On Sat, 1 May 2004, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> Against your two examples over 150 years, one which
> was a civil war and the other a war involving a civil
> war in an at-best half-democratic country, we have
> hundreds of wars, big and small, over that period,
> involving nondemocracies that -- this point should be
> neglected -- are not enmeshed in the web of
> international agreements, or wars of imperialist
> aggression (many carried out by democracies), or of
> national liberation, some against democracies. Btw,
> the point is not that democracies are pacific in
> general, just towards each other, and the web of
> agreements part is important too.
People talk about how fuzzy psychology is, but this kind of poly sci stuff is even more speculative than Freud. "Capitalist democracies" have thousands of sociopolitical charactertics in addition to making international agreements with other capitalist democracies, and any one or more of these could be the true reasons why they rarely engage in war with one another.
It's an interesting hypothesis, but the data are ambiguous here.
Miles