If anyone were dim enough to think that America's war against Iraq proves that democracies do go to war, I'm sure that the likes of Messrs. McCain and Blair would have a pat reply: "America is the democracy here, Iraq the non-democracy, and we maintain that democracies never fight each other."
In case anybody missed the point still, let me spell it out for Messrs. McCain and Blair. If x is a democracy, and y is a democracy, then and only then, x and y will never go to war against each other. Aggression by one democracy against a non-democracy doesn't count, you see -- it seems there's something so uncongenial about an autocracy that it brings out the worst in a democracy, and compels it, against its finest sentiments, to attack the barbaric autocracy. Therefore, logic compels us to conclude that we must get rid of the non-democracies to achieve universal piece -- for they provoke the democracies into attacking them.
Here, at this point, the reader may be stroking his chin; perhaps, there's something in a democracy's DNA that causes it to -- dare we say it! -- "overreact". The reader will then recall the warnings against democracy advanced by the Federalist Papers, such as this one:
"Sparta, Athens, Rome, and Carthage were all republics; two of them, Athens and Carthage, of the commercial kind. Yet were they ... often engaged in wars..." (the Federalist Papers, No. 6, Project Gutenberg Etext, June 6, 1992).
There are other observations of a similar nature, but I leave them out.
"Is it true that democracies never fight each other?" inquires Lord
Skidelsky, in his article on John McCain and the Democratic League. "The
affirmative answer seems to depend on two separate claims," he maintains.
"The first is that democracies have, as a matter of historical record,
never fought each other. This is true of a rather small group of rich countries
-- India is a partial exception -- mainly in Western Europe and its overseas
offshoots, since World War II."
Apparently, there was no history before World War II - no democracies, no republics; in which case, the world must have been perpetually at war, for non-democracies are always pugnacious. Thus ancient Egypt, ancient China, and so on and so forth, were mere war machines. Never mind that Egypt did not even have an army before the Hyksos invasion: that was a mere aberration. Never mind that the Roman Empire, after the civil wars of the Republic, was welcomed by poets like Virgil and Horace for the great Octavian peace: these are mere accidents. As a "matter of historical record", democracies have never fought each other.
Let us assume that the past does not count -- that history is bunk. That would make the twentieth century bunk as well, but would possibly make it less bunkish, since closer to our time.
The reason Lord Skidelsky gives for non-combatant democracies is (with the telling exception of the world's largest) that prosperity produces peace. "But is it democracy that has brought them peace and prosperity, or is it peace and prosperity that have brought democracy? Is it democracy that has kept Europe peaceful since 1945, or is it the long period of peace since 1945 that has allowed democracy to become the European norm?"
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