The War Over Perpetual Peace pp 151-162 | Cite as
From the Turmoil of International Anarchy to the Calm of the Liberal Peace
Chapter
Abstract
Complementing the principal explanation for patterns developed in chapter 8 is a subsidiary explanation that reflects on the steady increase in the number of liberal states in the western hemisphere over the past one hundred and fifty-five years and the affect of this evolving historico-political phenomenon on the minds of interpreters at work during this time period and in this geographical space.
Keywords
Liberal State Definitive Article North Atlantic Treaty Organization Liberal Regime Interwar Period
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Notes
- 2.Bruce Russett, Controlling the Sword: The Democratic Governance of National Security (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 119–23 cited inCrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Wade L. Huntley, “Kant’s Third Image: Systemic Sources of the Liberal Peace,” International Studies Quarterly, 40 (1996), p. 45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 3.J. Levy, “Domestic Politics and War,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 18 (1988), pp. 661–62 andCrossRefGoogle Scholar
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- 4.Chris Brown, International Relations Theory (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1992), p. 40.Google Scholar
- 5.Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), pp. 80–123.Google Scholar
- Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 18–37.Google Scholar
- 6.J.D. Singer and Associates, Explaining War: Selected Papers from the Correlates of War Project (London: Sage Publications, 1979) cited in Brown, International Relations Theory, p. 41.Google Scholar
- 7.Howard Williams and Ken Booth, “Kant: Theorist beyond Limits” in Ian Clark and Iver B. Neumann, eds., Classical Theories of International Relations (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and London: MacMillan Press, 1996), pp. 89–90.Google Scholar
- 8.Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs, Part 1,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12 (1983), pp. 209–12.Google Scholar
- 9.Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs, Part 1,” p. 212. Importantly, I use the terms “liberal” or “illiberal” and Doyle’s terms “liberal regime(s)/state(s)/republic(s)” or “non-liberal regime(s)/state(s)” throughout this chapter. The terms “ ‘republican,’ representative government(s)” or “non-republican, unrepresentative government(s)” are also used and are a subcategory of Doyle’s terms “liberal regime(s)/state(s)/republic(s)” or “non-liberal regime(s)/state(s),” respectively. According to Doyle’s adopted terminology and definition here, a “liberal regime [or state]” necessarily has “republican, representative government.” The key is to avoid use of the terms “democratic” or “democracy” (unless it is understood to be “representative democracy” as in the Freedom House survey later) in discussion of Perpetual Peace. Kant was clearly against the establishment of pure “democracy” since it was not “representative.” In Perpetual Peace, he states, “Of the three forms of sovereignty [autocracy, aristocracy and democracy], democracy, in the truest sense of the word, is necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power through which all the citizens may make decisions about (and indeed against) the single individual without his consent, so that decisions are made by all the people and yet not by all the people; and this means that the general will is in contradiction with itself, and thus also with freedom.” Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 101 (emphasis in original). This is a further reason why I choose the phrase “liberal peace” over the more widely used phrase “democratic peace” throughout this chapter and the book as a whole. Many scholars do, however, use the latter phrase throughout their studies and articles on the subject.Google Scholar
- 15.Adrian Karatnycky, ed., Freedom House, Freedom in the World: The Annual Survey of Political Rights & Civil Liberties 1999–2000 (New York: Freedom House, 2000).Google Scholar
- 37.John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 51.Google Scholar
- 45.Doyle notes the following important point from Melvin Small and J. David Singer’s influential work Resort to Arms: “Significantly, the most war-affected states have not been liberal republics.” Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1982), pp. 176–79 cited in Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs, Part 1,” p. 228.Google Scholar
- 48.A.C.F. Beales, The History of Peace: A Short History of the Organized Movements for International Peace (New York: The Dial Press, 1931), p. 36.Google Scholar
- 49.R.B. Mowat, The European States System: A Study of International Relations (2nd ed.) (London: Oxford University Press, 1929; first published in 1923), p. 94.Google Scholar
- 57.Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992).Google Scholar
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© Eric S. Easley 2004