Democracies and the Ethics of War: The Record of the Past

Abstract

Democracy in the contemporary sense of the term arose in the eighteenth century with the entry of the people into politics. It is worth noting that the beginnings of this upsurge (the War of Independence in America and the French Revolution) came simultaneously with the idea of the nation in arms. The fundamental question for a historian surveying the last two centuries is the following: What is acceptable for a democracy in an armed conflict? Can a democracy use all means at its disposal in war, in particular against the unarmed? But obviously another problematic issue must also be considered. In the conflicts of the twentieth-century (“the war century”)¹ democracies not only fight among themselves, but combat totalitarian states as well. The question then is to determine whether the spirit of democratic values can remain intact when waging war or whether the totalitarian states succeed in spreading, at least in part, their contempt for human rights. That is where we stand today, and it is the problem inherent in an approach that is in part that of an historian and in part that of a moral observer.