Never at War
Weart, Spencer C.
WELL, ALMOST NEVER Never at War Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another Spencer C. Wcart Yale University Press. $35.432 pp. Jean Bethke Elshtain Spencer R. Weart, director of the Center for...
...Jean Bethke Elshtain Spencer R. Weart, director of the Center for Physics at the American Institute of Physics, here turns historian—I assume he is by training a physicist—in order to breathe new life into an old claim, for some a rock-ribbed truth: Democracies don't go to war against one another...
...But Weart prefers "any conflict involving at least two-hundred deaths in organized combat...
...But the key question for Weart is not how cruelly the oligarchy treats its subjects, "but whether they treat one another as equals," a sort of honor-among-thieves claim...
...The point is not that democracies do not make war but, rather, "that well-established democracies are inhibited by their fundamental nature from warring on one another...
...But too much that is critical to history and human life drops out of Weart's scenario...
...The problem with this notion is that the Soviets and Czechs were not coequal thieves...
...A few pages describe the negotiation between Brezhnev and his henchmen and Dubcek "and his colleagues," without any sense of the popular uprising (stones against tanks in Wenceslas Square), the radical disparity of forces, the West's outrage and inaction...
...He acknowledges that free peoples do not lose a hankering for conflict...
...Dauntingly complex issues are settled in a manner that is too arbitrary to be finally compelling...
...One "satisfactory definition of war is violence organized by political units against one another across their boundaries...
...Democratic bellicosity" remains a problem...
...Weart defines "reCommonweal 1 3 March 26,1999 public" as a "more general concept," meaning that democracy is but one of a very long list of variants on republic...
...To Weart, the case is simply the exception that proves the rule that oligarchic republics do not attack their own kind...
...In defense of his thesis, Weart divides regimes into so many categories and variants on categories you need a Scoreboard to keep it all straight...
...First, "well-established democracies have never made war on one another...
...Weart's definition of war is no more enlightening...
...Machiavellian at home...
...But into this category, somewhat astonishingly, he slots both the Soviet Union and the old Czechoslovakia under Soviet domination as offering one of the pitifully few exceptions to the rule that "approximately republican regimes of the same kind" never come into conflict...
...In a republic, "political decisions are made by a body of citizens who hold equal rights...
...As Weart sets out to see if this first finding holds up, he finds a second...
...But what sort of problem and how do democracies sort it out?A first task is to determine what modes of political and social organization fall into the category "democracy...
...A republic becomes a democracy "if the body of citizens with political rights includes at least two-thirds of the adult males," and Weart argues that even republican oligarchies rarely come into conflict...
...But what does it all add up to...
...Weart's one comment on this strange coupling is that it might indeed seem "odd to give the respectable name of republicans to these overseers of an empire and prison camps...
...But a "key hypothesis" is now added, namely, that "leaders will tend to act toward their foreign counterparts in the way they are accustomed to act toward rival domestic political leaders...
...The exceptional occasion: the crushing of Prague Spring, 1968...
...The "incident" of Prague, 1968, comes off in this book as dry as dust...
...Clearly something is askew...
...ditto...
...Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago...
...My hunch is that knowledgeable historians and social scientists will find wanting the particular ways Weart parses a "case...
...Weart's hopes for universal democracy are worthy enough...
...Well-established oligarchic republics (the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia in 1968, remember) "have scarcely ever made war on one another...
...At times, Weart seems to be trying to keep his vessel from springing leaks and his preferred way of staving off swamping and sinking is to further refine already narrowly parsed definitions...
...He builds his case by layering on definitions and categories, defending this approach by noting that he offers an exhaustively chronicled history that puts paid to the traditional balance-of-power and raison d'etat propositions...
...That may well be true...
...Moderate compromiser at home...
...The bulk of Never at War is devoted to case studies, all pointing in the direction of Wearf s general claims, from ancient Greece to contemporary Yugoslav successor-state horrors...
...Weart indicates that he could not find a single "plain counterfactual to this rule, even in remote historic locales...
...At the same time, he is no Kantian...
...The final message of the book is also its first: that well-established democracies are "inhibited by their fundamental nature from warring on one another...
...The posing and pursuit of caveats and clarifiers goes on for pages...
...What about postrevolutionary France going on a rampage against every European country in sight...
...I've mentioned the case of Czechoslovakia in 1968...
...Machiavellian abroad...
...This analysis shoves into one category an authoritarian, oppressive empire and one of its client states upon which an analogous state apparatus was forced...
...Whatever the merits of this case—and they are considerable— it is not made effectively here...
...Weart goes on to tag the Soviet Union and the Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia not only "republican" but "approximately" the same kind of order...
...Of course, this is much too tidy...
...Weart insists that there is a sturdy and growing zone of democratic peace...
...As soon as the gauntlet is thrown down, the realpolitiker in this reader comes back: "Oh yeah...
...This opens the door to hundreds and hundreds of conflicts and Weart covers a staggering number...
...And the response from the defender of the Weartean thesis would likely be: "Yes, but none of the attacked countries or regimes was democratic...
...Keep in mind here his definition of democracy as a sub-set of republic and the fact that he has appended the qualifier: well-established...
Vol. 126 • March 1999 • No. 6
