Debating the Democratic Peace by Michael E. BrownReview by: Francis FukuyamaForeign Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 1996), p. 144Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20047836 .

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Recent Books

on International Relations

Political and Legal FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

Debating the Democratic Peace, edited

BY MICHAEL E. BROWN ET AL.

Cambridge: mit Press, 1996,379 pp.

$17.00 (paper). The essays in this extremely useful volume,

many of them previously published in International Security, bring together much

of the work done on the "democratic

peace" hypothesis in recent years. The as

sertion that democracies tend not to fight one another is, in Bruce Russett s words, "one of the strongest nontrivial and non

tautological generalizations that can be

made about international relations," and

the academic debate on the issue has been

both interesting and of high quality. The volume begins with such proponents of the

hypothesis as Russett and Michael Doyle, then moves to counterpoints by Christo

pher Layne, David Spiro, and Jack Snyder. The controversies they address concern

how to define democracy, empirical evi

dence of wars or near wars, and the causal

connections between democracy and peace. It is hard not to conclude that an im

portant relationship binds democracy and

peace, though it has certain qualifications: it is not an iron rule, but a correlation

that is dependent on the degree to which not just democratic but liberal institutions and norms are consolidated. Hence it is

not surprising that many of the coun

terexamples cited by critics concern

borderline liberal-democratic states such

as the American South, Wilhelmine

Germany, or the Soviet successor states.

The policy question then is not whether

democracy is conducive to peace, but

under what circumstances it is reason

able to expect democracy to develop, and what instruments outside states

have for promoting it. This question,

falling as it does more within the

province of comparative government and political economy than interna

tional relations, is the one missing piece of an otherwise excellent volume.

Call for any book reviewed or advertised in this issue

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