Democracies and Success in War Essay

We know that democracies are common among the economically urbanized countries and rare between the very deprived ones. The reason we scrutinize this pattern is not that democracies are more probable to emerge, as a result, of economic development but that they are to a large extent more possible to survive if they occur to emerge in most urbanized countries. The paths to democracy are diverse. Indeed, they appear to follow no unsurprising pattern. But once democracy is conventional, for whatever reasons, its endurance depends on a few, easily particular, factors.

What is the Just War theory and how did it pertain to St. Augustine? According to Augustine there is no private right to kill. According to Paul Ramsey opposes in The Just War, Christian participation in warfare “was not actually an exception to the commandment, “you shall not murder” but instead an expression of the Christian understanding of moral and political responsibility. One can kill only under the authority of God. St. Augustine argued that Christian rulers had such an obligation to make peace for the protection of his subjects even if the only way to eliminate such a threat was through force of arms. St. Augustine believed that in wars there was a right intention.

The Democratic peace thesis, whose basic concepts were studied by Kant in the 1700s, is the theory that suggests that democracies have been pacific in their relations with one other and are unlikely to go to war with another democracy. “Democracies rarely fight each other (an empirical statement) because (b) they have other means of resolving conflicts between them and therefore do not need to fight each other (a prudential statement),and (c) they perceive that democracies should not fight each other (a normative statement about principles of right behavior), which reinforces the empirical state¬ment. By this reasoning the more democracies there are in the world, the fewer potential adversaries we and other democracies will have and the wider the zone of peace.” russet

The most prevalent reasons for states going to war are security, interest, standing, and revenge; of these, I posit that security is the most frequent. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on warfare occurring since the onset of the 20th century, however many of the core arguments retain efficacy through the countless centuries of human warfare. States don’t trust one another; even the best relationships between states are mired in spycraft with, or in opposition to one another. To summarize Waltz, drive for security is something that all states want, and need, as long as there are multiple states and at least one of them is looking for power.

Wars are usually fought for getting resources or based on ideologies or religion. Democratic institutions may sway public opinion, but this still may not result in future wars. Domestic order is in opposition to international anarchy and highlights the challenges facing international institutions. We need to identify different domestic interests that value the cost of war differently. The government itself can be an actor that can have interests in threatening or starting a war. Democratic peace tries to explain that having a democratic world will result in less war, but that is not true. Wars against democracies can be predicted by chance. An example of this would be the American Civil War when democracies fought one

Democracies are controlled by the people, and for the people, or so it is commonly defined. All people have their own opinions of how they think the government should work. Democracies symbolize freedom and justice as they appeal to the people. The first document, “The Gettysburg Address” focuses on the effects of the Civil War and how the people should react, instead of how the government is run. The second document, the “Funeral Oration”, explains how the people themselves could form the perfect democracy by Pericles standards. With this evidence in mind, the “Funeral Oration”, a speech given by Pericles, holds more extensive knowledge about the definition of democracy than Lincoln in “The Gettysburg Address”.

The challenge is how to keep the military in check and subservient to the political authority of a democratically oriented form of government, given the fact that the military possesses the ultimate power of force and coercion. The focus of a democratic form of society is that the citizens exercise direct participation in the government. The populace utilizes elections to select people to serve as their representative. The citizenry must stay cognizant of world affairs, the implications of military intervention, the cost of the sacrifice in comparison to the projected result, and make their elected officials aware of their position. The rule of law must govern this process, and the general population must concur there is a fair method for conducting said elections. The people must believe that the elected officials will in turn utilize the military forces in a disciplined manner, with concern for the greater good of the nation.

