NO. 1(1996)

Professor of Political Science

46-393 Holopu Place

Kaneohe, Hawaii 96744

Contents

Chapter 1. Why Is This Book Credible? 3

Chapter 2. What is Freedom and How Do We Get It? 6

Chapter 3. Freedom Solves the Problem of War 11

Chapter 4. Freedom Minimizes the Problem of Political Violence 22

Chapter 5. Freedom Virtually Eliminates Genocide and Mass Murder 30

Chapter 6. Freedom Produces Wealth and Prosperity 39

Chapter 7. Freedom Promotes Social Justice 50

Chapter 8. An Enlightened Foreign Policy 63

Chapter 9. But What About . . . ? 78

Annotated Bibliography 89

Bibliography 92

Chapter 1

Why is This Book Credible?

What you will read in this book will be both astounding and shocking. You will read that democracies do not make war on other democracies and rarely engage in lesser violence against each other. You also will read that the more a nation is democratically free, the less severe its foreign and internal political violence. Moreover, you will read that somewhere around 170,000,000 people have been murdered by their own governments, aside from war, and that the more democratic a nation the less it murders its own people. As if this were not enough, you will also read that democratic freedom promotes wealth and prosperity. Finally, you will read that our basic foreign policy should be to promote democratic freedom around the world. In short, you will read that were the world to become wholly democratic, then to the best of our knowledge war would be completely eliminated for the human species, lesser political violence, genocide and mass murder would be minimized and poverty and inequality would be sharply reduced.

After reading all this, you may well conclude that I do not know what I am writing about or am some kind of kook. Had I read this myself thirty years ago, I would have thought it at best idealistic but, in any case, too simplistic and misleading, even arrogant. I would not have believed anyone claiming that they have a solution to end war. And then for them to assert that this solution also will deal with other forms of political violence and reduce poverty. . . . well, at the least I would have believed they did not live in the real world. I was sure then that war and other forms of human violence were complex social and political phenomena, requiring an understanding of diverse conditions and causes to forecast and resolve. Any one factor explanation was simply absurd. Moreover, to claim as I will here that this one factor should be the paramount concern of American foreign policy was also, I would have thought then, to be really irresponsible about policies that, in a world of independent and powerful nations, can not only lead us astray, but endanger our security as a nation and risk war.

To at least provide the reader with some assurance that I did not dream all this up, therefore, let me give some background on how I came to these conclusions. But first, so there is no misunderstanding, I should point out that these conclusions are not mine alone, but now the product of the research of many people, that has accumulated over two decades. Indeed, many of those doing this research on war approached it with the same kind of skepticism you may presently have, but became convinced by their own research results, as I became convinced by mine, that there was a fantastic truth here. Nor is the idea that democracy will promote peace new. It goes back several centuries, as I will show. What is new is that the computer, statistical data collections and developments in methods of research since the 1960s have enabled us to scientifically test and validate this idea. I have been one researcher among many, therefore, who could have written this book, and my particular history in doing research on this may be shared by several colleagues.

During World War II I was a young boy highly influenced by anti-Japanese war propaganda. I saw the Japanese as buck toothed, monkey-like, inscrutable, cruel and devious, without feeling or sentiment. It was a cultural shock, therefore, to see the Japanese people as they really are while I was stationed in Japan during the Korean War. I found that the Japanese were nothing like my war engendered stereotypes. They could laugh and cry and love flowers and animals. They could be loving and considerate. Moreover, this period was close enough to the Second World War for me to see still the effects on the people and cities of American bombing. This experience had a life-long effect, for it made me ask myself why, if we are really all the same as human beings, we make war on each other.

After the Korean War I started college with a major in physics and mathematics. But my true interest was in reading about social and political matters, particularly about East Asia. So I decided in 1956 as a sophomore at the University of Hawaii to change my major to political science, and then happily discovered that in political science I could study war and peace within the subfield of international relations. From then on I focused my term papers, MA thesis, and Ph.D. dissertation on war and other forms of political violence. After getting my doctorate in 1963 and for the next thirteen years I received annual grants from the National Science Foundation and Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense to conduct research on the empirical dimensions of nations and their behavior, which for me was an attempt to delineate the context and conditions of conflict and war between and within nations. This turned out to be one of the largest social science projects of this kind. Its results have been published in numerous books, the most important of which are described in the bibliography. The essential findings were published in 1981 and are what you will read here: to foster nonviolence, promote freedom.

This result was so radical and seemed too ideological (particularly during the Cold War), that I had to assure myself further that it was sound. As a matter of course, I had already screened all the related research in the literature and so I redid this a second time and also replicated with new data the empirical results. The freedom factor, which is what I will now call it, held up without exception. But my research had been limited to violent conflict such as war, military action short of war, revolution, guerrilla warfare, rebellion and the like. Because I did not appreciate its extent, I had ignored democide, that is genocide and mass murder. But after this research some work on democide led me to realize that possibly more people were killed through government genocide and mass murder than in war. So with grants from the United States Institute of Peace I spent quite a few years collecting data on democide and then subjected them to a variety of empirical analysis. The results of this were also the same. The more democratic freedom, the less democide.

This brings me up to about 1993. Now I was ready to pull all this research—really my life-time research career—together in one volume to be called Power Kills (see the bibliography). In the process I again carried out a series of empirical replications and redid for the third time a systematic survey of the literature, with again the same results. The new findings reconfirmed what I will write here.

One final note: I have not personally done the research on the positive effects of freedom on wealth and prosperity. But I have followed research on this for three decades, since it shows a benefit of freedom that must be considered as important as eradicating violence. When I come to this I will present the central results of this work.

This book is meant to communicate in nontechnical terms the new and revolutionary results from research on war, other forms of political violence, and economic progress. I hope that the reader will gain a new appreciation of the miracle that is democratic freedom and realize that this now gives us the power of knowledge. This is knowing what now can be done to rid humanity of the horrors of war, to almost eliminate other forms of political violence, including genocide and mass murder and to sharply reduce world poverty.

Chapter 2

What is Freedom

and How do We Get It?

By freedom I mean liberal democratic freedom, or liberal democracy. And since I will argue that we should universalize such freedom, what does such democratization involve?

Democracy may be defined by its inherent nature and by its empirical conditions. As to its nature, Aristotle defined democracy as rule by the people (Greek demokratia: demos meaning people + -kratia, -cracy, meaning rule or governing body) and this idea that in some way the people govern themselves is still the core meaning of democracy. Around this concept of self-government have developed four themes that many democrats now believe integral to a particular form of democracy, which we call liberal democracy.

One is that the people govern themselves by regular elections through which their highest leaders and representatives are periodically determined (representative democracy) or directly by their votes on policy alternatives (direct democracy).

A second is that the right to vote includes virtually all adults. This near universal franchise is an entirely modern addition to the definition. Not so long ago governments that were called democratic excluded from the franchise all slaves and women, as well as all non-slave males that did not meet certain property or literacy requirements. We now consider it perverse to call democratic any country that so restricts the vote, as did the apartheid regime in South Africa that limited voting to minority whites.

A third theme is that there be certain civil and political democratic rights. These political rights include not only the right to vote, but also the rights to a secret ballot and to have one’s vote count equally, but also the right to run for the highest office, to organize political groups or parties, and to a transparent government, in particularly knowing how one's representatives voted and debated. Of great importance is that open competition be allowed for political office, which usually is translated to mean that there is more than one political party competing for power. The civil rights are those to freedom of speech, particularly the freedom of newspapers and other communication media to criticize government policies and leaders; freedom of religion; and the freedom to form unions and organize businesses. One of the most important civil rights is that to a fair trial.

And finally, there is rule by law. Above the state there must be a law that structures the government, elaborates the reciprocal rights and duties of government and the people, and which all governing officials and their policies must obey. This is a constitution, either in the form of a single document as for the United States, or a set of documents, statutes, and traditions, as for Great Britain.

Liberal democracy, therefore, now generally means that a people rule themselves through periodic elections of their highest leaders in which nearly all adults can participate, for which offices they are eligible, and under the rule of law which guarantees certain political and general rights.

And this defines what I mean by freedom here. These aspects of freedom are summarized in table 2.1.

Some countries may be called democracy but are not liberal democracies as defined here. These may have competitive elections, a secret ballot, and near universal franchise, but still there are arbitrary arrests, restrictions on or even terror against a minority, controlled speech, and so on. Both India and Colombia are examples of these nonliberal democracies.

