Session 15: Liberal Democracy = Peace?

Peace. It is the ever elusive destination; the big question in the sphere of international relations. For long, scholars have tried to come up with mechanisms for peace. Michael Doyle provides a good literature review in his piece titled, 'Liberalism and World Politics'. For Immanuel Kant, the recipe for peace is liberal democracy. He argues that liberal democracies have established a state of peace among themselves because they find it far more beneficial to do so in accordance to their capitalistic and ideologically liberal nature. He presents fair evidence for this which is quite convincing. However what makes Kant’s theory stand out from other liberal peace theorists like Schumpeter and Machiavelli, is Kant’s recognition that this peace only exists between liberal states while against non liberal states, liberal states remains just as war like as any other.  In my opinion, this assertion is the most relevant in world politics today.

Let’s take the example of the United States of America. It’s the most powerful liberal democracy in the world. It is interesting to note how many wars the US has fought over the years to liberate people of other countries from tyranny of their autocratic leaders. This is exactly what Kant has predicted. How a liberal state like America has used liberal values as the reason for waging of wars. Examples include the Korean, Vietnamese as well as the recent Iraqi war. But this liberal rationale is more often than not just an excuse used to justify wars, rather than being the actual reason. The US mostly fights wars because of its own interests in various areas. An interesting look at US foreign policy in regards to its relations according to regime types of countries and other factors is attached below.

Kant also argues that “liberal states assume that non liberal states, which do not rest on free consent, are not just. Because non liberal governments are in a state of aggression with their own people, their foreign relations become for liberal government deeply suspect.” Nowadays this is very aptly applicable to the relations between China and most of the liberal world. The rise of China has buzzed many alarms and the Chinese still suffer from a bad reputation due to their domestic authoritarian rule, so China remains on the ‘suspect list’ of many liberal countries. Even in the study of international relations, China has become a great case study for prediction on how peaceful it’s further rise will be. This in turn has coloured foreign relations of many liberal democracies with China, with whom they are willing to trade but still have a deep seated suspicion towards. Whether it leads to war one day remains to be seen.

In conclusion this piece by Michael Doyle was interesting to read because it does try to provide recipes for peace, which has been something that I have been looking forward to discovering and exploring. Kant’s theory was the most interesting to study but still the problem of non liberal states remains and in my opinion, even though Kant recognizes this problem, it felt like it was not given much importance because today this remains the biggest cause of war and to think that one day all these non liberal states will transform to liberal states still seems like a long shot and thus perhaps there needs to be exploration of other mechanisms for ensuring peace which encompass and directly challenge this problem.