From the Analysis of a Separate Democratic Peace to the Liberal Study of International Conflict
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Introduction
From the Analysis of a Separate Democratic Peace to the Liberal Study of International Conflict1 International Politics (2004) 41, 465–471. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800091
Research on the ‘democratic peace’ has reached a critical stage. During the 1980s and 1990s, scholars, by and large, focused on defending the finding of a separate peace among democracies against mainly realist skeptics. Only more recently have they begun to investigate the wider field of international conflict. Research from this latest wave of democratic peace scholarship constitutes the bulk of contributions to the special issue. In this introduction, we aim to put them into a broader context of developments in democratic peace analysis. In particular, we want to draw attention to a characteristic evolution of liberal research programmes that seems to have inspired the democratic peace as well: Typically, scholars start with identifying a separate zone of international politics, then analyze the distinct liberal logic governing this separate zone, and, finally, claim that this distinct liberal logic is a harbinger of a more encompassing transformation of the international system. The extension of research beyond the separate peace has led to a multitude of new findings and, as a consequence, a rather complex picture of why conflicts arise and what contributes to either their escalation or peaceful termination. The mounting complexity of liberal conflict studies has increased the demand for a road map that is able to distinguish major highways from side streets, point to unknown (or still occupied) territories and, most importantly, demarcate borders (or rather frontiers) between the democratic peace and neighboring fields of the discipline. In the second part of this introduction, we briefly portray and discuss two road maps that are currently competing to guide future research on the subject.
The Development of Democratic Peace Research Typically, the world portrayed by liberals is a progressing one: the spread of peace among states is considered possible as is growing welfare among trading partners and increasing dispute settlement by international institutions (Zacher and Matthew, 1995; Huntley, 1996; cf. Doyle, 1997). According to liberals, the state of nature, that has dominated foreign policy making for centuries, will, in
Andreas Hasenclever and Wolfgang Wagner Introduction
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time, be replaced by a state of law, and war will no longer be a core feature of international affairs. Such optimism has been characteristic for liberal scholarship and underlines its origins in the philosophy of enlightenment which challenges the professional pessimism of realist scholarship. According to realists, progress to peace, welfare, and institutions is not to be expected under conditions of anarchy. Consequently, governments for their own sake should keep on playing by the rules of the international self-help game. As Raymond Aron (1962, 18) has put it: ‘les relations intere´tatiques (y) se de´roulent a` l’ombre de la guerre.’ Govern
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