Comment & Debate
R.J. Rummel. “The Democratic Peace: A new IDEA”. – WHY DEMOCRACIES ARE LESS VIOLENT. The civil liberties and political rights of a democratic system foster and maintain an exchange society. This is a social field, whose medium is composed of a people’s meanings (as those given to the flag or a cross), values, and norms; its social forces are imbedded in this medium and flow one way or another, forming various equilibriums among what people want, can, and will try to get; and conflict or cooperation within this field, violence or peace, depend on the congruence between these equilibriums and the expectations people have about the outcome of their actions.
Democratically free people are spontaneous, diverse, pluralistic. They have many, often opposing, interests pushing them one way or another. They belong to independent and overlapping occupational, religious, recreational, and political subgroups, each involving its own interests; and then they are moved by the separate and even antagonistic desires of different age, sex, ethnic, racial, and regional strata.
Freedom thus creates a social field in which social forces point in many different directions, and in which individual interests, the engine of social behavior, are often cross-pressured. Like the Catholic political conservative who cannot decide whether to vote for the Episcopalian, Republican conservative, or the Catholic welfare democrat, many within a free society must balance often contradictory wants. This means that those very strong interests that drive the individual in one direction to the exclusion of all else, even at the risk of violence, do not develop easily. And, if such interests do develop, they are usually shared by relatively few individuals. That is, the normal working of a democratically free society in all its diversity is to restrain the growth across the community of that consuming singleness of view and purpose that leads, if frustrated, to wide-scale social and political violence.
Consider by contrast a centralized society with a totalitarian government. In the main, behavior is no longer spontaneous, but commanded; in its major, most significant outlines, what one is and does is determined at the center. The totalitarian model is familiar and need not be elaborated. Relevantly here, such a system turns a social field into an organization, with a task to achieve (such as equality, communism, social justice, development), a management-worker, communal-obey class division cutting across all society, and all the characteristics of an organization (coercive planning, plethora of rules, lines of authority from top to bottom) needed to direct each member’s activities.
The consequence is to polarize major interests. If the satisfaction of one’s interests depends always on the same “them”; if “they” are responsible for one’s job, housing, quality and cost of food, and even life and death, then almost all that is important depends on whether one is in the command or obey class. In effect, these are two poles to which interests become aligned. Thus, and most importantly for us here, since most vital interests depend on one center, it is easy to see that the interests related to this center–who commands and what is commanded–are matters of grave concern. In a democracy one can shrug his shoulders over losing: “win some, lose some, I’ll do better next time.” But in a highly centralized system, a loss on one issue may result in a loss on all, including even one’s life.
With so much at stake, therefore, violence comes easily, especially to the rulers who must use repression and terror against possible dissent or sources of opposition; the gun, prison, or concentration camp are the major tools of social policy. And, as happened in Poland, in such a polarized system, conflict and violence involving local interests soon engage the whole society. For the split between those who command and obey is a fault line: slippage in one place moves along the whole fault and causes a social quake–wide-scale conflict and, given the importance of the issues, quite possibly violence.
What about foreign violence? By virtue of the same cross-pressures restricting violence within democracies, the unification of public interests needed to pursue foreign aggression is usually missing. Given the lack of general public support, and perhaps the outright opposition of certain social or interest groups, a democratic leader would pursue a costly foreign conflict at great risk to his political future, even if he could get the government’s counter-balanced machinery to work in the same perilous direction. This he can do, especially when some external threat or attack unites public opinion (as in Great Britain’s military response to Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands), but not with anything like the political freedom with which a dictator or small ruling group can make war. And among democracies, each with its own pluralism, cross-pressures, and politically constrained leaders; and each quite possibly having a variety of political and commercial ties and transactions that create their own pro-peace interest groups; the forces opposing violence overwhelm any tendencies toward severe conflict, violence, and war between them.
A totalitarian ruler has no such natural constraints. True, there will be cross-pressures among the elite. There are calculations to be made about the cost in lost trade, aid, allies, and the like, not to mention in resources and manpower. But such cross-pressures are usually within a particular direction (Should we invade today or wait? Should we squeeze them into submission?) and among often hand-picked subordinates. Real, fundamental opposition is lacking, where as in a democracy even the basic constitutional laws governing the making of war are open to debate and political contest.
In all this I am simplifying to essentials, as in universally describing a falling body by a simple equation that ignores wind, body shape, and air friction. And the heart of this pure explanation is the difference between a social field of cross-pressured interests and politically responsible leaders versus a tightly organized society of polarized interests and dictatorial rulers. I am describing pure types, recognizing that there are many gradations between.
But this should suffice here. To promote democratic institutions promotes a deeper and more durable peace because it promotes a social field, cross-pressures, and political responsibility; it promotes pluralism, diversity, and groups that have a stake in peace.