• DOI:10.2307/2539197
• Corpus ID: 154645374

How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace

@article{Owen1994HowLP,
  title={How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace},
  author={John M. Owen},
  journal={International Security},
  year={1994},
  volume={19},
  pages={125 - 87}
}

• John M. Owen
• Published 23 January 1994
• Political Science
• International Security

democracies seldom if ever go to war against one another has nearly become a truism. The ”democratic peace” has attracted attention for a number of reasons. It is “the closest thing we have to an empirical law in the study of international relations,” reports one scholar.’ It poses an apparent anomaly to realism, the dominant school of security studies. And it has become an axiom of U.S. foreign policy. ”Democracies don’t attack each other,” President Clinton declared in his 1994 State of the Union address, meaning that ”ultimately the best strategy to insure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere.” Clinton has called democratization the ”third pillar” of his foreign policy.2 The democratic peace proposition is vulnerable in at least three ways, however. First, it contains two inherent ambiguities: How does one define democracy? What counts as a war? The slipperiness of these terms provides a temptation to tautology: to define them so as to safeguard the proposition. Indeed, some challengers to the proposition claim that democracies have been at war with each other several times.3 A second challenge is that the