Internationalists generally have refused to accept that any one nation is really better than another. After all, cultures and values are relative; one nation’s virtues are another’s evils. Best we treat all nations equally to better resolve conflicts among them. As Professor Hans Morgenthau pointed out in his popular and influential international relations text, Politics Among Nations, both the United States and Soviet Union should be condemned for the Cold War; it is their evangelistic, crusading belief in their own values that made the East-West conflict so difficult to resolve.
This two-partyism can be seen easily in reading the peace oriented literature. There is no victim or aggressor, no right or wrong nation, but only two parties to a conflict (when this two-partyism did break down, it was usually in terms of American, or Western “imperialist, aggression”). Consequently, to accept that the freedoms espoused by the United States and its democratic allies lead to peace, and that the totalitarian socialism that was fostered by the Soviet Union and China lead to violence and war, is to take sides. It is to be nationalistic. And this for many internationalists was ipso facto wrong.
There is another psychological force toward two-partyism that should not be underestimated. The statement that democracy fosters peace seems not only nationalistic, but also inherently ideological. After all, freedom was one of the flags in the “ideological Cold War.” No matter that this was an observational and historical statement. To accept it appeared not only to take sides; but what is worse, to be a right wing, cold warrior.
Finally, the peace that the classical liberals had in mind involved not only the absence of war between nations, but also harmonious international relations. They, like our contemporaries, had no conception of the degree to which governments could and would massacre their own people. After all, presumably, mankind had progressed since the bloody Albigensian Crusade in France, Inquisition in Spain, and witch hunts throughout Europe.
Today, we can extend the idea of peace through democracy to cover freedom from government genocide and mass murder. But to do so requires overcoming incredible mass ignorance even about the megamurders for which authoritarian and totalitarian governments have been responsible. Of course, everyone knows about the Nazi genocide. And most consider the near 6,000,000 Jews murdered as a monstrous crime against humanity by Hitler and his Nazi gang of racists. Few know that they also murdered in cold blood an additional near 14,000,000 Poles, Gypsies, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Russians, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Frenchmen, and others.
Few outside of the Soviet Union know about Stalin’s horrors, that he killed people by the tens of millions (I calculate about 43,000,000). Even fewer realize that under the communist regime in China more tens of millions were killed (as shown in Table 1). And virtually no one except Armenians seems to remember the Armenian genocide by Turkey, the Pakistan genocide and mass murder; except Bengalis; and the Japanese atrocities during the Sino-Japanese and Pacific Wars, except the Chinese and Koreans. And now, virtually no one remembers anymore the mass murder of about 10 million Chinese by their Nationalist regime.
It is understandable, then, that the global magnitude of murder by governments in this century is almost universally unknown, that it might exceed an absolutely incredible 150,944,000 men, women, and children killed, or more than four times all this century’s battle deaths in all its domestic and international wars. Of course, it must then be unknown that virtually no democratic citizens are among this utterly fantastic number.
Is it any wonder, then, that in this time of democracy’s victory there has been little gleeful shouting about one terribly important value of democracy–the victory of democracy over violent political death, over war, revolution, genocide, and mass murder.
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Anonymous:
November 11th, 2005 at 7:40 pm
I think Professor Rummel’s essay is really a beacon of hope for many of the countries of the world. I think Capitalism does work best with democracy and democracy works best for peace. However, for me it is simpler to just look at our relationship with China and the whole globalization thing as war. To quote Sun Tzu, “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.”
On this note, when our corporations slobbered all over themselves thinking (my father was an entrepreneur I know how they think) of the billions of Chinese to sell products to, in the spirit of Sun Tzu, the Chinese planners simply reversed “sell” to “buy products from” and opened their arms and embraced them. I believe another saying in China is: hold your friends at arm length and your enemy in your arms. If we were to look at globalization in the context of modern warfare, the initial contact by our corporations in China would be the P (Penetrate) in modern warfare’s strategy of PISRR (Penetrate, Isolate, Subvert, Reorient, Reharmonize). Where Globalization differs in strategy would be in the second letter I (Isolate), Globalization “Includes” instead of “Isolates”. In the context of war the other letters still hold true.
To take a short jog from here, globalization is simply potential energy, as are all ideas. In scientific terms, kinetic energy is equal to the negative of potential energy. This simply means, if everything is going right, when you fill up a country with kinetic energy (this could be the movement of bombs or products) the potential decreases. In other words, when you bomb the hell out of a country, the potential for that country to do you harm decreases, that is if you don’t piss off the rest of the swarm or run out of bombs. When the kinetic energy, a product of globalization, enters a country, the potential for war against globalization should decrease. The country should be enjoying the idea of globalization more and more as people accept it. Even the most stanch supporter of Globalization would agree that the kinetic energy associated with Globalization is not exactly non-destructive to the USA.
So I guess my question is: as we get deeper into globalization with China is the potential for war decreasing with the movement of products into our country? If the potential is not decreasing, if we have more unrest from loss of jobs and the destruction of the middle class, there must be a problem somewhere. According to the CIA Worldbook, 12% of our countrymen are poor and 10% of China’s population is poor. I suppose another question could be: if we are at war, who is winning?
I think the problem with using corporations in a time of war is that they have no allegiance to any country. Their only implicit law is to maximize profits. As Dr. Rummel suggests, “And the democratic individualist has argued further with their democratic socialist friends that the free market is a necessary mechanism through which individuals have the greatest choice as to what will make them happy, both in the relative diversity and cheapness of goods and in the creation and dissemination of wealth.”, this is not a completely bad law, for the Left or Right. Good laws, a democratic society, and a satisfied empowered work force are usually the best road to maximizing profits. All of these have something for either the Left (empowered workforce) and Right (good laws, democratic society). However, I have no idea if this is the road that is being followed in China or even in America for that matter.
