The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  To circumvent the temptation of data snooping when deciding whether a state was democratic, especially states that call themselves “democracies” on the basis of farcical elections, Russett and Oneal got their numbers from the Polity Project, which assigns each country a democracy score from 0 to 10 based on how competitive its political process is, how openly its leader is chosen, and how many constraints are placed on the leader’s power. The researchers also threw into the pot some variables that are expected to affect military disputes through sheer realpolitik: whether a pair of countries were in a formal alliance (since allies are less likely to fight); whether one of them is a great power (since great powers tend to find trouble); and if neither is a great power, whether one is considerably more powerful than the other (because states fight less often when they are mismatched and the outcome would be a foregone conclusion).

  So are democracies less likely to get into militarized disputes, all else held constant? The answer was a clear yes. When the less democratic member of a pair was a full autocracy, it doubled the chance that they would have a quarrel compared to an average pair of at-risk countries. When both countries were fully democratic, the chance of a dispute fell by more than half.226

  In fact, the Democratic Peace theory did even better than its advocates hoped. Not only do democracies avoid disputes with each other, but there is a suggestion that they tend to stay out of disputes across the board.227 And the reason they don’t fight each other is not just that they are birds of a feather: there is no Autocratic Peace, a kind of honor among thieves in which autocracies also avoid disputes with each other.228 The Democratic Peace held not only over the entire 115 years spanned by the dataset but also in the subspans from 1900 to 1939 and from 1989 to 2001. That shows that the Democratic Peace is not a by-product of a Pax Americana during the Cold War.229 In fact, there were never any signs of a Pax Americana or a Pax Britannica: the years when one of these countries was the world’s dominant military power were no more peaceful than the years in which it was just one power among many.230 Nor was there any sign that new democracies are stroppy exceptions to the Democratic Peace—just think of the Baltic and Central European countries that embraced democracy after the Soviet empire collapsed, and the South American countries that shook off their military juntas in the 1970s and 1980s, none of which subsequently went to war.231 Russett and Oneal found only one restriction on the Democratic Peace: it kicked in only around 1900, as one might have expected from the plethora of 19th-century counterexamples.232

  So the Democratic Peace came out of a tough test in good shape. But that does not mean we should all be freedom guys and try to impose democratic governments on every autocracy we can invade. Democracy is not completely exogenous to a society; it is not a list of procedures for the workings of government from which every other good follows. It is woven into a fabric of civilized attitudes that includes, most prominently, a renunciation of political violence. England and the United States, recall, had prepared the ground for their democracies when their political leaders and their opponents had gotten out of the habit of murdering each other. Without this fabric, democracy brings no guarantee of internal peace. Though new and fragile democracies don’t start interstate wars, in the next chapter we will see that they host more than their share of civil wars.

  Even when it comes to the aversion of democracies to interstate war, it is premature to anoint democracy as the first cause. Countries with democracy are beneficiaries of the happy end of the Matthew Effect, in which them that’s got shall get and them that’s not shall lose. Not only are democracies free of despots, but they are richer, healthier, better educated, and more open to international trade and international organizations. To understand the Long Peace, we have to pry these influences apart.

  IS THE LONG PEACE A LIBERAL PEACE?

  The Democratic Peace is sometimes considered a special case of a Liberal Peace—“liberal” in the sense of classical liberalism, with its emphasis on political and economic freedom, rather than left-liberalism.233 The theory of the Liberal Peace embraces as well the doctrine of gentle commerce, according to which trade is a form of reciprocal altruism which offers positive-sum benefits for both parties and gives each a selfish stake in the well-being of the other. Robert Wright, who gave reciprocity pride of place in Nonzero, his treatise on the expansion of cooperation through history, put it this way: “Among the many reasons I think we shouldn’t bomb the Japanese is that they made my minivan.”

  The vogue word globalization reminds us that in recent decades international trade has mushroomed. Many exogenous developments have made trade easier and cheaper. They include transportation technologies such as the jet airplane and the container ship; electronic communication technologies such as the telex, long-distance telephone, fax, satellite, and Internet; trade agreements that have reduced tariffs and regulations; channels of international finance and currency exchange that make it easier for money to flow across borders; and the increased reliance of modern economies on ideas and information rather than on manual labor and physical stuff.