Is therefore my definition of freedom as liberal democracy too narrow a definition of freedom, one that fits only Western European nations? Not at all. Consider Freedom House’s prestigious annual survey of freedom in the world, as published in each years first issue of their Freedom Review (formerly Freedom at Issue) and their yearbook Freedom in the World. They define freedom by the existence of civil liberties and political rights similar to those I list above. On these criteria they find that as of the beginning of 1994, 1,046,200,000 people lived under freedom, comprising seventy-two nations and forty-five related territories. Nearly twenty percent of the world’s population was thus free. And this excludes a number of democracies that are nonliberal. For example, democratic India is defined as only partially free, largely because of anti-Hindu killings, arson, and looting, in some cases involving the police, wide scale government corruption, and the direct takeover by the central government of rule over four of India's states. Moreover, Russia and many of her former Soviet Republics like Latvia, Ukraine, and Armenia have had democratic elections but still are not considered free. Similarly for former Yugoslavian Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Consequently, the claims I will make in this book about the benefits of democratic freedom should be understood to apply with main force to free countries, those that have a liberal democracy.

Who then are the free countries? They include, of course, those one would normally list—the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Great Britain, and other Western European nations. But they also now include Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guyana, and Uruguay in Latin America and most of the Caribbean Islands. In Eastern Europe they include Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria. There is also Cyprus in the Mediterranean and lone Israel in the Middle East. In addition to Japan in Asia there is now Mongolia and South Korea. And most Pacific island nations are free, such as the Marshall Islands, Solomon Islands, and Nauru.

If what I will say about the value of freedom is true, then how is this freedom to be achieved in nations? There appears to be no one process of such democratization. What agreement there is on how best to achieve a stable democracy favors slow incremental development. Great Britain is, of course, the example of this, with gradual change over centuries from absolute monarchy to one of the world’s most enduring liberal democracies. However, such an incremental process seems neither necessary nor sufficient for democracy or its stability. Great Britain is an example of a bottom-up process, where the non-governing elite or lower classes made incessant demands for an extension of rights and voting power, and, through government concessions, chipped away at ruling authority. Not all such democratization is so gradual, and indeed many appear revolutionary. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Chinese Revolution of 1912, and the Russian Revolution of 1917 that preceded the Bolshevik coup are examples, only the first of which established a long lasting democracy.

The process of democratization may also be carried out by the governing elite themselves, as has often happened in South America, and indeed, one will find authoritarian leaders that claim their rule is required to create the conditions for democracy. However, this top-down process has more often ended in an unstable democracy, unless it has been responsive to revolutionary pressure and pro-democratic violence from those below.

Democracy may also be created and mid-wifed by foreign powers. In this way were created the democracies of Japan and West Germany. After the Second World War the United States occupied Japan and with the help of democratic minded Japanese intellectuals and politicians reconstructed the Japanese government, wrote the so-called MacArthur Constitution, and carried out social reforms, such as land reform, that would strengthen democracy. This top-down, foreign imposed democratization produced a democracy stable enough to see in 1993 one of the longest lasting and most powerful governing parties among democracies, the Liberal-Democrats that had governed since 1955, thrown out of power by the Japanese people. Similarly, the new post-World War II democratic West German government, erected with the help and under the watchful eyes of Great Britain, France, and the United States, has been stable and effective.

Colonization, especially by Great Britain, has provided an incubation period for democracy in a number of countries, which with independence became full fledged and stable democracies. Canada, New Zealand, and Australia are good examples. India is also an example, but of a democracy still with nonliberal aspects, as mentioned above. It has come under severe strain, and the survival of what democracy it has is all the more remarkable given its regional, religious, linguistic, and ethnic centrifugal forces.

Many have tried to define the empirical conditions necessary for the creation and success of democracy. In some of this work there tends to be confusion between the defining conditions of democracy itself, such as a free press and competitive elections, and that of democratization. If we understand the latter to involve those conditions that facilitate the creation of a stable democracy confusion can be avoided. For this most stress the importance of economic development, with the concomitant high levels of literacy and education, and modern communications. It is believed, and the empirical evidence strongly supports this, that democracy requires an aware and relatively educated electorate, and that moreover, where poverty and inequality are as severe as they are in the poorest nations, democracy cannot take root. Moreover, some also emphasize that there must be a civil society—diverse social groups and institutions independent of government—for democracy to take root and flourish.

But also there is the role of culture. Many democratic theorists now accept that democracy requires a political culture of negotiation, compromise, accommodation, and a willingness to lose. Where this culture is absent, democracy, even if created through revolution by the people themselves, cannot succeed. However, as one considers such democracies as Japan, France, Germany, or even early 19th century Great Britain, their pre-democratic cultures were most conducive to authoritarian rule of some kind. It is only with the development of democracy that their political cultures gradually became democratic. Whether political democracy or democratic culture came first is clearly a chicken and egg question, but whether it comes before or after democracy is created, it is widely recognized as essential to democratic stability and success.

Other conditions have been proposed, such as the importance of a vigorous, bourgeois middle class, or the necessity for a depoliticized military.

Whatever, I will argue that because of the ability of democratic freedom to solve mankind’s major and historical problems, that of war, violence, genocide and mass murder, and poverty, democratization must be the prime, front and center, crystal-clear goal of our foreign policy. Such a foreign policy must of course recognize what we have learned about the process of democratization and realize that a democracy imposed against a people’s wishes cannot long endure. But there is much that a foreign policy can do, and I will deal with this after I show why democratization should be seen as in our vital national interest.

Chapter 3

Freedom Solves

The Problem of War

War has been always with us and incredibly destructive of human lives. One cannot find a span of history, a region, or a culture that has been without its wars. There were the bloody wars among ancient civilizations, the classical Greek city-states; the Italian city-states Swiss forest states, and monarchies of the middle ages; and our modern nation-states. There were the wars among groups, tribes, principalities, empires, and civilizations in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa. There were the Crusades, the Mongol invasions, and the incredible bloody wars of transition from one empire to the next in China.

Among all these wars, one of the bloodiest was the Thirty Years War, fought from 1618 to 1648, an interconnected series of about a dozen wars between different powers and at different places in Europe. Together these wars wrecked much of Europe, killed millions of people, and forced the migration of many millions more. Some countries lost a huge proportion of their population, the German Empire alone suffering a population drop from about 21,000,000 in 1618 to less than 13,500,000 in 1648.

Then there were the Napoleonic Wars that over the years 1800-1814 were fought by France all over Europe and to Moscow and back. Some 2,000,000 died in battle and France alone lost about every one out of five of its soldiers to wounds or death. Just between these wars and World War I in 1914 there was the Crimean War, with about 785,000 battle-dead; the Seven Weeks War that killed in battle, as wars go, a small number—15,000. There was the Franco-Prussian War and 184,000 battle dead; the Russo-Japanese War with 160,000 more battle dead; and the Balkan Wars that cost an additional 462,000 battle dead. Yet this does not count the numerous small wars and clashes, and the colonial wars fought with indigenous people wanting nothing more that their freedom.

For all European nations alone and from 1300 to 1700, the average time nations were at war was over 50 percent. For the 18th century the duration dropped to 36 percent, and subsequently to 30 percent for the 19th century.

Then there is our century with its world wars. World War I alone wiped out some 9,000,000 people in battle. In one famous battle, the Verdun in 1916, about 976,000 French and German troops were killed and wounded in their trenches or as they tried to run the gauntlet of shell fire and bullets to reach the enemy’s. In the first battle of the Somme in the same year, the British alone lost 60,000 casualties, with 19,000 killed. Aside from the battle dead, just from the war induced and spread flu epidemic of 1918 as many as 20,000,000 men, women, and children died. And untold millions more perished from other diseases, famine, and dislocation.

Then there was World War II. What more need be said about this bloodiest and most total of wars. Its sheer destructiveness and horrors have been written on the minds of all readers through actual involvement or through television and in movie fictionalized accounts and documentaries. Its human cost alone is around 16,000,000 battle dead. By itself this exceeds the total population of many nations of the world and yet to this must be added the tens of millions of civilians that died from indiscriminate attacks, being caught up in battles, and war caused famine, disease, and dislocation. Some have placed the final toll at 40,000,000 to 60,000,000 dead.

What has been the historical toll of war? Exact calculations are impossible, but the roughest sort of estimates can be made. From the 30th century BC. through our century something like 151,000,000 may have died in war. If we look at the twentieth century alone, for which our calculations can be more exact, we find that international wars—World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Iran-Iraq, USSR-Afghanistan, Japan-China, Japan-Russia, Israel versus her Arab neighbors, Cambodia-Vietnam, and so on—have killed about perhaps 111,000,000 people, around 4 percent of the world’s average population, 1900-1987. This means that a world citizen had a risk of 1 in 25 of being killed in war, not very good odds, considering that this is a matter of life or death. Even were one to survive, there is an unacceptable probability that loved ones may die in war.

The sheer destructiveness of war, its ferocity and wild killing, has been likened to a disease. It is a human plague that infects the mind and contaminates neighbors. It spreads, leaving mangled and bloody corpses in its wake and then disappears for awhile to again appear unpredictably in the same or a different place.

The best of our thinkers and scientists have tried to understand this plague, to control and even manipulate it, and above all to eliminate it. Solutions have been proposed, such as replacing the lust for battle with international sports, educating the young in the horrors of war and values of peace, equalizing international resources and wealth, reducing poverty, cultural exchange between nations to show that we all are alike, better international communication to avoid misperception, disarmament, arms control, trade, the creation of functional organizations that tie nations together, research into the causes and conditions of war, and so on and on. Surely any well stacked library has shelves and shelves of books written on what can and should be done to solve the problem of war or avoid it.

