International Order and Individual Liberty

International Order and Individual Liberty offers a critical examination of one of the most popular ideas among contemporary political scientists: that "democracies do not go to war with one another." According to the school of the "democratic peace," the long peace between democratic states since 1945 has demonstrated that democratic norms and institutions help states in the international system transcend traditional concerns about power-seeking and security, allowing for the possibility of a "perpetual peace" between democratic states. However, there is another explanation for the long peace between democracies: reverse causation. That is, the current peaceful international order (created by such factors as U.S. hegemony, the solidification of borders, economic growth, and the nuclear revolution) has made it possible for liberal democracy to flourish in many countries that have found it difficult or impossible to build and maintain free institutions in previous eras of international violence and instability. Only states which are relatively secure-politically, militarily, economically-can afford to have free, pluralistic societies; in the absence of this security, states are much more likely to adopt, maintain, or revert to centralized, coercive authority structures. This book outlines in detail the alternative theoretical perspective of peace facilitating democracy, and applies this theoretical perspective to a number of historical case studies. The case studies include an examination of the American Revolution, French Revolution, the development of Germany in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, and modern Israel.

Mark E. Pietrzyk is an instructor at Benedictine University, Illinois.