Kant and International Relations Theory: Cosmopolitan Community-Building by Dora Ion

Author:Dora Ion [Ion, Dora]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781136334726
Google: NgXDAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17538794
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

5 Comparative conceptions and

critiques of democratic peace

theory

In the last decades, the tenets of democratic peace theory have become increasingly influential upon the policies of democratization (Nisley 2007). Theoretically, however, versions of the theory have proved vulnerable to critiques: the monadic version (suggesting that democracies/liberal states are more prone to peace than non-democracies) cannot “differentiate the circumstances in which liberal states do and do not go to war”, and the dyadic version does not explain “why the liberal states should be peace prone only in relation with other liberal states” (Macmillan 2003, 233). The probabilistic re-formulation of the relationship between democracy and peace (Maoz and Russett 1993), and the improvement of causal models with new independent interdependencies (Oneal and Russett 2001), have left the claim to the “Kantian legacy” unchallenged.

According to Gates, Knutsen and Moses, the school's lack of introspection into its genealogy is precisely what diminishes the theory's explanatory power. Most interpretations are founded on a “rumored content” of Kant's “Perpetual Peace” essay, through the utter neglect of Kant's warning that republics should not be confused with democracies (Gates et al. 1996, 6). Classics such as Paine or Godwin seem a much better source of democratic peace ideas than Kant: Godwin not only extolled the peacefulness of democracies in relation with each other, but also warned about their aggression towards non-democracies, claims that Kant never made. Instead of insisting upon the Kantian character of the separate democratic peace, the analysis of such sources would save some scholars (Owen, Doyle) from the inconvenience of justifying (Doyle) or excusing (Russett) democracies’ wars with non-democracies with the help of “Kantian criteria”. Notwithstanding obvious critiques to the theory's justification of interventions (Cavallar 2001), there is insufficient recognition within the school that Kant “strongly” disapproved “the use of force as a way of pursuing one's rights” (Macmillan 2003, 239), and that he refuted the non-liberal (even “imperialist”) mentality of some “contemporary liberal justifications of interventions in non-liberal states that only a part of the world is capable of governing itself”. In fact, the use of force, as an illiberal means “to solve the shortcomings of the liberal capitalist society”, is popular among classical utilitarians, such as John Stuart Mill (Jahn 2005). Even though the school does not necessarily claim interventionism as its tradition (Macmillan 2003, 238–239), the record of wars and interventions towards non-liberals deserves theoretical clarification in relation to the alleged Kantian legacy.

It is worth noting that the democratic peace theory can be criticized on one hand from the standpoint of its misinterpretation of Kantian texts, and on the other hand from the standpoint of its use of statistical data. Insofar as it is based upon members’ satisfaction with the status quo, Kant's cosmopolitan community concept provides a better explanation of the fact that democracies rarely (if ever) fight each other than does democratic constitutional design; at the same time, the absence of conditions and relationships leading to security communities might explain some conflicts between democracies and non-democracies. Nonetheless, the main point on which

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