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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> Check the democratic peace theory -- democracies don't fight wars with each others.

The Democratic Peace theory has always been bunk: even when it was formulated, for any definition of democracy restrictive enough for the claim "Democracies don't fight wars with each other", the number of available democracy-democracy pairs is so small compared to thr number of pairs of countries that the expected number of wars between them is, rounded to the nearest integer, zero.

Certain, since the wars in the Balkans from the 1990s, the Democratic Peace theory is even less defensible than it was previously.

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The US went to war with Mexico. Or, more accurately, Mexico went to war with itself, and the US supported the secession bloc well enough to legally adopt it.

Then the US went to war against its own secession immediately afterward.

Mexico, the United States, and the Confederate States are (were) all democratic republics, and their constituent states are all democratic republics.

And does it have to be a shooting war? Because democracies wage economic wars against each other quite frequently.

>> the number of available democracy-democracy pairs is so small compared to thr number of pairs of countries that the expected number of wars between them is, rounded to the nearest integer, zero.

There are literally dozens of modern democracies that have been free since WWII, how can that be too few "pairs"?

>> Certain, since the wars in the Balkans from the 1990s, the Democratic Peace theory is even less defensible than it was previously.

Uh, Soviet ended 1989. Then the Balkan got free -- and Jugoslavia fell relatively quickly into a civil war. How does that reflect on democracies?

(Are you defining "democracy" as "one free election, no power changes after consecutive free elections is needed"? That is hardly how the term is defined, last I checked either the democracy or the democratic peace theory.)

> There are literally dozens of modern democracies that have been free since WWII, how can that be too few "pairs"?

There's a little under 200 countries now. The number of democracies by any definition that leaves no inter-democracy wars is a small fraction of that (though, yes, in the dozens). The ratio of democracy-democracy dyads to total dyads is smaller (for reasons which should be mathematically obvious) than the ratio of democracies to countries.

> Uh, Soviet ended 1989. Then the Balkan got free -

Uh, Yugoslavia split from the Soviet bloc in 1948, and Tito died in 1980.

AGAIN: You claim that Yugoslavia was democratic before the civil war, since you claim that exact Balkan war (?) is a counterexample to the claim that democracies don't wage war.

How many free elections did they have? :-) How many free transfers of power did they have? :-)

(The next point here is that the democratic peace theory didn't say anything about civil wars?)

EDIT: I am NOT going to comment on Dragonwriter's answer to this and for a THIRD TIME ask for references about how Yugoslavia and Serbia are stable democracies that have been doing transfer of power after free elections AT THAT TIME PERIOD. :-( I am disappointed over a 30+K karma account for this bullshit.

> (The next point here is that the democratic peace theory didn't say anything about civil wars?)

The NATO-Yugoslavia war was not a civil war, even if it was motivated by one.

I know a lot of scholars count Serbia as a democracy, but it wasn't until 2001. Milosevic was a classic post-soviet Eastern European autocratic strongman. While Serbia had a parliament, electoral fraud was rife.

Milosevic's popular support was likely around 10% at the end. The country was governed by a weird coalition of financial interests that made up a ruling class of a few tens of thousands of people - many ex-communists.

In terms of success as a kleptocrat, Milosevic is only beaten out by Suharto, Marcos and a small number of others - he likely stole in excess of a billion.

That said - the Balkan wars do present another case of democracy v democracy at war as at some points Croatia and Bosnia (the Muslim canton) were at a state of war yet both were democracies (altho also arguably ruled by strongmen).

dragonwriter know that Serbia wasn't a stable democracy at the time. He just refuses to discuss it because he is trolling.

Also, Croatia/Bosnia/Serbia were civil wars.

Anyway, how many free elections had Croatia and Bosnia had at that time, to be defined as democratic? :-)

How many peaceful transitions of power had there been at the time (the real gold test)? :-)

If just one reasonably free election is needed, then Hamas in Gaza is a democratic government... :-)

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