The favorite of all proposed solutions has been the belief that world government and associated international law would once and for all eliminate war. Constitutions for such a world government have been written and through the centuries many designs for such a government have been offered. No matter how carefully constructed, however, they have always raised the question as to how we get from where we are now to such a world government; and besides, there is also the question as to whether this would only get rid of wars by definition. While there would no longer be international wars, since independent nations would be subordinate to a world government, would not there now be bloody civil wars within this unified world community?

None of these solutions to the problem of war have worked out. They have been idealistic or impractical, like world government. Or they simply have been shown to be wrong, as with the belief in education or cultural exchange. But there was one solution proposed in the later 18th century that recent social science research has proved to be the answer. In his Perpetual Peace written in 1795, the great German Philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that the way to universal peace lie in creating republics, what today we would call representative democracies. Kant wrote that

Note two things about this solution. One is that where people have equal rights and freely participate in their governance they will unlikely fight other such peoples. And two, the reason for this is that they will be unwilling to bear the personal cost in property and the lose of their lives and those of their loved ones. Where leaders are responsible to the people, they then will be reluctant to fight. And where the leaders of two nations are so restrained, then war between them is nearly out of the question.

That democracies are therefore inherently peaceful was not an idea lost to others. It became part of a more general philosophy of governance that Kant shared with liberals of the time, a system of belief we now call classical liberalism. These beliefs were promoted by Adam Smith, John Stewart Mill, John Locke, and many more influential thinkers of the time. At the core, they argued for the maximum freedom of the individual consistent with a like freedom of others, that is they believed in minimal government. They also supported free trade between nations and a free market within. Such freedom, they argued, would create a harmony among nations and promote peace. As Thomas Paine, a classical liberal and an American political philosopher wrote in his influential Rights of Man in 1791-1792,

And in this the classical liberals were right.

Unfortunately for mankind, the belief in individual freedom was soon to be overtaken and overshadowed by various versions of socialism, including communism (or Marxism) and fascism. This was the view that government could be a tool to redesign society and create through the redistribution of wealth and the use of science and technology a more equitable and richer society. Capitalism—the free market—was seen as exploitive, the institutionalization of personal greed. By its nature capitalism was perceived as destructive of community values and a cause of war as capitalist fights capitalist for new markets.

Now socialism did not eclipse democracy and indeed, for many there was a marriage between democracy as the institutionalization of people-power and the ideals of socialism, what we call democratic socialism. This is a set of beliefs that have formed the platform of many past and present ruling parties in European democracies, and which have guided the creation of mixed free market-command economies. Moreover, notwithstanding the socialist view of capitalism as inherently belligerent, many people believed in their heart that liberal democratic nations were more peaceful than other forms of governance. And the philosophy of classical liberalism did not die; it mutated into contemporary libertarianism or modern conservatism.

But what was lost until recent decades was the hearts and minds of intellectuals. Not all or most intellectuals became socialists. Many continued to believe in freedom and its beneficial results. But what was largely lost was the belief in the peaceful nature of free peoples. The socialist critique of capitalism, especially on the supposed aggressiveness of such nations, as exemplified by their many colonial wars, won out. The many wars by democratic Great Britain, which has fought more wars than any other country, and those of the United States—the aggressiveness of the United States against Mexico in the last century and towards Spain, which eventuated in the Spanish-American War of 1898, not to mention the frequent American military interventions in Central and South America—seemed to give validity to the socialist argument. In any case, those who did not accept socialism were pulled by this critique and the evidence of history to take a middle position. Democracies were no more nor less belligerent than other people.

For intellectuals the Cold War gave particular emphasis to this belief. Although opposed to communism and strongly supportive of democratic freedoms, many intellectuals believed that talk about democratic peacefulness was simply Cold War propaganda. That, indeed, belief in this could lead to a democratic crusade that would endanger the peace and possibly lead to a World War III. After all, did not that classical liberal, President Wilson, make the United States entry into World War I a crusade to make the world safe for democracy.

There was also a conventional way of looking at nations that caused intellectuals and social scientists alike to miss the truth in Kant’s solution. The tendency was to look at nations in terms of their overall behavior and to focus on the large number of wars of specific nations, like Britain and the United States, rather than seeing wars bilaterally, in terms of the type of government of those who made war on each other. That is, while it was evident that Great Britain fought more wars than any other country, what was missed was that it fought no wars against other democracies once it became a full fledged democracy in the later 19th century. Nor once they became well established democracies—once democracy had a chance to become fully institutionalized and a democratic culture to develop, a process that might take several years—did France, Germany, or Japan make war on other democracies. Nor did the Unites States, in its full history, ever make war on another well established democracy.

Whatever the explanation, the truth in Kant’s solution and the classical liberals faith in the peacefulness of democracies was largely lost. Not until the 1960s was this solution resurrected and the research begun that would within three decades prove Kant correct. By then social scientists had amassed data on all wars that had occurred over the last several centuries. And by applying various statistical analyses to these data, social scientists had shown that there was no war between well established democracies. Moreover, through these techniques, they also proved that there was not a hidden factor accounting for this—that this was not due to the lack of common borders or the geographic distance between democracies. Nor was it due to the economic development of democracies or their international power. Or their resources. Pure and simple, well established democracies, democracies that have been in existence for several years, do not make wars on each other.

Table 3.1 provides some evidence on this. The table gives a simple count of the number of wars between democracies, democracies and nondemocracies, and nondemocracies from 1816 to 1991. As the table shows, among 353 wars for over a century and a half there was not one war in which well established democracies killed each other's citizens.

But might not this be due to chance? That is, since democracies are in a minority among nations and in previous centuries there have been only a handful of democracies at any one time, are not the odds against there being wars among democracies. One thing that can be done by statistical analysis is the calculation of the probability of events taking place. Calculating these probabilities for wars between democracies has shown that it is extremely unlikely by chance in general, with odds for some periods and wars of hundreds of thousands to one, that the lack of wars is a chance finding.

Table 3.1

Wars 1816-1991

Two works in particular provide the final evidence. In his Democracy and International Politics, James Lee Ray, Professor of Political Science at Florida State University, looked in detail at all alleged cases, twenty in total, in which democracies have made war on each other. These include the Athens-Syracuse War of 415-413 BC., the British-American War of 1812, the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Boer War of 1899 to 1902, World War I in which a possibly democratic Germany fought Britain and France, a democratic Finland versus the democratic allies in World War II, and Israel versus Lebanon in 1948 and 1967. After careful consideration of each case he had to conclude that not one really involved a war between two established democracies. Democracies do not make war on each other, without exception.

Dr. Spencer Weart, historian and physicist, director of the Center for History of Physics, provided the final evidence. In his book Never at War he did a thorough study of all possible cases of war between democracies in written history, beginning with the classical democratic city-states. He also found not one case of war between well established democratic states, democracies that had existed for around three years or more. Not one.

Moreover, adding considerable credibility to his findings, Weart saw that states would make war on each other right up to their becoming democracies and after democracy settled in there would be no more wars between them. Then, when one or the other or both became nondemocratic, wars between them would break out again. It was as though a higher being flipped a switch. Now war; then no war; then war again. The switch was democracy.

He also discovered something new and important to social scientists, i.e., that oligarchic republics also do not make war on each other. For Weart a democracy was one in which at least two-thirds of the adult males had equal rights and could participate in government. In an oligarchic republic no more than one-third of adult males could so participate and shared rights. A good example of such a government was pre-democratic South Africa under the white apartheid regime. The minority whites were democratic among themselves, but the greater majority of blacks were second class citizens, unable to vote. Weart discovered that such oligarchic republics almost never make war on each other, but such republics and democracies fight each other, sometimes tooth and nail.

Why should this be so? Indeed, why should free and democratic peoples not make war on each other at all. Remember Immanuel Kant’s hypothesis that people who are politically empowered would not want to bear the cost of wars and therefore would restrain their leaders? This seems on the surface a straight forward explanation, and it does help to understand why democracies do not make war on each other. But democratic people’s have also been jingoistic. They have favored war and encouraged their leaders to fight. Public outcry over the explosion aboard the American battleship Maine in a Cuban harbor and its sinking with a loss of 260 men in 1898, and horrible atrocities of Spanish forces against the Cuban people and rebels, pressured Congress and President McKinley to intervene in Cuba. As a result, McKinley requested and got congressional authority to do so, and Spain declared war.

American public opinion also strongly favored President Truman’s commission of American troops to the defense of South Korea against the North Korean invasion in 1950; and similarly favored President Johnson’s request of Congress for a blank check—the Tonkin Gulf resolution of 1964—to come to the defense of South Vietnam, then near collapse under the weight of North Vietnam’s aggression.

