Democratic Peace Theory

[Silent Hunter]

Matthew White has an interesting little article on this:

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/demowar.htm

He concludes that 6 of the 39 international wars (ergo, not counting civil conflicts) between WW2 and the year 2000 might have been between democracies. However, due to the fact that democracies have been historically rare and wars fairly rare (in probability terms), the sample- which produces 6 inter-democracy wars instead of the expected- is too small to draw accurate conclusions from.

[Silent Hunter]

"The Golden Arches Peace Theory" (the McDonalds One) got discredited with Kosovo. It was also false when it came to Panama and the Kargil War (the 1999 India-Pakistan one). The article I linked to commented on that.

Vis WWI, Germany didn't start the war, that's true. They certainly, however, made things a lot, lot worse by invading Belgium. They also did some rather nasty things in the process (burning the Louvian library for a start).

I'd advise you to read The Guns of August, which covers that subject pretty well (it was, incidentally, what JFK read just before the Cuban Missiles Crisis and it influenced his thinking).

[Silent Hunter]

Germany invaded Belgium, for crying out loud. And Luxembourg. It almost certainly made things worse on the Eastern Front. It bears a lot of responsibility for World War One, even if it didn't start it.

[Silent Hunter]

The Democratic Piece Theory, opebo, is that democracies don't fight other democracies, not that democracies don't fight non-democracies.

[Silent Hunter]

Electing a government does not make a state a democracy. It also requires freedom and human rights.