Michael Totten, guest posting at Instapundit this week considers how the war in the Middle East affects the democratic peace theory:
This war in the Middle East nearly demolishes the theory that democracies don’t go to war with each other. Lebanon, aside from Hezbollah’s state-within-a-state, is a democracy. At least it’s an almost-democracy.
(For those who aren’t Security Studies nerds like myself, Democratic Peace theory essentially argues that democracies will never go to war with each other).
As Instapundit lacks a comments facility, Dan Drezner has opened up the debate instead, leading off with:
Given Hezbollah’s role as instigator, and the failure of the Lebanese army to engage the IDF, it seems hard to code this as a violation of the democratic peace proposition. And yet, labeling this case as an exception carries the whiff of fitting the data to match the hypothesis.
The debate that follows in the comments thread is well worth a read.
The theory if often used by proponents of democratisation – as well as the more obvious benefits of democracy, the simple process of democratising the globe makes for a safer world.
Which would be nice, if only the theory wasn’t based more on a hope than hard statistical evidence. Its credibility wears pretty thin when one looks at the numerous examples of wars that have actually taken place between democracies.
I wouldn’t want to underplay the global security benefits of democratisation, though – I think there is some pretty solid evidence out there to demonstrate that democracies fight each other far less than non-democracies fight each other, and that conflicts between democracies tend to be less severe.
Anyway, moving back to how to characterise the current conflict in Lebanon (hopefully without making any particular comment on the rights or wrongs of the war), I’d argue that it’s a conflict between a democratic state (Israel), and a non-state actor that takes part in a democratic process without yet embracing the ideals of democracy (Hizbullah), which is taking place in part on the territory of a developing but fragile democracy (Lebanon).
Which, to my mind, means that the conflict is outside the strictures of the democratic peace theory anyway.