There is something much deeper than simply fear of death and destruction at work in preventing wars among democracies. This is an inhibition that works regardless of the basic disposition of a people towards war or peace, aggression or appeasement. Where democratic freedom flourishes in two countries, where there are relatively free markets, and freedom of religion, association, ideas, and speech, economic and social entrepreneurialship also flourishes. Corporations, partnerships, associations, societies, churches, schools, and clubs proliferate in and between the countries. Through their interests, work, and play, people become members of multiple groups and institutions, some localized in each country, some transcending the borders of both. These become separate pyramids of power, competing with each other and with their own and the other government. Both nations then really comprise one society, one crosscut by these multifold groups. The critical social dimensions of wealth, power, and prestige are then subdivided in many ways and, most important, this pluralism cross-pressures interests. That is, what people want, their desires and goals, are cut up into different pieces, each satisfied by a different group, such as their church on Sunday, their bowling league on Tuesday night, their factory or office for 40 hours, their child’s school and parent teacher association during some evenings, their political party mailings and election campaign, and, of course, their family at home. All are different, but overlapping interests, and all take time and energy.

This is true of government as well. After all, democratic government is not some monolith, a uniform pyramid of power. It is made up of many departments, agencies, and bureaus, all staffed with bureaucrats and political appointees, each with their own interest. Moreover, between two democratic governments numerous official and unofficial connections and linkages are made to achieve similar functions and satisfy mutual interests. Their militaries coordinate their strategies and may even share equipment in line with their mutual defense arrangements and perceived common dangers. Intelligence services will share some secrets and even in some cases agents. Health services will coordinate their studies, undertake common projects, and provide health supplies when needed. In other words, two democratic societies are tied to each other by multiple shared and cross-pressured interests. As a result politicians, leaders, and groups have a common interest in keeping the peace. And where conflict might escalate into violence, as over some trade issue or fishing grounds, interests are so cross-pressured by different groups and ties, the depth of feeling and single-minded devotion to the interest at stake is simply not there. Keep in mind that for democratic leaders to intentionally choose to make the huge jump to violence against another country demands almost fanatic dedication to the interests—the stakes—involved, almost to the exclusion of all else.

But there is also something about democratically free societies that is even more important than these links and cross-pressures. This is their culture. Where people are free, as in a free market, exchange dominates. "You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours." "You give me that and I’ll give you this." Money is often the currency of such exchange, but also so are privileges of one sort or another, benefits, positions, and so on. But except where such exchange is so standardized that there is little room for bargaining, as in buying a hamburger at the local fast food restaurant, the operating procedures for establishing an exchange involves offers, negotiation, compromise, and concessions. From the highest government officials to the lowest workman, from the consideration of bills in a legislature to the determination of who does the dishes after dinner, there is bargaining of one sort or another. Of course, some of this becomes regularized, as in the bargaining of unions and management in the United States structured by the Labor Relations Board, or that given by tradition which dictates in some families that the wife will always wash the dishes. But much also entails bargaining.

As a result, in a free society a culture of bargaining, what might be called an exchange or democratic culture, develops. This is part of the settling in that takes place when a state first becomes democratic. Authoritarian practices, doing things by orders, decrees, and commands sent down a hierarchy gradually gets replaced by many hierarchies of power and the use of bargaining and its techniques of negotiation and compromise to get things done. One soon comes to expect that issues will be negotiated and that through concessions and the splitting of differences conflict will be settled. These expectations become hardened into customs and perception. Thus democratic peoples see each other as willing to compromise and negotiate issues rather than wanting to fight over differences. No matter the conflict, they do not expect war. For most important, they see each other as of the same kind, part of one’s in-group, one’s moral universe. They each share not only socially, in overlapping groups, functions, and linkages, but also in culture. As we no more expect that American Senators Mitchell and Dole will punch each other over President Clinton’s health care proposal, Americans and Canadians have no expectation of fighting each other over trade restrictions. Both see each other as similarly free and democratic, and willing to bargain.

Finally, one should give a strong role to the ideology of democratic liberalism itself. Democratic liberals believe in democracy—the right of people to make their voices heard, to have a role in government, and to be free. Such liberals, which in domestic policy may be conservative or progressive, Democrat or Republican, strongly oppose any violence against other democracies. If such were contemplated by those in power the democratic liberals would call on allies in the media, legislature, and bureaucracy to arouse a storm of protest against such action.

But what about oligarchic republics, in which, be it recalled, only a minority have democratic freedom. Here also similar factors operate. Among the politically equal and participating minority there is the same exchange culture and the expectation of nonviolence and negotiation that we find in democracies. This minority sees other oligarchic republics as of the same kind; sharing the same culture and philosophy of rule; participating in the same moral universe. And thus these republics avoid war among themselves.

But as for democracies, they are different. All people are free and equal and oligarchic republics not only see them as morally and culturally different, but also as a moral and physical threat to their minority rule. Thus relations are constrained, interaction limited, and the danger of war implicit in their relations. Of course, democracies reciprocate this latent and sometimes overt hostility.

For recent decades, one only need point out the hostility of the democracies against oligarchic South Africa. Not only was strong pressure applied to the South African white government to democratize, but overt sanctions were applied and trade was boycotted. The headquarters of multinational companies in democracies had pressure brought on them to cease business in South Africa and in many cases such business was made illegal. Obviously, South Africa was seen not only as of a different kind, an out-group, but by virtue of the exclusion of the majority blacks from power, utterly racist and thus doubly immoral. Although it did not come to war between democracies and South Africa, had not the white regime liberalized and negotiated to enable a truly democratic election involving all South Africans, war at some point was not out of the question, especially if the white government had escalated violence against blacks to maintain their oligarchy.

All considered, then, why is there no war between democracies and virtually none between oligarchic republics? Because of the equal rights and free participation in governance of a sizable group of citizens. This creates a multitude of groups that produce diverse linkages across borders, cross-pressured interests, and make for an exchange culture of negotiation and compromise. Democracies (or oligarchies) see each other of the same kind, as morally similar, as negotiators rather than aggressors, and therefore have no expectation of war; and there is a prevalent ideology of democratic liberalism that believes in democratic freedom and opposes violence between democracies. Thus the interdemocratic or interoligarchic peace.

Then why do nondemocracies make war on each other. Do not dictators see each other as of the same kind, sharing the same coercive culture. Yes, and that is precisely the problem for them. They live by the use of coercion and force; they are used to sycophantic underlings and manipulation through lies and deceit. In his Special Tasks, the recent memoirs of the high level Soviet spymaster, Pavel Sudoplatov, he well displays what life was like in such a system. He wrote that

Commands and decrees are the operational routine of dictators, and if they do undertake negotiations they are often seen as a battle ground on which one uses all the technique of subterfuge, misinformation, stalling, and manipulation to win.

Diplomacy by dictators with other countries is no different: it is seen as the continuation of war by other means. Only under threat of greater force will true negotiations take place. Thus the recognition of others as also nondemocratic, as dictators or monarchs, is to recognize that war is possible, that coercion will be necessary, and that any concession from the other side will have to be studied from all angles to find hidden traps. A dictators promise is as good as the cannon he sees sighted on him.

Were all to be said about freedom that democracies don’t make war on each other, it would be revolutionary and we should all be ecstatic. After all the centuries through which a solution to war has been sought; through all the struggle to identify the causes and conditions of war, to collect data on war and subject them to scientific analysis; through all the effort people have made to manage crises and avoid war; it comes down to this simple, practical factor. Promote civil and political rights, that is, promote freedom.

Perhaps the reader feels as I would if I had read this several decades ago. First, is not war so complex and its causes and conditions so diverse and situational, that this is much too simplistic? Can we really believe it all reduces to the one factor of freedom? The answer is categorically yes. The research results on this are consistent. But perhaps part of the conceptual problem is in understanding precisely what kind of cause democratic freedom is.

I am not arguing that war necessarily will occur between two countries if one or both are not democratic. I am only arguing that two countries being democratic is a necessary condition for an assured peace between them. The empirical results of the study of all wars and democracies shows conclusively that if war occurs between two states, one of them at least must not be a democracy. But lack of democracy is not a sufficient condition for war. War may not occur between nondemocracies for many reasons, such as both being very small and weak countries distant from each other, as are Yemen and Uruguay. Or they may have certain strongly shared interests, with one dominating the relationship, as between Vietnam and Laos. War or peace among democracies in fact may demand the multivariable and well nuanced analysis and explanation that historians and foreign policy practitioners often demand. But we can say this. If the nations are democratic we know that war will not occur, as much as we know anything about human behavior. And this simple factor of democratic freedom is, as best we can forecast from our experience and understanding into the future to solve our problems, all we need to know to eliminate war.

Chapter 4

Freedom Minimizes

The Problem of Political Violence

Wars exist or they do not. A country is democratic or it is not. For this reason, as startling and important is it to know that democracies do not make war on each other, democracy as a solution to war has two limitations. One is that were this all we could say, then it is not sufficient for countries to move toward democracy or to be partially free for the effects of democracy to kick in. This means that to end war we would have to not just foster freedom, but make sure nearly all countries are free.