  History suggests many examples in which freer trade correlates with greater peace. The 18th century saw both a lull in war and an embrace of commerce, when royal charters and monopolies began to give way to free markets, and when the beggar-thy-neighbor mindset of mercantilism gave way to the everybody-wins mindset of international trade. Countries that withdrew from the great power game and its attendant wars, such as the Netherlands in the 18th century and Germany and Japan in the second half of the 20th, often channeled their national aspirations into becoming commercial powers instead. The protectionist tariffs of the 1930s led to a falloff in international trade and perhaps to a rise in international tensions. The current comity between the United States and China, which have little in common except a river of manufactured goods in one direction and dollars in the other, is a recent reminder of the irenic effects of trade. And rivaling the Democratic Peace theory as a categorical factoid about modern conflict prevention is the Golden Arches theory: no two countries with a McDonald’s have ever fought in a war. The only unambiguous Big Mac Attack took place in 1999, when NATO briefly bombed Yugoslavia.234

  Anecdotes aside, many historians are skeptical that trade, as a general rule, conduces to peace. In 1986, for example, John Gaddis wrote, “These are pleasant things to believe, but there is remarkably little historical evidence to validate them.”235 Certainly, enhancements in the infrastructure supporting trade were not sufficient to yield peace in ancient and medieval times. The technologies that facilitated trade, such as ships and roads, also facilitated plunder, sometimes among the same itinerants, who followed the rule “If there are more of them, trade; if there are more of us, raid.”236 In later centuries, the profits to be gained from trade were so tempting that trade was sometimes imposed with gunboats on colonies and weak countries that resisted it, most infamously in the 19th-century Opium Wars, when Britain fought China to force it to allow British traffickers to sell the addictive drug within its borders. And great power wars often embroiled pairs of countries that had traded with each other a great deal.

  Norman Angell inadvertently set back the reputation of the trade-peace connection when he was seen as claiming that free trade had made war obsolete and five years later World War I broke out. Skeptics like to rub it in by pointing out that the prewar years saw unprecedented levels of financial interdependence, including a large volume of trade between England and Germany. 237 And as Angell himself took pains to point out, the economic futility of war is a reason to avoid it only if nations are interested in prosperity in the first place. Many leaders are willing to sacrifice a bit of prosperity (often much more than a bit) to enhance national grandeur, to implement utopian ideologies, or to rectify what they see as historic injustices. Their citizenries, even in democracies, may go along with them.

  Russett and Oneal, the number-crunching defenders of the Democratic Peace, also sought to test the theory of the Liberal Peace, a
nd they were skeptical of the skeptics. They noted that though international trade hit a local peak just before World War I, it still was a fraction of the level, relative to gross domestic product, that countries would see after World War II (figure 5–24).

  Also, trade may work as a pacifying force only when it is underpinned by international agreements that prevent a nation from suddenly lurching toward protectionism and cutting off the air supply of its trading partners. Gat argues that around the turn of the 20th century, Britain and France were making noises about becoming imperial autarkies that would live off trade within their colonial empires. This sent Germany into a panic and gave its leaders the idea that it needed an empire too.238

  With examples and counterexamples on both sides, and the many statistical confounds between trade and other good things (democracy, membership in international organizations, membership in alliances, and overall prosperity), it was time once again for multiple regression. For every pair of at-risk nations, Russett and Oneal entered the amount of trade (as a proportion of GDP) for the more trade-dependent member. They found that countries that depended more on trade in a given year were less likely to have a militarized dispute in the subsequent year, even controlling for democracy, power ratio, great power status, and economic growth.239 Other studies have shown that the pacifying effects of trade depend on the countries’ level of development: those that have access to the financial and technological infrastructure that lowers the cost of trade are most likely to resolve their disputes without displays of military force.240 This is consistent with the suggestions of Angell and Wright that broad historical changes have tilted financial incentives away from war and toward trade.

  FIGURE 5–24. International trade relative to GDP, 1885–2000

  Source: Graph from Russett, 2008, based on data from Gleditsch, 2002.

  Russett and Oneal found that it was not just the level of bilateral trade between the two nations in a pair that contributed to peace, but the dependence of each country on trade across the board: a country that is open to the global economy is less likely to find itself in a militarized dispute.241 This invites a more expansive version of the theory of gentle commerce. International trade is just one facet of a country’s commercial spirit. Others include an openness to foreign investment, the freedom of citizens to enter into enforceable contracts, and their dependence on voluntary financial exchanges as opposed to self-sufficiency, barter, or extortion. The pacifying effects of commerce in this broad sense appear to be even more robust than the pacifying effects of democracy. A democratic peace strongly kicks in only when both members of a pair of countries are democratic, but the effects of commerce are demonstrable when either member of the pair has a market economy.242

  Such findings have led some political scientists to entertain a heretical idea called the Capitalist Peace.243 The word liberal in Liberal Peace refers both to the political openness of democracy and to the economic openness of capitalism, and according to the Capitalist Peace heresy, it’s the economic openness that does most of the pacifying. In arguments that are sure to leave leftists speechless, advocates claim that many of Kant’s arguments about democracy apply just as well to capitalism. Capitalism pertains to an economy that runs by voluntary contracts between citizens rather than government command and control, and that principle can bring some of the same advantages that Kant adduced for democratic republics. The ethic of voluntary negotiation within a country (like the ethic of law-governed transfer of power) is naturally externalized to its relationships with other countries. The transparency and intelligibility of a country with a free market economy can reassure its neighbors that it is not going on a war footing, which can defuse a Hobbesian trap and cramp a leader’s freedom to engage in risky bluffing and brinkmanship. And whether or not a leader’s power is constrained by the ballot box, in a market economy it is constrained by stakeholders who control the means of production and who might oppose a disruption of international trade that’s bad for business. These constraints put a brake on a leader’s personal ambition for glory, grandeur, and cosmic justice and on his temptation to respond to a provocation with a reckless escalation.

