Abstract

BUCHRUCKER, Cristian. The debate  about “the democratic peace”. Ambiguities, illusions and realities. Ciclos hist. econ. soc. [online]. 2017, vol.28, n.48, pp.1-20. ISSN 1851-3735.

The democratic peace theory doesn’t provide a clear mechanism showing how democratic countries produce policies of negotiation when they have differences with other democracies. This strange deficit is universally deplored. So there remains a basic question: in what sense are democratic the processes through which contemporary states decide to start wars and coercitive policies? It seems that in no precise sense. Since the middle of the 20th century the capacity of public opinion and parliaments to influence to  a preponderant extent this matter has been decreasing in an alarming way. A growing delegation and usurpation of powers has been concentrating the authority to decide these things in a very small cycle led by presidents and prime ministers, who are advised by a handful of  military and civilian bureaucrats and technocrats. Just one member of this group has a basis in elections. If the democracy factor had the important weight the theory claims, we should have evidence that the foreign policies of those states is effectively controlled by the non elites, that is, the vast majority of the citizenry. No serious student of international politics would dare to say that such evidence exists. Using a very minimalist definition of democracy, a historical generalization of dyadic democratic peace could be proposed, but the contribution it has made to the debate of the causes of war and peace has been very modest, namely, that the type of political system, together with other cultural affinities, can be useful as a conditioning factor to facilitate negotiations and understanding between two opposing sides. But it does not seem that institutional differences by themselves have been a war producing factor in contemporary history.

Keywords : peace, democracy, state, war.

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