Second is that there are many other kinds of violence than international war. There is violence between nations short of war, such as American jets shooting down Iraqi fighter planes that violate the United Nations defined no-fly zone over southern Iraq, or, the blowing up of a South Korean passenger jet by North Korean agents, or, military action by Cuban forces against Somalia during the Ethiopia-Somalia War over the Ogaden (Cuba actually lost about 1,000 battle dead). And then there are the civil wars, guerrilla wars, revolutionary wars, violent coup d’états, and the like within nations. What about all these kinds of violence?

Here also freedom works its magic. But to understand this magic correctly, we now have to stop thinking about war in terms of a single event that occurs or not. Rather we should think of war as a concept covering the most severe forms of political violence between and within nations. We should understand that there are wars of differing severity, that we can have as a war the fighting between Germany and the Soviet Union in World War II in which the latter lost some 7,500,000 battle-dead; and we also can call a war that between India and China in 1962 in which each lost around 500 dead. Both are wars. But now let us focus on the severity of military violence between nations in terms of the number killed. Let us also do the same thing for domestic political violence, and consider the total people killed in all internal political violence, such as that directed by the government at some groups, as of guerrillas or rebels in a peasant uprising, or that violence directed at government officials, institutions, or forces.

Then, first, as far as our data on violence can reach, we find that for any two nations, the more democratically free both are, the less likely there has been severe violence between them. This is shown in figure 4.1 for all wars in this century.

At one end we have two nations that are both democratically free and fight no wars and have, if any violence at all, very minor violence between them and marginal democracies. At the other end we have nations in which there are no civil rights and political liberties, no free market, and the government coercively commands all other socially significant activity and groups. At this end, where we have two totalitarian governments, they are most likely to have the most intense violence. World War II involving totalitarian Germany and the Soviet Union is a case in point. No other pair of nations has lost as many people in fighting against each other than have these two. As mentioned, the totalitarian Soviet Union lost 7,500,000 in battle; and totalitarian Nazi Germany lost about 3,500,000 battle dead, most of them on the Soviet front.

Second, we find that the more democratic a country is, the less intense has been the foreign violence in which it has engaged. Another way of putting this is that the more freedom a nation has the less its leaders squander the lives of their people in foreign violence and war. Figure 4.2 shows this for all nations from 1900 to 1980.

This is not to say that democracies are entirely pacifist. They have of course engaged in bloody wars, usually to fight aggression and defend themselves and other democracies. Sometimes, however, democracies have also been the aggressors, as was the United States in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902, and the Grenada and Panama interventions. In general, however, on the average, democracies fight less severe wars and are thus more careful about the lives of their citizens. Totalitarian regimes, the least free, use their people en mass, often to throw at the enemy in human waves, in order to win their battles and wars.

And third, we now know that the more democratic a country the less severe its internal political violence. This is shown in figure 4.3.

This is also a statistical fact. There are, of course, exceptions to this, such as the American civil war. Although one might argue that this was fought over individual freedom itself—the right of a people to be free of slavery—it was still a most violent war in which Americans killed almost 500,000 other Americans. And there has been continuous mixed political-ethnic-religious violence in India, the guerrilla warfare that occurred in democratic El Salvador and Peru, and so on. But then there are the greater number of democratically free countries like Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, and Switzerland in which political violence is virtually absent. And there are or have been the nondemocratic countries like Burma, Cambodia, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Ethiopia, Somalia, pre-democratic Colombia, and so on, in which violence has been endemic.

The most extreme cases of internal political violence between the government and armed groups have been in the Soviet Union, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, China, Sudan, Somalia, and Burma, totalitarian or near totalitarian all. But there is also the violence in authoritarian nations. The Mexican revolution from 1910 to 1920 killed about 2,000,000 people and the la violencia—terrorism, assassinations, and civil violence—in Columbia from 1949 to 1962 killed perhaps some 300,000 people. And then there was the violence under Idi Amin of Uganda and his successors, in which in total perhaps near 750,000 people were killed. When free societies are compared to such violent countries, even the most civil or politically violent nations like the United States do not seem to have that much violence after all.

The freedom factor is thus a freedom continuum. A continuum of diminishing violence. The less the freedom of a people, the less their civil and political rights, then the more likely they will lose their lives in foreign military action or be caught up in internal political violence. This is to say that freedom minimizes such violence. It does not necessarily end it. Some minor violence may still occur between democracies and internal violence—rioting, terrorism, and even civil war—might still occur. Freedom is no guarantee against this. In the world at large, with all the issues people and governments may fight over, we have no proven and practical means of ending political violence forever, everywhere. But we now know that we can sharply reduce such violence to a minimum through the practice of freedom.

Here we have the same question as the question regarding the lack of war among democracies. How do we understand this reduction in violence? And the answer is the same. Democracies have numerous bonds and linkages among themselves that inhibit violence. More importantly, they share democratic culture and recognize each other as of the same kind. They expect to bargain away and compromise their conflicts, and violence is not ordinarily an option. Then why does some violence occur, even though limited? In those cases in which violence has taken place, such as in Turkey sinking a Greek boat, or Israel accidentally firing on the British while both were allied against the United Arab Republic (Egypt) in the Suez War, it is almost always between countries just marginally democratic or in very unusual circumstances, such as in a war.

But what about the other side of this. Why is there a scale such that at the extreme nonfree end, governments are likely to have the most foreign and internal violence? If we could only explain the dampening effect of freedom on violence in terms of freedom alone, this would only be half an explanation. What is it about decreasing freedom, about nonfreedom, that causes violence? The answer is power.

Now power comes in many forms. Among the most important is exchange power that underlies the diversity and culture of free societies. There is also authoritative power, or the ability to get others to do what one wants them to do because of one’s credentials or position. This is the power of an hereditary monarch, a teacher in class, or a judge in his courtroom.

The powers of concern here, however, are coercion and force. These are the means by which a dictator and totalitarian ruler enforces obedience to their commands. Obey or suffer the consequences. And often this will be prison, torture, and possibly death. The worst of these regimes command their people and organize society according to ideological imperatives. Be they Marxism-Leninism and the drive for true communism, socialist equalitarianism, racial purity, the glory of the nation, economic development and modernization, or the realization of God’s will, their modus operandi are the same: a hierarchical command structure. There are no civil rights or political liberties—little or no freedom. People must do what they are told to do under the threat of sanctions, including prison or even death.

The result of such a command structure is that society becomes polarized. First, the competing pyramids of power that discipline, check, and balance government in a free society no longer exist. There is now only one pyramid of power, with the dictator or ruling elite at the top and the mass of subjects at the bottom.

Second, where in a free society independent cross-cutting groups service diverse interests, there is now in effect only one division in society: that between those who command and those who must obey. Where one’s job depends on the political regime, where one’s food comes from its stores, where it produces and censures all one’s newspapers, books, movies and television programs, where it strictly controls all schooling and writes all textbooks, and where it manages all religion, society is polarized. Major interests align into two opposing camps along only one conflict front, that between "them" and "us". Any relatively minor issue, therefore, can become a matter of regime power, legitimacy, or credibility. A strike in one small town can become a matter of such concern to the regime that major force must be used to put it down. For the people, such a strike may be symbolic, and a display of resistance that should be supported, and therefore the strike may spread along the fault line between the regime and people. In any case, the regime cannot afford to let any resistance, any display of independence, anywhere by anybody, go unchallenged. Force must be used to suppress such strikes, and any other demonstrations, for to allow them to go on unchallenged is to weaken one’s reputation for power. And that will only encourage more resistance and opposition.

So coercion and force is the nature of such rule; violence a natural concomitant. But there is more to this. As a culture of accommodation is a corollary of freedom, a culture of force and violence is a consequence of dictatorial rule. Where such rule is absolute, we find a culture of fear—not knowing when one might do something perceived as wrong and reported to the police, uncertainty as to whether one’s ancestors or race or religion is or will become a black mark, and insecurity about the lives of one’s loved ones, who may be dragged off to serve in the military, disappear because of something they said, or become the plaything of some official. The fear exists up and down the command structure. Generals may be shot for jokes about the "Great Leader", top government functionaries may be jailed and tortured because of a rumored plot, and the dictator himself must always fear that those around him with guns to protect him will turn them on him.

There is still another aspect to this. The dictator has the power to move people around like chessmen, to use them as tools to carry out his whims. Those that get in his way, those that resist, that thwart his desire, can therefore easily be eliminated. Moreover, when the dictator’s will is strengthened and justified by some consuming ideology, when the dictator can believe that his will is that which will promote justice and happiness for his people or the world, then there is no stopping him from having peaceful demonstrators machine gunned, shooting farmers and their families resisting collectivization, or invading and taking over a neighboring country.

