At the heart of democratic peace
The idea that liberal democracies are more pacifist than authoritarian regimes is rooted in the work of Kant in his 1795 essay ‘To Perpetual Peace’. Kant put forth the notion that the main cause of war is a lack of just political institutions. Debates over this include a series of articles published by Michael Doyle between 1983 and 1986. The Kantian-Doyleian thesis (KDT) has met with many criticisms and prompted further international study of this topic over the last three decades. The ‘Democratic peace theory: Recent developments’ (DPTRD) project sought to discover the extent to which the KDT needs revision and further qualification. In particular, the EU-funded study was interested in determining if the core idea of the KDT can be ‘saved’. DPTRD determined that there is a need for more than just a narrowing of the temporal validity of the democratic peace theory from two centuries to just a few decades. As such, research that exists implies an overall rethinking of the grounds on which the theory is originally based. Project members underline that the utilitarian approach has wrongly interpreted Kant's original intuition, that of underscoring the direct interest of citizens for peace, as the only ingredient for peace. Democratic nationalism in the Balkans, as well as the United States-led invasion of Iraq, show that the will of the average voter is not enough to deter wars against other democracies or wars fought for reasons beyond those of self-defence. In assessing the prospects of KDT as a foundation for envisioning new forms of global governance, the project offered two competing proposals to KDT. These are the cosmopolitan democracy of D. Held and D. Archibugi, and the Plädoyer for a common European foreign policy by J. Habermas and J. Derrida. The DPTRD project has advanced knowledge and forged a new approach to factors to be considered in enhancing social security and a clearer notion of democratic peace.