International Order and Individual Liberty: Effects of War and Peace on the Development of Governments.

• Author: Mueller, John
• Position: Book Review

By Mark E. Pietrzyk Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002. Pp. xxiv, 247. $44.00 paper.

In the past fifteen years or so, a cottage industry has burgeoned within political science focused on the observation that democracies have rarely, if ever, engaged in war with each other. Many scholars have concluded from this apparent fact that something about democracy causes peace. Perhaps the normal give-and-take of democracy is extrapolated to the international area, making democracies capable of settling their differences without resort to force, or perhaps ordinary people tend to dislike war (because ultimately they have to bear its burdens) and apply their clout "in democracies to keep their governments from going to war, at least against other democracies.

Unlike most political science rumination, this research has had an impact on policy thinking. Bill Clinton's administration prominently and enthusiastically embraced it, and many of the supporters of war against Iraq in George W. Bush's administration argue that the forcible imposition of democracy there might very wail lead to a cascade of democratic governments in the Middle East and thus, ultimately, to peace in that troubled region.

Mark E. Pietrzyk belongs to a comparatively small band of political scientists who take issue with the central proposition. Like others, he has been frustrated by the fact that when examples counter to the treasured thesis are brought up, democratic peace theorists gingerly massage definitions to conclude conveniently either that the case in point did not involve democracies on both sides or that what happened was not a war. For example, he points out that the problem presented by what appears to be a whole set of enthusiastic aggressions by France against quite liberal states in the last years of the eighteenth century is deftly solved by the controversial argument that France ceased to be a democracy in 1795 (pp. 126-27). Likewise, democratic Lebanon's war against Israel in 1948 is brushed aside because Israel had not really gotten its formal democratic institutions in order yet (p. 205).

Pietrzyk's engaging, thoughtful, and carefully argued (if somewhat repetitive) book is devoted for the most part to a fairly detailed and methodical examination of several cases. Again and again, Pietrzyk finds democratic publics eager for war even against other democracies, often abandoning their supposed propensity for peaceful give-and-take when sufficiently...