To be sure, I am drawing extremes here to make my point. Where power becomes absolute, killing en mass follows. Of course there are partially free regimes and those also in which there is little freedom, but the regime is an authoritarian monarchy ruling according to tradition and custom, as in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. Power in this case is more authoritarian, obeyed because it conforms with tradition, than coercive. But we find that the less free a society and the more it is controlled by coercive commands, then the greater the polarization and culture of fear and violence, and the more that violence will occur.

The continuum of freedom thus runs from free democratic societies at one end to strictly totalitarian societies at the other. The closer two nations are to the totalitarian end, the more likely violence will occur between them; the closer to the free democratic end, the less likely such violence. Moreover, the less free and more totalitarian a society, the more severe its foreign and internal political violence are likely to be.

There is one aspect of this explanation that some readers may question. Those that have been brought up in democracies, with their relative free markets, civil rights, and representative and limited government, have difficulty accepting how absolute some governments can and have become. Although the age of true totalitarianism may be behind us, not so long ago there were governments that controlled every aspect of a person’s life. The government literally ran everything. There was no private business, nor independent schools, athletics, newspapers, movies, or books. For travel from one village, city, or town to another, one had to get government permission. Homes and apartments were even government owned and in many places, as in the Soviet Union or communist China under Mao, the government kept track of the visitors to one’s home. Some of these totalitarian countries required that in some locations or occupations, such as farming, even living and eating had to be done communally, in dormitories and mess halls. For one communist regime, that of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, in some regions people were forbidden to own more than a spoon, and could not scrounge food for themselves in Cambodia’s lush forests without fear of being shot. In this Cambodia it was even dangerous to laugh with people or to say honeyed words to loved ones, because that could show less serious dedication to the regime. All this is documented and I need not exaggerate at all to make my point. Under such hellish regimes violence is a way of life.

I will pay particular attention to a type of such regimes in the next chapter, the most totalitarian and the most violent, the communist ones.

Chapter 5

Freedom Virtually Eliminates

Genocide and Mass Murder

The leaders of some governments have been mass murderers. They have killed their own citizens and foreigners, all unarmed and helplessly in their control. By shooting, drowning, burying alive, slicing, stabbing, torturing, beating, suffocating, starving, exposing, poisoning, crushing, and all the other myriad ways that lives can be wiped out, intentionally, and with forethought.

It seems difficult for those having lived in democracies all their lives to accept the simple truth of this. I know that even some of my political science colleagues resist the thought. I can see them wince when at a conference or meeting, for example, I say outright that Kim Il-sung, the recently deceased dictator of North Korea who was responsible for something like 1,700,000 dead, was a murderer. For some reason we can easily apply this to an individual committing serial murders, such as London’s famous "Jack the Ripper" who killed six or seven people in 1888, or the "Boston Strangler" DeSalvo who in 1962-1964 killed thirteen people. But we resist calling a dictator a mass murderer, even Idi Amin when he ruled Uganda, who may have physically participated in some of the murders carried out by his regime and was ultimately responsible for the deaths of some 300,000 of his subjects.

I call murder by a regime democide. This means any intentional killing of unarmed people and includes, as it does in American civil law, deaths due to the intentional and wanton risk of human lives. Thus Nazi Germany putting people in concentration camps where they died from overwork, disease, and exposure, or letting people starve to death as the Soviet Union did in the Ukraine in 1932-1933, is murder. And, of course, so is machine gunning POWs alongside a ditch; executing political opponents; shooting people to death because of their race, religion, or ethnicity; hanging people picked up at random in retaliation for attacks on soldiers; and so on and so on for all the means by which people can be killed by those with power over them.

I will deal first with the most murderous regimes of them all, the communist ones. This is in order to display the shocking product of absolute power and to nail down the virtue of freedom too widely unappreciated. I first will do this through four true examples of democide. Two will be taken from Stalin’s Soviet Union, one from Mao’s communist China, and the other from the Khmer Rouge's Cambodia.

During the 1930s a number of purges of presumed enemies of the people were carried out under Stalin’s orders. On the flimsiest presumptions and in many cases without any evidence of any wrong doing at all, people were arrested and tortured until they would admit to whatever the interrogator demanded.

It was believed among top communists that there was a certain percentage of the population that opposed the regime and had to be done away with. But in typical communist fashion, this was not something that could be left to the discretion of low level cadre. After all, iron, steel, pigs, wheat production, and virtually everything else economically had to be defined by a quota to assure that lower level cadre were guided in their work. It may be utterly incomprehensible to those outside such a totalitarian system that such cadre were also given quotas of people to murder, but it was consistent with the idea of central planning and control. From Moscow NKVD (a predecessor to the KGB) headquarters an order would go out to some small towns or villages to kill so many "enemies of the people," and soon enough the local henchmen would report back that the task was completed.

That such orders would be given is incredible enough. That the local official would obey them is unbelievable. Why did "quite ordinary decent human beings, with a normal hatred of injustice and cruelty" carry out these merciless purges and executions? Simple: through sweating, trembling, fear. Consider what Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, in their book appropriately titled Empire of Fear, wrote about what a friend, who is called M—, said of his experience,

Throughout this period Stalin was particularly concerned about Ukrainian nationalism and their opposition to collectivization. This was a major reason for Ukrainian opposition to Moscow and a source of support for Ukrainian exiles abroad planning for an independent Ukraine, and being given aid to that end by Nazi Germany. One strong base for this opposition was the peasant and for this reason when a drought hit the Ukraine in the early 1930s Stalin purposely exacerbated the resulting famine. He blockaded the Ukraine and would not let food in, and he sent cadre on systematic forays against the peasants to uncover any food they might be hiding. Even warm bread was taken off peasants tables and seed grain for the next planting was expropriated; dogs and cats were shot and when the peasants started to eat birds, these too were shot from the trees. About 5,000,000 Ukrainians died from hunger and disease as a result.

But, there was another source of nationalism, its culture-carriers. The communists therefore shot Ukrainian writers, historians and composers, Ukrainian officials too considerate of the Ukraine; and even itinerant, blind folk singers. Those with "bourgeoisie sensitivities" might find the following from the memoirs of composer Dmitri Shostakovich to have its own chilling horror.

Turning now to communist China, its Cultural Revolution during the 1960s was a tumultuous period. The communist party was split between those who supported Mao’s desire to continue the glorious communist revolution and those who were more pragmatic, the so called "capitalist roaders." No one could be neutral in the bloody conflict for power between these two groups. Military units fought each other, even with cannon and tanks; students waged pitched battles with machine guns and grenades given them by military sympathizers. The victors in one battle or another would then often systematically purge the opposition, subjecting them to torture and mass execution. How many died in this internal conflagration cannot be counted. Perhaps 1,600,000; even possibly 10,000,000.

In this struggle, Mao and his supporters could trust no intellectual or scientist of any sort, especially in the governing of any organization. For this reason it was customary in these years to put fanatical communist radicals, regardless of their lack of experience or knowledge of their job, in charge of universities, schools, scientific institutes, hospitals, and intellectual associations of one sort or another. Consider the following experience related by a Chinese scientist when Shan Guizhang, a fanatic and ignorant radical, was appointed to head one of China's most prestigious of institutes, the Institute of Optics and Precision Instruments in Changchun.

Now Shan had read Tales of the Plum Flower Society, a spy thriller about an entirely fictional effort to break a Kuomintang espionage network in the Academy of Sciences. The chief Kuomintang agent was named Peng Jiamu, also a name, unfortunately, of a real scientist working at the institute. Incredibly, Shan believed that scientist Peng was in fact the real life spy in the book. So, fully understandable in the context of the "Cultural Revolution," Shan had 166 scientists at the institute arrested as spies, along with local accountants, policemen, workers, and even nursery attendants. Some were beaten to death; some others committed suicide. Sufficient proof of spying was the existence of a radio or camera at home or the ability of a person to speak a foreign language. After thus purging the institute of these "spies," Shan was promoted to a provincial Party committee.

The killing in Cambodia is the most extreme case of democide in this century. The Khmwe Rouge murdered perhaps one-third of the Cambodian people from April 1975 to their defeat in a war with Vietnam during the first days of 1979. In 1946 the Khmer Rouge militarily overthrew U.S. supported General Lon Nol, took control of the government, and in the next few days evacuated all the cities they newly controlled, including the millions in Phnom Penh, the capital. They forced all these city-folk or refugees to join the peasants and work the soil from morning to night. All that was grown and harvested was seized by the Khmer Rouge. What the new and old peasants were fed in return was often insufficient to sustain life or protect them against disease. As a result at least 1,000,000 starved to death or died from associated disease.

The Khmer Rouge also committed outright genocide, as of the Muslim Chams, Cambodian-Vietnamese, and Buddhist Monks. They murdered all officers who had served in the Lon Nol army or police. They killed those Cambodians having any college or professional education, or speaking a foreign language. They executed anyone suspected of plots against the regime, or violating any one of the plethora of rules and regulations. They also killed people for laziness, complaining, wrong attitudes, insufficient enthusiasm, or unsatisfactory work.

