Democracies may rarely fight one another, but developed socialist states rarely fight at all

Alternatives

Volumn 22, Issue 4, 1997, Pages 493-521

  Oren, Ido ^a   Hays, Jude ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 21944435061     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437549702200403     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. See Jack Levy, "Domestic Politics and War," in Robert Rothberg and Theodore Rabb, eds., The Origins and Prevention of Major Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 79-100.
2. The concept of "images" of international relations is from Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954).
3. Melvin Small and J. David Singer, "The War Proneness of Democratic Regimes, 1816-1965," Jerusalem Journal of International Relations 1 (summer 1976):50-69;
4. Steve Chan, "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall . . . Are the Freer Countries More Pacific?" Journal of Conflict Resolution 28 (December 1984): 617-648;
5. Levy, "Domestic Politics and War"; Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 11.
6. See, e.g., Michael Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics," American Political Science Review 80 (December 1986):1151-1161;
7. Zeev Maoz and Nasrin Abdulali, "Regime Type and International Conflict," Journal of Conflict Resolution 33 (March 1989):3-35; Russen, note 2.
8. For dissenting analyses see David Spiro, "The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace," International Security 19 (fall 1994):50-86;
9. Henry Farber and Joanne Gowa, "Polities and Peace," International Security 20 (fall 1995):123-146.
10. Levy, note 1, p. 88.
11. See Ido Oren, "The Subjectivity of the 'Democratic' Peace: Changing U.S. Perceptions of Imperial Germany," International Security 20 (fall 1995):147-184.
12. In the words of Scott Gates, Torbjorn Knutsen, and Jonathon Moses: "Given enough time and RAM, we might conceivably find other variables which correlate as strongly with 'peace' as does democracy" - "Democracy and Peace: A More Skeptical View," Journal of Peace Research 33 (February 1996):1-10 (quote on 3). Gates, Knutsen, and Moses also note that even the democratic-peace literature itself uncovered a pattern of a peace among nondemocracies - members of the group of countries classified as "anocracies" (between democracy and autocracy) have never fought one another (see Russett, note 2, p. 79).
13. See V. Kubalkova and A. A. Cruikshank, Marxism-Leninism and Theory of International Relations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980);
14. Margot Light, The Soviet Theory of International Relations (New York: St. Martin's, 1988).
15. Vladimir I. Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1916/1975);
16. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: Unwin Hyman, 1902/1988).
17. See also Rudolph Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922/1981).
18. Kubalkova and Cruikshank, note 8; Light, note 8.
19. For thorough treatments of the theory that explicate and criticize it on its own terms, consult Kubalkova and Cruikshank, note 8; Light, note 8; Alien Lynch, The Soviet Study of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
20. See Gates, Knutsen, and Moses, note 7: 6-7.
21. Kubalkova and Cruikshank, note 8, p. 219.
22. Ibid., p. 198.
23. Ibid., pp. 197-198.
24. See Marie Lavigne, International Political Economy and Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 63.
25. International Political Economy and Socialism Ibid., pp. 8-9.
26. See President William Clinton, "Confronting the Challenges of a Broader World," U.S. State Department Dispatch 4 (1993):3;
27. Anthony Lake, "From Containment to Enlargement," U.S. State Department Dispatch 4 (1993):3.
28. Lavigne, note 16, p. 63.
29. For a Soviet publication making this distinction, see E. Leonidov and Y. Mikhailov, "Maoists' Anti-Popular Economic Policy," International Affairs (Moscow) 21 (February 1975):34-43. From a Western perspective, the differentiation of "Marxism-Leninism" and "Maoism" (i.e., the wrong kind of socialism) appeared to entail artificial ideological hairsplitting, not a legitimate theoretical move. Indeed, the reclassification of China as "Maoist," so as to distance it from the Soviet Union, was obviously a post hoc product of the Sino-Soviet rift. But such ideological, post hoc, theorizing appears "abnormal" only if one believes that US social-scientific theorizing about foreign countries is unaffected by changes in US diplomatic relations with these countries. In reality, US social-scientific concepts are greatly influenced by US foreign relations. For example, whereas presently imperial Germany is understood to have been an "autocracy," a century ago - when US-German relations were still cordial - US political scientists regarded Germany far more positively, as an advanced constitutional state whose efficient administration Americans should copy (see Oren, note 6). And whereas fascism is presently understood to have been a reactionary, right-wing movement, so long as the United States maintained cordial relations with Mussolini many US political scientists regarded Italian fascism as a progressive, modernizing force.
30. See Ido Oren, "Corporatism and the Attraction of Fascism in American Political Science," paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Southwestern Political Science Association, Houston, 1996. The Soviet reclassification of China after the rift appears abnormal only if compared with a mythical norm of US political science. As for China's image in the United States, in the early 1970s it underwent a transformation that was not unlike the one that occurred in Moscow. Whereas, in the past, Communist China was portrayed by the US media in the darkest of terms, once US-Chinese relations improved it was widely reported (while the terrible Cultural Revolution was still under way) that China was "moving to the Right," and that Chinese and Western values were far less divergent than previously believed.
