For the reasons you mention, wars between democracies are rare. Some level of democracy was common in ancient times, and wars between them were common. Rome versus Carthage is a good example. Most of the Greek city states that participated in the Peloponesean (sp?) War were at least somewhat democratic.
It appears to me that the ancient democracies were the products of warfare. Various kings developed military tactics that required large portions of their citizenry to be armed and trained as efficient soldiers. As armed and trained soldiers, the citizens were difficult to intimidate, and political crises resolved themselves into citizen controlled councils.
A book on the English longbow would make interesting reading. King Edward_I decided that ordinary English people should spend their time practising with the newly discovered longbows. His grandson, Edward_III, used these to devastating effect on the battlefields in France. *His* grandson, Richard_II faced the peasant revolt, made dangerous by the efficient weapons they had been trained with. A similar revolt in France was put down easily because the French King had not armed his peasants.
When the Roman republic wished to discuss something, they called out the army. If you had the weapons to be part of the army, you were allowed to vote. You would have voted a lot on whether or not there would be a war.
JHG
A noteworthy example of two liberal democracies fightin a war against eachother, I think, would be the Quasi War between the United States and revolutionary France, though I don’t know enough about French politics around 1798 to know if you’d call it a liberal democracy.
Revolutionary France was putatively a democracy, but with the factional power struggles going on and the guillotine going about its grim labors, it was more like mob rule with a garnish of oligarchy.
Hurm. I think the mere fact that “liberal democracies” are willing to use aggression against other countries perceived as vulnerable puts the lie to the premise. Look at what the USA has done repeatedly to, well, all the former Spanish imperial possessions, (especially the Philippines & Colombia, but covertly against all of them) regardless of whether they were democracies or not.
Also, the UK & the USA were both liberal democracies when they deposed a democratic government in Iran to put the Shah in as absolute monarch (& British puppet).
I think Cecil’s comment about India and Pakistan at the end is a bit odd. He seems to imply that their wars were carried out by authoritarian governments. However, at the time of their first war, both Pakistan and India were democracies (at least using the definition supplied in the article).
I’m reading the part about India and Pakistan as qualifying the sentence immediately preceding (“where their authoritarian predecessors did not”).
Now that I think about it, the whole article is kind of weird. The article doesn’t clearly state that India and Pakistan were two democracies who went at it.
… which is different from being elected to lead the country, considering:
(the minor complaint that) no one elects the head of the party directly,
(the more major complaint that) not controlling a majority of the parliament, getting to be the head of the country is anything but a sure thing: you certainly can’t say that Germany as a whole elected someone when the majority of voters voted against them.
The same could be said of George W. Bush in 2000, or a few other presidents before him. The President is not elected directly by the citizens, but by the Electoral College, and Bush won the Electoral College vote despite getting less than half of the popular vote. But Bush won the Presidency according to the democratic rules under which the US operates, and Hitler won the Chancellorship according to the democratic rules under which Germany operated at the time. I don’t think you can say that either was illegitimate, or more “democratic” than the other.
Of course, once he got power, Hitler proceeded to use it to do some very undemocratic things, but he still gained it democratically in the first place.
I don’t think you could say that. We are a democratic republic, and strictly speaking, our presidents are elected under republican rules. That most of them would also have won under a democratic election does matter a bit for their democratic legitimacy, but saying that, for instance, Bill Clinton or George Bush was “democratically elected” is a bit glib.
A republic and a democracy are not different creatures in the sense that one cannot be the other. Republic simply indicates where the well-spring of power is, as opposed to, say monarchy. Democracy defines how those in power are chosen, and how the laws we have are made.
I presume you are attempting to refer to the fact that presidents in this country are selected by an Electoral College, not as a result of totalling votes from around the country. This is not an aspect of our republicanism, it is an aspect of our federalism.
Per your reasoning, why can’t it be an aspect of our republicanism and our federalism (like the late Earn Warren? :D) If the Electoral College decides to let voting America take a flying leap, what can be done about it, legally? Sure, some states have faithless elector laws, but I’m not sure that would invalidate the results of the Electoral College vote, per se.
I believe my post conceded that, while still merely a republic and not a democratic republic by a technicality when electing our President, that in the majority of cases the President is indeed the one elected by popular plurality and so it can be considered a democratic republic in those instances, for the purposes of a “democratically elected” President.
You are missing the point. The “republic” aspect of what we are has nothing to do with the method of choosing our leaders. A republic is simply a state that derives all its power to govern from the people themselves, as opposed to, say, a monarchy where the power to govern is inherent in the ruling monarch (by right of being the chosen member of the ruling family). You can be a democratic republic (as we are, in that we have the people vote on choosing laws and leaders), you can have an assemblic republic (I cannot think of a better term for it) like they had in Rome, where the Senate was not elected directly, but chosen from among those who were in the upper class, but which wielded the res publica, and the Plebian Assembly also weilded power in the name of some of the people, you can even be a dictatorial republic (though that can get to the point where one can question the true “public” aspect).
Federalism is what the Electoral College is all about. It demonstrates that we are not a classic democracy, but then almost no one is, since in a classic democracy, all people vote on everything (you might get this at some level in some New England states, which still have town meetings). The electors in the College are democratically elected. The President, then, is the head of state of a federal democratic republic, and that should be enough for a headache.
What part of my posts implied that I do not know that the underlying similarity between self-styled “republics” is that they theoretically wield the res publica?
Just because we are a representative republic does not mean that we elect our President democratically. In fact, it would be easy to do so, contrary to your assertion, but that also does not make it so.
Note that w/r/t the original column, I would agree that inasmuch as the Nazis would have left the Weimar Republic’s democracy intact, had the US gone to war with the Nazi-plurality regime it would have qualified as two “democracies” going to war, as the term is commonly understood in the phrasing of the question, as parliamentary representative democracies are generally understood to be “democracies”. This does not change the fact that the people do not elect their leader much of the time.