I will give only one example of this, but as a teacher, it is for me the most hideous of all the accounts I have read. This is the Buddhist monk Hem Samluat’s description of an execution he witnessed in the village of Do Nauy.

Few would deny any longer what these examples attest, that communism—Marxism-Leninism and its variants—meant in practice bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison camps and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and show trials, and genocide. It is also widely known that as a result millions of innocent people have been murdered in cold blood. What was this human cost of totalitarian communism?

Table 5.1 lists all communist governments that have committed any form of democide and gives their estimated total domestic and foreign democide and its annual rate (the percent of a government’s domestic population murdered per year). It also shows the total for communist guerrillas (including quasi-governments, such as the Mao soviets in China prior to the communist victory in 1949) and the world total for all governments and guerrillas (including such quasi-governments as the White Armies during the Russian civil war in 1917-1922). Figure 5.1 graphs the communist megamurderers and compares this to the communist and world totals.

These estimates have been pieced together from hundreds of sources and in determining the final figures I have tried to be prudent and avoid exaggeration. Nonetheless, all these figures and their graph are only rough approximations. Even were we to have total access to all communist archives we still would not be able to calculate precisely how many the communists murdered. We can, however, get a probable order of magnitude and a relative approximation of these deaths within a most likely range. And that is what the estimates in the table and figure are meant to be. Their apparent precision is only due to the total for most communist governments being the summation of dozens of subtotals (as of forced labor deaths each year) and calculations (as in extrapolating scholarly estimates of executions or massacres).

With this understood, the Soviet Union appears the greatest megamurderer of all, apparently killing over 61,000,000 people. Stalin himself is responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these. Of all the deaths, perhaps around 39,000,000 are due to lethal forced labor in gulag and transit thereto. Communist China up to 1987, but mainly from 1949 through the cultural revolution, which alone may have seen over 1,000,000 murdered, is the second worst megamurderer. Then there are the lesser megamurderers, such as North Korea and Tito’s Yugoslavia.

Obviously the population that is available to kill will make a big difference in the total democide, and thus the annual percentage rate of democide is revealing. By far, the most deadly of all communist countries and, indeed, of all countries in this century, has been Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot and his crew likely killed some 2,000,000 Cambodians from April 1975 through December 1978 out of an initial population of around 7,000,000. This is an annual rate of over 8 percent of the population murdered, or odds of an average Cambodian surviving Pol Pot’s rule of slightly over 2 to 1.

In sum the communists probably have murdered something like 110,000,000, or nearly two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course, the world total itself it shocking. It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been killed in all this century’s international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone—one communist country—well surpasses this cost of war. And those of communist China almost equal it.

How can we understand all this killing by communists? It is the marriage of an absolutist ideology with absolute power. Communists believed that they knew

the truth, absolutely. They believed that they knew through Marxism what would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness. And they believed that power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be used to tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and rebuild society and culture to realize this utopia. Nothing must stand in the way of its achievement. Government—the Communist Party—was thus above any law. All institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. And the people were like lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world.

Constructing this utopia was seen as a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism, and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And thus this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia justified all the deaths. The irony of this is that communism, in practice, even after decades of total control, did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made their living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the greatest famines have occurred within the Soviet Union (about 5,000,000 dead during 1921-23 and 7,000,000 during 1932-3) and communist China (about 27,000,000 dead during 1959-61). In total almost 55,000,000 people died in various communist famines and associated diseases, a little over 10,000,000 of them from democidal famine. This is as though the total population of Turkey, Iran, or Thailand had been completely wiped out. And that something like 35,000,000 people fled communist countries as refugees, as though Argentina or Columbia had been totally emptied of all their people, was an unparalleled vote against the utopian pretensions of Marxism-Leninism.

But communists could not be wrong. After all, their knowledge was scientific, based on historical materialism, an understanding of the dialectical process in nature and human society, and a materialist (and thus realistic) view of nature. Marx has shown empirically where society has been and why, and he and his interpreters have proved that it was destined for a communist end. No one could prevent this, but only stand in the way and delay it at the cost of more human misery. Those who disagreed with this world view and even with some of the proper interpretations of Marx and Lenin were, without a scintilla of doubt, wrong. After all, did not Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao say that? In other words, communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven and indicated the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusade against nonbelievers.

What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the state’s instruments of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and, of course, the family. The result is what we see in table 5.1.

Communism has been human kinds greatest social engineering experiment. It failed utterly and in doing so it killed about 110,000,000 men, women, and children, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked. But there is a larger lesson to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology and that is that no one can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power the political regime has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or decree the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives are to be sacrificed. This is but one reason, but perhaps the most important one, for fostering freedom.

And consistent with this, communism does not stand alone in such mass murder. We do have the example of totalitarian Nazi Germany, which may have itself murdered some 20,000,000 Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Yugoslavs, Frenchmen, Germans, and other nationalities. Then there is the authoritarian Nationalist government of China under Chiang Kai-shek, which murdered nearly 10,000,000 Chinese from 1928 to 1949, and the totalitarian Japanese militarists who murdered almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Indochinese, Koreans, Filipinos, and others during World War II. And then we have the 1,000,000 or more Bengalis and Hindus killed in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 by the Pakistan military. Nor should we forget the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans and German citizens from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, particularly by the authoritarian Polish government as it seized the German Eastern Territories, killing perhaps over 1,000,000 of them. Nor should we ignore the 1,000,000 plus deaths in authoritarian Mexico from 1900 to 1920, which includes many poor Indians and peasants being killed by forced labor on barbaric haciendas. One could go on and on to detail various kinds of noncommunist democide.

But what connects them all is this. As a government’s power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all the corners of culture and society, and, as it is less democratically free, the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. As a governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal desires or to pursue what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. In this case power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite has it, other causes and conditions can operate to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres, or whatever killing an elite feels is warranted.

All this gives no better utilitarian argument for freedom. It preserves and secures life.

Chapter 6

Freedom Produces

Wealth and Prosperity

Universal freedom would not only end war as we know it, it would reduce to a minimum political violence, and practically eliminate genocide and mass murder. As if this were not enough, it also promotes wealth and prosperity. Freedom is an economic engine of jobs, wages, increased earnings, new technology, and greater human choice.

What has often been called the technological revolution of the 18th and 19th century was really a revolution in freedom. As government loosened its strangle hold on national economies and foreign trade, as it allowed the forces of entrepeneuralship and creativity to develop and flourish, there was a takeoff in new inventions, new businesses, and the earnings and wages of the poor. Before this revolution the poor were tied to a farm or manor and lived the most basic and poorest of lives. They often faced the threat of starvation if a harvest was meager, if they lost or broke their tools, or were dispossessed of their land. And they would wear the most basic and plainest of clothes and eat the simplest and cheapest food. What the revolution of freedom did is to free these poor from this kind of servitude, assure them of basic wage, and enable them to improve their consumption. Much to the complaint of the upper classes, who saw this as putting on airs, the poor began to dress in more colorful and better clothes and to eat a greater variety of food.

All of us are the inheritors of this economic revolution, of this free market. The automobiles we drive, the television we watch, the movies we see, the computers we use, the telephones we answer, the planes we fly, and the diverse and wholesome food we eat, all owe their development and availability to the free market. At the most basic level, the operation of the free market can be seen best in the availability of an incredible variety of cheap food for the poor and lower middle class. An American supermarket is a cornucopia of agricultural wealth, with choices of fruits, vegetables, meats, cereals, breads, wines, and so on from throughout the United States and, indeed, from many countries of the world. The same is true of a department store, which shelves, hangs, and displays a rich variety of goods. To truly see the results of freedom is to shop in a supermarket or department store.

Then compare this with what happened under the former command economies of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Mao tse-tung’s China, and elsewhere. Here the opposite of a free market was imposed. Government owned and ran all sources of production and all stores. In the worst of the command economies there were no private businesses, no entrepreneurs, no private farms, and no automatic balancing of supply and demand, except in a black market. In the best of them some private farming was allowed, but prices and distribution were tightly controlled by the government. All experienced shortages of basic goods and in some cases their resulting economies were driven to the point of collapse.

By the 1980s the standard of living of Soviet citizens was not much better than it had been in Czarist times, even after some sixty-years of communist control over the economy (Westerners were often misled by what they saw in Moscow, but Moscow was a show place and was in comparison to the rest of the Soviet Union like a developed country compared to the Third World). In China by the 1970s, the standard of living of the average Chinese was below what it had been before the Sino-Japanese War that began in 1937. We all have heard the stories of life in typical communist countries, of lines after lines of people waiting to buy scarce goods; of days spent just to find toilet paper, sausages, or shoes; of a line for a ticket to buy an item, a line to pick up the item, and yet a third line to pay for it. We have also heard of the special privileges the ruling elite had, their own restaurants, their own stores to shop in with the best of goods, their chauffeured cars and villas or retreats. But few people know about the worst that has happened in some of these countries under a nonfree economy.