The idea that democracies do not fight each other can be traced back to the writings of Immanuel Kant over two hundred years ago in essay ‘On Perpetual Peace’, however, only in the early 1980s and with the writings of Michael Doyle was the idea consolidated. According to Doyle and other advocates of the democratic peace theory, liberal democratic states have been able to maintain peaceful relations amongst themselves, but are prone to wage war against non-democratic regimes. In order to prove this theory, vast databases have been constructed of historical dyadic relationships between states as well as detailed breakdowns of incidents of inter-state war. The conclusions reached are best shown in the work of Bruce Russett who has argued that

Over the previous two decades, the number of countries acquiring a democratic regime has increased dramatically. Democracy is a political regime allowing a system of government that is based on the belief of freedom and equal justice. Power is held by elected representatives through free and fair elections, resulting in a system that reflects the people’s choices. Democratic countries rarely, if ever, wage war on each other and tend to resolve disputes in a more peaceful manner rather than declaring war on their opposition. However, they are not the utopias of peace that many people envision democracies to be. The invasion of Iraq by the United States of America in 2003 stands as a strong example where the impact of a forced regime change has resulted in unrest and violence. IGO’s like the UN promote democracy in a less invasive and obstructive way and are a lot more successful. The invasion of Iraq clearly demonstrates the dangers of promoting democracy in an undemocratic international system. The spread of democracy cannot be imposed by force as it is discrediting the idea of freedom that the regime itself represents. Is democracy a reason for peace just as much as it is a justification for war? I believe democracy does make the world a more peaceful place, however, the forceful spread of democracy does not.

The Democratic Peace has become one of the most compelling theories in political science. The notice supports the claim that there is an absence of war between democracies. Many individuals have tested the reason for the lack of war is due to the role of public opinion. Democratic leaders are under an obligation to citizens of a democratic nation. Dating back to the days of Immanuel Kant, the subject of war has debated amongst scholars and writers alike. Those who are against any sort of physical activity that is warlike reinforce the main argument of the human and financial burdens of war. This then supports the idea that, overall, democracies behave peacefully. Although, this so-called peaceful behavior is not strongly correlated with other

Fortunately, a Harvard-educated history professor named Carroll Quigley wrote a handful of books that answer all of these questions and more. Unfortunately, the answers are very disturbing, especially to those who’ve accepted the common myths of “democratic government.”

The question of what is considered a democracy is one which many people have struggled to answer for centuries. Answers might vary from having all civil liberties to a model in which every person’s rights is protected and independent to a model that ensures equality. McKinnon (2012), believes that “Democracy refers generally to a method group decision-making that is characterised by a kind of equality among the participants at an essential age." Does the world have a democratic government that encompasses all of those answers? no. However, they all share one principle; the right to vote (choose a government). But an element of that answer contradicts the notion that a right to vote would lead to a government “by the people”. This essay will aim to illustrate how giving people a vote does not mean that a state would have a government “by the people” by analysing the problem in three areas: majority, minority and real-world statistical representation.

Winston Churchill once remarked that “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried”. In agreement with his statement, this paper will examine the problems of democratic governments using specific examples, and compare it to the failure of fascist governments in Nazi Germany and Italy and communist governments in the Soviet Union and China.

To date, though, notably few studies have investigated whether democratic publics are more hesitant to attack democracies than autocracies.Moreover, the small body of actual work has not computed for variables that could confound the relationship bounded by shared democracy and public support for war, nor has it explored the mechanisms by which the regime nature of the adversary affects the public mood. Despite decades of inquisition on the democratic peace, we still lack convincing documentation about whether and how public opinion contributes to the absence of war among democracies. The leaders who make the ultimate decisions about war and peace in democracies have powerful impetus to respect the opinions of citizens. Public opinion matters for several reasons. First, leaders who disappoint or antagonize their constituents risk being removed from office. While early research believe that public opinion on foreign policy was incoherent (Almond 1960) and that politics “stopped at the water’s edge” (Wildavsky 1966), this interpretation has been supplanted by many other studies showing that mass opinion is logical and influential. Leaders know that citizens care about foreign policy, which foreign policy regularly plays a role in electoral campaigns, and that foreign policy mistakes can hurt leaders at the ballot box (Aldrich 1989; Gronke 2003; Gelpi 2007).

Churchill’s claim that “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried” is deliberately provocative and intended to challenge the reader’s simplistic ideal that democracy is without faults. There are an estimated 114 democracies in the world today (Wong, Oct 3rd lecture). A figure that has increased rapidly in the last century not necessarily because democracy is the best form of government, but primarily for reason that in practice, under stable social, economic and political conditions, it has the least limitations in comparison to other forms of government. Be it the transparency of a democratic government or the prevalence of majority rule, all subdivisions of democracy benefit and hinder its