CONCLUSION: PUSHING DEMOCRACY TO ACHIEVE PEACE

Social science theory and research has established a strong connection between democracy and conflict resolution between and within states. As an empirical mat­ter, the peace among democratically gov­erned states is almost universally accepted.

Whatever questions remain, it is clear that democratic governance is generally conducive to the resolution of both civil and international conflict. The policy implications also seem clear: the spread of democracy is good for international society as a whole, for the security of democratic states in particular, and for the peoples residing in war-torn regions of the globe. It has, of course, been the policy of the democratic major powers, and especially the United States, to promote democratic reform worldwide—a policy that predates the recent accumulation of social scientific research linking democracy to domestic and international peace (e.g. Carothers 1999; Ikenberry 2000). Yet the end of the Cold War and the dissipation of the major ideological challenge to representative democracy and market capitalism brought with it a greater willingness to discuss the use of military force as a means of toppling authoritarian regimes, with the expectation that democratization, while good for those liberated from tyrannical rule, also generates positive externalities for regional and inter­national security.

As discussed above, most of the reserva­tions in the scholarly literature concerning the connection between democracy and peaceful conflict resolution turn on the social upheaval sometimes associated with democratic tran­sitions. There are other reservations, how­ever. Aside from the irony that democracy, and therefore peace, might be promoted at gunpoint, the efficacy of “democratic imperialism” (Kristol and Kagan 2000; Kurtz 2003) has been called into question. Although there is some statistical evidence linking US military intervention to the democratization of target states (e.g. Meernik 1996; Peceny 1999), when looking at the specific cases of US interventions intended (wholly or in part) to contribute to the creation or consolidation of democratic regimes, fewer than half succeeded. And democratization was almost never the by-product of US inter­ventions undertaken for purposes other than regime change (Russett 2005; Pickering and Peceny 2006). The success rate for military interventions by Britain and France is even worse. Furthermore, there is little evidence that imposing democratic reforms on a state in an otherwise nondemocratic region will serve to encourage democratization elsewhere in the region (Enterline and Greig 2005).

These and other studies of intervention recognize that the promotion of democracy is rarely the sole purpose of military action by the US or other democratic major powers. When democratic reforms prove difficult—usually they do—and threaten the intervener’s other policy aims, the inter­vening government’s own electoral survival normally dictates that democratization be abandoned altogether or that it be limited to mainly symbolic reforms, even rigged elections (Bueno de Mesquita and Downs 2006). Multilateral operations like those mounted by the United Nations, the more forceful ones included, seem to have a better track record than unilateral interventions. But peace-building and democratization are never easy, particularly after civil wars in societies divided along ethnic or religious lines (on the determinants of success, see Doyle and Sambanis 2006). And even when military intervention is likely to succeed in bringing about a democratic transition and stable peace, it must be weighed against the direct costs in blood and treasure, as well as the opportunity costs of foregoing alternative peaceful methods of conflict resolution.