Never at War, Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another (Hardcover)

To present as scientific a study as possible, Weart meticulously defines various forms of government in order to present a working model of democracy. He defines a republic as a community in which political decisions are made by citizens with equal rights, then divides republics into two camps: democracies, in which at least two-thirds of adult males can make political decisions, and oligarchies, in which one-third or fewer males hold political rights. Working within these parameters, he finds that "republics and only republics have tended to form durable, peaceful leagues." Taking his point further, he asks, "When states avoid war so thoroughly, can that be a mere accident, or is there some deeper reason? If a general reason exists then we may already have at hand, in peaceful democratic regions like Western Europe, the blueprint for a solution to the problem of war." Such a solution is both his hope and his conviction.

As he illustrates with copious historical examples, governments tend to transfer their internal political structure outward, so that they deal with other nations as if they were operating from a similar set of rules--a kind of diplomatic "do unto others" approach. When republics are dealing with one another, negotiation and compromise are used instead of war. When two different political regimes are in conflict, however, no similar ground rules apply, and war becomes much more likely. To back up such claims, he relies on a wealth of evidence that stretches from ancient Greece through Renaissance Italy and into the mid-1990s, including an appendix that details nearly every meaningful skirmish between "approximately republican regimes" over the past two millennia. Impressive in scope and powerfully convincing, Never at War is an effective tool for waging peace. --Shawn Carkonen

From Library Journal
One of our cherished mythologies is that democracies do not fight each other. Weart, director of the Center for the History of Physics at the American Insitute of Physics and author most recently of Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (LJ 5/1/88), has examined hundreds of battles over the centuries between republics, oligarchies, democracies, and autocracies to show that, indeed, democracies do not seem to attack one another. The reason, Weart proposes, turns out to be rather simple: democratic leaders are not inclined to war on other nations whose citizenry hold the same basic ideals and principles as they. The author concludes that this is not the case with republics or with nations ruled by autocracies or dictators. Since the enemy is easier to designate as the "other," war more readily transpires. Weart bases his thesis on an enormous amount of research in historical, sociological, anthropological, and political science sources. He mixes the methodologies of all these disciplines to arrive at his well-argued conclusions. A remarkable piece of scholarship; for all large collections and for those specializing in war and peace studies.?Edward Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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