tires of war more quickly than elite groups. Examples include the German and Russian revolts at the end of the first world war and the movement of American opinion against the Vietnam war. But even if the Russett conclusion were completely solid, this would provide little consolation, as the majority of conflicts since the end of the cold war have involved on one or both sides countries that were far from being textbook democracies. Prof Russett is far from starry-eyed in his conclusions. Looking ahead, he presciently warned that the model of "fight them, beat them and then make them democratic" was irrevocably flawed. He foresaw the danger of nationalist or ethnic quarrels among the successor states of the former Soviet empire. He also foresaw that the initial creation of democratic institutions could contribute to the explosion of ethnic conflicts by unleashing expressions of hatred that were suppressed under communism. Democracy seems to me a very weak barrier to war. If I remember Thucydides correctly, the Athenian assembly, spurred on by demagogues, was often an influence for more aggressive action. In our own time, Israel's hawkish Ariel Sharon has been freely elected. The most one can say is that his more pacific opponents have a freedom of expression they would not have in most dictatorships. The real problem is the propensity of human nature to divide the world into one's own group and strangers outside it. If I knew how to tackle this trait, I would deserve the Nobel peace prize. Meanwhile, one has to concentrate on deterrence, diplomacy and piecemeal efforts such as Daniel Barenboim's Arab-Israeli orchestra. But it will not help to pretend that the masses have superior self-restraint to those who try to lead them. * Do democracies have different policies than non-democracies?, C.B. Mulligan, R. Gil and X. Sala-i-Martin, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2004 ** Princeton 1993
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