31. See Rob Knowles and Ido Oren, "Shifting US Attitudes Toward China," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 17, 1995.
32. Assigning Yugoslavia to the developed socialist camp starting in 1949 has little effect on our statistical findings, nor does reassigning Albania from the developed socialist to the developing socialist group.
33. The information discussed above was gleaned from Roy Mellor, Comecon: Challenge to the West (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971);
34. Giuseppe Schiavone, The Institution of Comecon (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981);
35. CMEA Secretariat, The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, 30 Years (Moscow: CMEA Secretariat Economic Information Department, 1979);
36. CMEA Secretariat, Survey of CMEA Activities in 1981 (Moscow: CMEA Secretariat, 1982);
37. Vienna Institute for Comparative Economic Studies, Comecon Foreign Trade Data, 1986 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988); Lavigne, note 16.
38. US Department of State, Atlas of U.S. Foreign Relations, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: State Department, 1985);
39. quoted in John Rourke, International Politics on the World Stage, 2d ed. (Guildford, Conn.: Dushkin Publishing, 1989).
40. See OECD homepage at http://www.oecd.org.
41. Based on the comprehensive listing of system members compiled by the Correlates of War Project. See J. David Singer and Melvin Small, Correlates of War Project: International and Civil War Data, 1816-1992, computer files and codebook (Ann Arbor: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 1994).
42. The definition and measurement procedures of war employed by the COW project are fully explained in Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816-1980 (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1982);
43. Singer and Small, Correlates of War Project.
44. See, e.g., Raymond Duvall, "An Appraisal of the Methodological and Statistical Procedures of the Correlates of War Project," in Francis Hoole and Dina Zinnes, eds., Quantitative International Politics (New York: Praeger, 1976), pp. 67-98.
45. Herbert Tillema, International Armed Conflict Since 1945: A Bibliographic Handbook of Wars and Military Interventions (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 11-12. In coding our data, we followed the listing of international armed conflicts provided in pp. 277-286 of Tillema's handbook. The list specifies the years in which each conflict began/ended and the names of the parties involved. To the extent that some states participated in a conflict for only a part of its total duration, these states were coded as participants for their years of active involvement alone (the information about the conflict involvement dates of individual states was gleaned from the short conflict narratives that make up the bulk of Tillema's handbook). We excluded from our data-set parties to conflict who at the time of their participation were not recognized as members of the international system (e.g., national liberation fronts). As a rule, Tillema did not distinguish between UN-sponsored and non-UN sponsored foreign interventions on the grounds that influential UN . members often used the organization's flag as a cover for their selfish interests (p. 6). This rule is generally sensible, but we feel that in one case Tillema applied it somewhat too rigidly; namely, when he coded the members of the UNIFIL peacekeeping force (Fiji, Finland, Ghana, Ireland, etc.) as participants in the Lebanese conflict. In our judgment, the UNIFIL contingent is a genuine peacekeeping force, and therefore we did not code its members as active participants in the conflict. At any rate, our statistical results are not significantly affected by this coding decision.
46. See Istvan Kende, "Twenty Five Years of Local Wars," Journal of Peace Research 8, no. 1 (1971):5-22;
47. I. Kende, "Wars of Ten Years (1967-1976)," Journal of Peace Research 15, no. 3 (1978):227-241.
48. See Dietrich Jung, Klaus Schlichte, and Jens Siegelberg, "Ongoing Wars and Their Explanation," unpub. manuscript, University of Hamburg, 1994, p. 15.
49. Ongoing Wars and Their Explanation, Ibid., p. 3.
50. For a full listing of the wars, see Klaus Jürgen Gantzel and Torsten Schwinghammer, Die Kriege nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg 1945 bis 1992: Daten und Tendenzen (Münster: Lit Verlag, 1994), pp. 49-86.
51. Also, in cases of civil wars with foreign intervention, we coded the pertinent state's government as a participant only if the foreign intervention was directed against the government.
52. Unlike Gantzel's data, which are available in German only, listings of the wars identified by COW researchers and by Herbert Tillema are widely available in English; therefore, we chose not to reproduce them here.
53. James McClave and Frank Dietrich, Statistics, 5th ed. (San Francisco: Dellen, 1991), p. 627.
54. The expected value denotes the frequency of war we would have expected to observe in each cell if variation in socioeconomic structure had nothing to do with variation in war propensity. The expected frequencies in each cell are estimated by multiplying the relevant row/column marginals by each other and dividing the product by the sample's total size.
55. See McClave and Dietrich, note 35, ch. 12.
56. In the cases of states whose classification changed in midperiod from developing capitalist to developing socialist, to the extent that they were involved in an ongoing war at the time of the transition, we coded them as having entered the war twice, before and after the transition.
57. It should be noted that the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan is not recorded by the most recent version of the COW interstate/extrasystemic war listing. The reason for this omission is not clear to us; the other two data-sets do include the Afghanistan war.
58. The "American-ness" of the science of international relations is the theme of Stanley Hoffmann, "An American Social Science: International Relations," Daedalus 106, no. 3 (1977):41-60.