Listening to the award ceremony of the Nobel Peace Prize of Liu Xiaobo today it was claimed that:
"never before have two democracies gone to war against each other."
Anyone have any comment or anything to substantiate this?
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Listening to the award ceremony of the Nobel Peace Prize of Liu Xiaobo today it was claimed that:
"never before have two democracies gone to war against each other."
Anyone have any comment or anything to substantiate this?
... and the following countries declined to attend the award ceremony:
Russia,
Kazakhstan,
Colombia,
Tunisia,
Saudi Arabia,
Pakistan,
Serbia (which changed its mind and attended),
Iraq,
Iran,
Vietnam,
Afghanistan,
Venezuela,
the Philippines,
Egypt,
Sudan,
Ukraine,
Cuba
Morocco.
See any great democracies on the list?
you define a "democracy" ;)
A huge amount of ink and bytes have been spilled on that topic ("no wars betwixt democracies") and the related topic of "democracies success vice internal insurgencies". The search engines are your friends. :D
Regards
Mike
I suggest what we saw here was China doing a little arm twisting or getting kindred spirits (with no human rights or democratic conscience) to agree with them. Not a great success I note.
With WikiLeaks we see the US version with the added "influence" over certain large financial (credit card) service providers. Note with great success either I note.
JMA,
You citedHow about World War One? Germany was a parliamentary democracy, Austria-Hungary maybe less so, Russia was not, France, Great Britain and Belgium were.Quote:
never before have two democracies gone to war against each other.
A few decades before the Franco-Prussian War?
Exhausted my instant history memory on a Sunday evening.;)
It is the so-called “Democratic Peace Theory”, a tenet of liberal-interventionism and neo-conservatism alike.
Thomas Friedman offered his own version of democratic peace theory in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, with his “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” whereby he argued that no two nations with a McDonald's franchise have ever gone to war with each other.
Tom Friedman, however, is a buffoon; right after Lexus was published NATO started bombing Serbia, which had McDonald’s. Other exceptions to the Golden Arches theory have been: Russia-Georgia, India-Pakistan, Israel-Lebanon.
I went through this debate in an IR class - the closest we got was Turkey vs Greece.
Liberal democracies haven't fought each other because:
1. They're still quite new; and
2. They've been too busy fighting everybody else.