So, who is winning?
I think I read somewhere that ¾ of our economy is created by consumers. Are we really going to be able to fight a war with China when it will mean an end to our economy? Doesn’t this mean that Taiwan is already toast?
Someone suggested China would lose all the money we owe them in the event of war. How about all the capital and assets we have tied up in China? Our dept held by China could be considered one of the greatest assets of China, at least in financial circles. Will the Chinese government actually lose those assets in a time of war? I suppose if we assume they will lose, perhaps. I know these are questions I can’t answer. As someone posted, these are interesting times, but I would still like to know who is winning?
If this is not war, how are we going to pay off our debt to China? I understand that it is just a portion of our yearly receipts, but to actually pay it off, aren’t we going to have to have another Louisiana Purchase, only this time China will be doing the purchasing?
Of course this is all just silly. We are not at war with China. We love the Chinese both here and on the mainland. I would not want them to think other wise, especially if they end up being my landowner.
If we were actually at war and becoming weaker I am sure there would be other signs in the world like a Japan rising. As we became weaker Japan would amass a huge kinetic force to offset our weakness. Just because this is happening we should not believe our eyes, we are after all Americans, the last of the superpowers.
larry
Rizalist:
November 13th, 2005 at 8:45 am
I like the idea that functional democracies–modeled as social networks of human beings that are free to vote for leaders and policies in regular elections–will tend to choose such leaders and policies that have a high utilitarian value in the production of human prosperity and happiness. I think this model is also very useful for explaining why things do seem to go wrong in democracies when leaders and policies are chosen that have a relatively low utilitarian value for producing such happiness or may be conducive to suffering and sadness.
I realized from reading your piece that what you are describing as a functional democracy is also well-described as a scale-free network, like the current models of the World Wide Web. In WWW (and I’m sure I don’t really need to say this at ZenPundit, but it’s more for my benefit) we have a relatively large and growing number of human agents creating, modifying, destroying and linking to or selecting websites and weblogs in a global man-machine network. It was long ago observed that if you apply some metric like the number of other websites linking to it, or hits from the human agents and other machines, and plot that as a ranked histogram, the distribution can be well fit to a Power Law Distribution or Zipf’s Law.
A democracy can be described as a scale-free network too since new human beings are being procreated all the time and the choice of leaders and policies is also similarly indefinite and growing..In this model, the human beings are freely selecting leaders and policies via elections and free speech, instead of surf-clicking on websites and weblogs. We can make a ranked list of a representative selection of “leaders and policies” according to their “utility in promoting human happiness.” For example, (1) freedom of expression, free market competition, open societies…and on down to 98-noncompetitive markets, 99- repressive state control and intolerant, 100-racist societies.
If we now plot a ranked frequency distribuition of the kinds of leaders and policies democratic societies tend to elect, we would expect the same kind of Power Law Distribution weighted heavily in favor of beneficial high-utility choices to be observed.
But then, there is the long tail, of very, very many progressively worse choices in leaders and policies, which of course democracies also will select, but with very low frequency. This may explain, in an oblique statistical sense, why one does observe cases where democracies choose to do things which are of low utility to their ULTIMATE happiness or even spectacularly terrible. Why they make such choices is not a complete mystery. We sometimes do things even if we know it isn’t good for us. (With rather more than the customary area under the curve in the long tail, such is the case with the Republic of the Philippines which was the FIRST and is the OLDEST democracy in Asia, ahead even of Australia and New Zealand, but that’s a different matter.) Some democracies may even choose so many of the low utility “leaders and policies” that they can actually FAIL.
I don’t have the research to prove any of this of course, but I am fairly certain this is what the data would show if it could be properly collected.
This is an excellent case you have made for a new historical era in which democracy is adopted by all nation-states on the planet. This will not only maximize their happiness but prolong their lives as the institutions of nonviolence spread to all countries, as you point out.
You have made the further assertion that democracies tend not to war on each other. I hope I didn’t misunderstand you but here I think there may be some contrary opinion or caveat at least during the long gestation period before a properly “mature” democracy emerges in each. I can’t explain “mature”, but there is a paper in the Autumn Parameters of the US Army War College…“The Strategic Implications of Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Middle East,” by Chris Zambelis
Zambelis makes the cogent point that democracy in the Middle East may not produce states that are necessarily friendly to the West. In fact he claims it is likely democracies in those countries will elect ultranationalistic, xenophobic or even Islamist leaders. That is due perhaps to the fact that democracies can be organized and established long before the society itself can institutionalize such things as a free press, high education, and other “utility-seeking” sensibilities, just as nations quickly became independent of Empires but falter even as democracies.. .
Clearly such a collection of interacting states cannot adopt a democracy amongst themselves. “One state one vote” would be a disaster applied to nation states. Also their “utilitarian” functions are bound to be radically different if not dangerously opposed to one another when it is not HUMAN happiness that is being sought but NATIONAL happiness of neighboring states. Some other principle would have to guide such an all democratic world.
Not knowing the correct continuation to this, may I just ask in closing, what might be your ideal model of a world populated universally by democracies. Would it be a United STATES? or a UNITED State?
Will you be a federalist or a globalist in such a world? Or something else. Thanks for the stimulating essay, The Democratic Peace. Bravo Dr. Rummel!
DJB Rizalist,
Manila, Philippines
(the First Iraq)