In 1988, the American political scientist Jack. S. Levy famously declared the “absence of war between democracies” to “come as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations” (Levy, “Domestic Politics and War,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 [no. 4, 1988]: 653–73, here p. 662). While this statement could be taken as a mere indication of the perennial dream of social scientists to become like natural scientists and to support their claim that their disciplines can be similarly cumulative, methodologically uncontroversial, and practically relevant, this particular declaration was much more than that. It was an attempt to contribute to the translation of a relatively recent development in the social sciences into a powerful instrument for strategic and political decision-making processes.
Relatively recent? While the proponents of this theory asserted that it had its origin in the thinking of Immanuel Kant and, therefore, in the reasoning of one of the greatest figures in the history of ideas, they more or less ignored the fact that the theory had not drawn much attention during the larger parts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the characteristics of the political science debate on “democratic peace” is a certain tendency toward historical decontextualization. Not only Kant but also crucial categories like “war” and “democracy” (or Kant’s “republic”) remained, perhaps due to the pressures of operationalization for quantitative studies, historically rather unreflected.
The book by the Israeli political scientist Piki Ish-Shalom is presented as a “political biography” of the idea of democratic peace, and such a “biography” of an influential social-scientific theory is certainly most welcome. The book at hand is not as comprehensive as one might have wished it to be. The lively debate about Kant’s ideas in Germany around 1800 (collected in Anita and Walter Dietze, eds., Ewiger Friede? Dokumente einer deutschen Diskussion um 1800, 1989) and later European contributions, like those by Pierre Hassner or Ernst Otto Czempiel, are ignored. The interpretation is totally tied to the self-perception of American political science. It mostly starts in 1983 with R. J. Rummel’s and, above all, Michael Doyle’s seminal essays—strangely ignoring Doyle’s later work. A brief reconstruction of the American pre-Doyle debate is added to the conventional picture.
While this emphasis on the selectivity of this political biography seems necessary, it is not intended as a critique. The author has set himself a different goal. His main interest clearly is to use the “biography” of “democratic peace” as exemplary for what happens to theories in general when they migrate outside academia. He is deeply interested in the empirical study of the complex processes involved and in the normative questions arising in this connection. The chapters lie on rather different levels, therefore. Some are mostly narrative, others densely theoretical. Methodologically, the whole book is based on a critical study of academic literature, semiacademic journals, partisan publications, “publicist writings and op-eds in major newspapers, presidential addresses, and policy papers” (p. 4).
On the more concrete level, I found Democratic Peace highly informative. While many readers will be familiar with the facts in the chapters about American foreign policy and its intellectual rationalization and legitimation, the chapters on Israel and particularly on Benjamin Netanyahu’s and Natan Sharansky’s pronouncements contain much additional material. Regarding the United States, Ish-Shalom sees the constellation after the collapse of communism in Europe and the end of the Cold War as particularly relevant: “The rare combination of a new, relatively peaceful world order, and a compelling theory that fits the collective identity and self-image of the sole emanating superpower, resulted in a public convention that democracies do not fight each other, which was accepted by policy-makers and foreign-policy pundits” (p. 70). The author describes in detail the important role that Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign against President George H. W. Bush played in this regard, and how Clinton succeeded in attracting some, not all, neoconservative intellectuals because of their conviction that the democratic peace theory supports their view of the moral justification of American national interests. In a later chapter, he shows how President George W. Bush exaggerated the claim even of the most ardent defenders of the “democratic peace” theory when he asserted in 2006 that “we know from history that free nations are peaceful nations” (p. 140).
The chapter on the ways in which the Israeli Right mobilized the “rhetorical capital” of the democratic peace thesis deftly distinguishes between the academic and the political level. Academically, Netanyahu’s back-and-forth between the different versions of the democratic peace thesis—namely, the one that emphasizes structural and the competing one that underlines normative explanations—could be seen as inconsistent, but according to the author, it is better to consider this apparent vacillation between theoretical alternatives “part of a well-crafted public relations effort” (p. 98). If the Palestinians have to democratize first, this is an excellent excuse for postponing the peace process. When Hamas won the elections in Gaza in 2006, Netanyahu—according to Ish-Shalom—abruptly changed his rhetorical strategy, gave up referring to the democratic peace thesis and substituted it with a new idea, namely, the idea that capitalism by itself leads to peace. It becomes clear that the author of this book is very much driven by the misuse of the democratic peace thesis in Israel and in connection with the U.S. war on Iraq.
On the more abstract and general level, the author has the ambition to show how power shapes truth without falling into the traps of a Foucauldian approach or following fashionable versions of constructionism. For Ish-Shalom, actors have to be specified and the pluralism of modern societies has to be taken into account. Moreover, for him, there is not only one causal direction at work here but a much more complex interplay among academic discourse, public debate, and strategic use of theory. For his purposes, he adduces insights from the hermeneutical tradition and from Antonio Gramsci’s analyses of the formations of hegemony. The details of his complex model have to be left aside here. Normatively, he follows Robert Goodin’s distinction between “blame” and “task” responsibility. This means that although theoreticians cannot be called responsible for every use or misuse of their theories, they cannot declare themselves uninterested in them either; they must take an active interest in addressing why their theories have been vulnerable in a certain respect. The book ends with advice for the producers of theories about how to comply with such a norm.
Although this book certainly is not a complete political biography of the rise (and decline) of democratic peace, it is a considerable achievement. By adding shorter analyses of the “capitalist peace” and the “soft power” approaches, the more general approach is also put to the test. It would perhaps have been useful to add some reflections on whether the results offered here with regard to political science are expected to be true for the other social sciences and for the humanities as well. More importantly, a chapter addressing the question of what remains from this whole debate after the decline of the democratic peace thesis would have been extremely helpful. Many of the objections and skeptical evaluations of the thesis are presented in the text and often in footnotes, but they are nowhere brought together in a systematic fashion. Such a chapter would have had to deal with the paradoxical consequences that have always characterized democratization at gunpoint and military aggression in the name of peace.