  Democracies tend to be capitalist and vice versa, but the correlation is imperfect: China, for example, is capitalist but autocratic, and India is democratic but until recently was heavily socialist. Several political scientists have exploited this slippage and have pitted democracy and capitalism against each other in analyses of datasets of militarized disputes or other international crises. Like Russett and Oneal, they all find a clear pacifying effect of capitalist variables such as international trade and openness to the global economy. But some of them disagree with the duo about whether democracy also makes a contribution to peace, once its correlation with capitalism is statistically removed.244 So while the relative contributions of political and economic liberalism are currently mired in regression wonkery, the overarching theory of the Liberal Peace is on solid ground.

  The very idea of a Capitalist Peace is a shock to those who remember when capitalists were considered “merchants of death” and “masters of war.” The irony was not lost on the eminent peace researcher Nils Petter Gleditsch, who ended his 2008 presidential address to the International Studies Association with an updating of the 1960s peace slogan: “Make money, not war.” 245

  IS THE LONG PEACE A KANTIAN PEACE?

  In the wake of World War II, leading thinkers were desperate to figure out what had gone wrong and tossed around a number of schemes for preventing a repeat performance. Mueller explains the most popular one:Some Western scientists, apparently consumed with guilt over having participated in the development of a weapon that could kill with new efficiency, . . . took time out from their laboratories and studies to consider human affairs. They quickly came to conclusions expressed with an evangelical certainty they would never have used in discussing the physical world. Although he had done his greatest work in physics while a citizen of the sovereign nation of Switzerland, Einstein proved as immune to the Swiss example as everyone else. “As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power,” he declared, “war is inevitable.” . . . Fortunately, he and other scientists had managed to discover the one device that could solve the problem. “Only the creation of a world government can prevent the impending self-destruction of mankind.”246

  World government seems like a straightforward extension of the logic of the Leviathan. If a national government with a monopoly on the use of force is the solution to the problem of homicide among individuals and of private and civil wars among factions, isn’t a world government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of military force the solution to the problem of wars among nations? Most intellectuals did not go as far as Bertrand Russell, who in 1948 proposed that the Soviet Union should be given an ultimatum that unless it immediately submitted to world government, the United States would attack it with nuclear weapons.247 But world government was endorsed by, among others, Einstein, Wendell Willkie, Hubert Humphrey, Norman Cousins, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and William O. Douglas. Many people thought world government would gradually emerge out of the United Nations.

  Today the campaign for world government lives on mainly among kooks and science fiction fans. One problem is that a functioning government relies on a degree of mutual trust and shared values among the people it governs which is unlikely to exist across the entire globe. Another is that a world government would have no alternatives from which it could learn better governance, or to which its disgruntled citizens could emigrate, and hence it would have no natural checks against stagnation and arrogance. And the United Nations is unlikely to morph into a government that anyone would want to be governed by. The Security Council is hamstrung by the veto power that the great powers insisted on before ceding it any authority, and the General Assembly is more of a soapbox for despots than a parliament of the world’s people.

  In “Perpetual Peace,” Kant envisioned a “federation of free states” that would fall
well short of an international Leviathan. It would be a gradually expanding club of liberal republics rather than a global megagovernment, and it would rely on the soft power of moral legitimacy rather than on a monopoly on the use of force. The modern equivalent is the intergovernmental organization or IGO—a bureaucracy with a limited mandate to coordinate the policies of participating nations in some area in which they have a common interest. The international entity with the best track record for implementing world peace is probably not the United Nations, but the European Coal and Steel Community, an IGO founded in 1950 by France, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy to oversee a common market and regulate the production of the two most important strategic commodities. The organization was specifically designed as a mechanism for submerging historic rivalries and ambitions—especially West Germany’s—in a shared commercial enterprise. The Coal and Steel Community set the stage for the European Economic Community, which in turn begot the European Union.248

  Many historians believe that these organizations helped keep war out of the collective consciousness of Western Europe. By making national borders porous to people, money, goods, and ideas, they weakened the temptation of nations to fall into militant rivalries, just as the existence of the United States weakens any temptation of, say, Minnesota and Wisconsin to fall into a militant rivalry. By throwing nations into a club whose leaders had to socialize and work together, they enforced certain norms of cooperation. By serving as an impartial judge, they could mediate disputes among member nations. And by holding out the carrot of a vast market, they could entice applicants to give up their empires (in the case of Portugal) or to commit themselves to liberal democracy (in the case of former Soviet satellites and, perhaps soon, Turkey).249