Even the introduction of a semi-command structure can wreck agriculture, as happened during the Russian Civil War. From 1921 to 1922 the communist government under Lenin not only confiscated food from the peasants to feed people in the cities and the Red Army, but also seized large farms without compensation and introduced massive price and production controls on the peasants. Of course, the deleterious effects of this were made worse by the dislocations caused in many regions of Russia by the civil war, as one army or another would control food producing areas. All told perhaps some 5,000,000 people starved to death or died from associated diseases. The toll would have been millions higher had not the American government provided massive aid to the starving.

But this was not the worst. I have already mentioned the intentional communist made famine in the Soviet Union during which some 5,000,000 Ukrainians were starved to death or died of associated diseases. This also was the period when peasants throughout the Soviet Union were undergoing forced collectivization. They were being driven off the farms, their livestock and tools confiscated, and forced to work within collectives. The idea here was simple. This was an attempt to multiply food production through the supposed efficiency and economy achieved by one very large farm replacing many small ones. Tractors (which were impractical on very small farms) could then be used, the food production planned, and farms assigned appropriate tasks depending upon what needed to be done and upon peasant skills.

This is one of those appealing ideas in the abstract, which fail completely when applied. These collective farms robbed the farmer of the incentive to work hard, but more importantly, the central planners in Moscow tried to fit all collectives into one plan, one set of rules. Down from Moscow would come orders for soil preparation, planting, fertilizing, and harvesting, when, where, and how. Local weather, soil, and topography were hardly taken into account by Moscow bureaucrats. The result at first was disastrous for agriculture and when a mild drought occurred that peasants in the past would have been able to wait out, the effects of the drought were multiplied by collectivization and caused a serious famine. Moreover, as mentioned, Stalin purposely aggravated this famine in the Ukraine, but in the North Caucasus and elsewhere some 2,000,000 people also died from this famine and its effects.

The Soviets tried to adjust their way of running these collective farms to make them more productive and did improve their production to a certain extent, but there were still local famines and another big one several years after World War II in which perhaps 2,000,000 or more died. Nothing helped agricultural productivity as much as giving farmers on the collectives the right on their time off to plant food on a little plot nearby. As one who has lived under a free market would expect, these became highly productive and by the time communism collapsed were accounting for most of the food produced in the Soviet Union.

But the total suppression of the agricultural free market by the Soviets was only one gigantic human experiment with productivity by command. Unwilling to learn from these disastrous results, blinded by their love of Marxism, the Chinese communists did the same thing once they had gained complete control over mainland China and had prepared their peasants. Within a few years all land and farms were taken over by the government, collectives called communes were built, and all farmers became, in effect, not only factory workers, but forced conscripts in a national agricultural army. In many communes they lived in dormitories, woke to bugles, ate their food in mess halls, and lined up after breakfast to be marched off with flags flying to carry out their group tasks and meet the commune’s quota.

This was true communism. It was the dream of those who believed that government could build a society to improve the lot of the poor and feed the needy. Here was total reconstruction, the revolution for which Mao tse-tung had worked and fought. Of course, what this meant was that those communist officials put in charge of a commune or agricultural region, could not afford to underfill their quotas. All, thus, exceeded them and food production soared. China was becoming an agriculturally rich country. The experiment had worked, or so it seemed to the government and to well wishers abroad. But all these statistics were a sham. They were only on paper.

The actual results were absolutely disastrous. Catastrophic. Men, women, and children starved to death in the communes and fields, in the villages and towns, and cities. While food production records were being broken the emaciated bodies began to pile up and soon their numbers, even to top party rulers, became undeniable. By 1962 the worst famine in world history was underway.

How many died in this is much in dispute. There are figures as high as 40,000,000 dead. A well documented estimate is 27,000,000. If we take this figure as close to the actual number, it is as though the total population of Canada had starved to death in two or three years.

There have been other famines caused by anti-free market policies. Africa is a good case in point. If one tracks where and when famines have occurred in Africa, one will find that they usually stem from government agricultural controls, particularly over prices, production, and distribution of food, and in some cases the added dislocation of a civil war. Somalia is the more recent example, but Ethiopia stands out for the extent of controls the communists put in place over agricultural production and the resulting famine. During the 1980s over 1,000,000 Ethiopians starved to death or died from related diseases. This is out of a population of 33,500,000 people, which makes its famine nearly proportionally as great as that of China.

These greatest of economic experiments in world history, this rebuilding of whole societies to match some abstract plan in which people are fitted, this attempt to do better, by command from the top, what free people can do spontaneously for themselves, has completely failed. All one need do is think of the market place in any free society compared to the shortages, long lines, limited choices, and massive famines of command economies.

There is a joke about the command economy that was heard from Eastern Europeans when they lived under communism. This is that if a communist country were to take over the great Sahara desert, you would hear nothing about it for ten years and then there would be a sudden shortage of sand.

It is no accident of history that the most developed and technologically advanced nations are democratic. Nor it is by chance that the poorest nations are those in which there is little or no open economic competition, in which people are limited or prevented from freely buying and selling goods, and in which to get anything done one has to bribe government bureaucrats or their relatives. In some other countries, such as India, until recently, even though it was democratic, a socialist angst had infused the governing and bureaucratic elite’s view of the economy. This severely limited India’s economic growth, while what economic freedom was allowed kept mass hunger at bay.

More specifically, consider the economic miracles that are Germany and Japan. Their economies and infrastructures were thoroughly destroyed during World War II yet both had to absorb millions of returning soldiers and civilians; in the case of West Germany it was something like 8,000,000 ethnic and Reich Germans expelled from the Eastern German territories by Poland and from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, and Yugoslavia. How did they recover as fast as they did from being among the most devastated of nations in 1945 to being, in the early 1990s, among the most economically powerful states? The answer in each case: a relatively free market.

But we can go further than this in showing the positive results of a free market. There is also rapid economic growth and modernization of now democratic South Korea. Compared to an annual average world growth rate in domestic product of 2.3 percent for the years 1950 to 1985, South Korea grew at an annual rate of 5.3 percent, in spite of the very destructive Korean War at the beginning of this period. Korea is now becoming a close competitor to Japan.

There is also the example of now democratic Taiwan, which over this period has grown at a rate of 7 percent, and which must be now classified as nearly among the developed nations.

Then there is, of course, the "Asian tiger" that is Singapore, which, in spite of an authoritarian government, has allowed the market to be relatively free, and, as a result, has become an economic jewel of Southeast Asia. Over the same period of 1950 to 1985 it grew at a rate of 7.9 percent, making it economically the fastest growing country in the world. And we cannot ignore the British colony of Hong Kong. Located on a series of small islands and a small strip of mainland China, it comprises only 397 square miles. In 1945 it had a population of under 600,000 Chinese, but through natural population growth and by absorbing millions of refugees fleeing communist China its population has swelled to over 6,000,000. This many on this small bit of land, yet there is little unemployment, a bustling, productive, and continually growing economy, and an annual growth rate of 6.9 percent, only slightly behind Singapore and Taiwan.

And there is also Chile, which, under the military government of Augusto Pinochet (from 1973 to 1989), brought in a group of free market economists from the University of Chicago and, with their advice, freed Chile’s economy from the controls and regulations that had crippled it. This policy has in the main been followed by now democratic Chile and, as a result, the country is a shining example to the rest of South America of a relatively free market at work.

Note also that once communist China liberalized its economy and introduced a modified, semicontrolled free market in many areas of the country, the economy has taken off. Year after year, now, China is growing at or near a double digit rate. Cities are literally being rebuilt, investments and businesses from abroad are competing with a new class of Chinese investors and businessmen, and, compared with just a couple of decades ago, people now have plenty of food. The visitor returning to China after twenty years is astounded by the signs of economic vigor and growth.

Such power of even a limited free market is greatly enhanced when it is part of the civil and political freedoms comprising liberal democracy. When we deal with such freedom globally and through time, we find that economic growth and relative wealth are at their greatest in free nations. In particular, for 113 nations from 1950 to 1985 the amount of their annual economic growth in terms of real domestic product, an excellent indicator of the wealth of a nation, goes down as their democratic freedom decreases. This is shown in figure 6.1 for an average of thirty-two liberal democracies, fifty-one authoritarian and thirty totalitarian regimes.

Note that communist countries have been excluded from this plot. It became clear after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, their statistics were largely a fraud. While they showed a greater average growth rate than free nations, their economies were in fact either near collapse or at Third World levels. Moreover, Middle Eastern major oil producing countries, such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait are also omitted, since their wealth and growth is largely a happenstance result of their huge oil fields.

The measure of democratic freedom is based on the Freedom House annual ratings that were described in chapter 2. These ratings go back only to 1973, but their annual average is largely applicable from 1950 to 1972 as well.

Economic growth rate is only one measure. A more important one is the actual average level of wealth, which is plotted in figure 6.2. The measure for this is the average real gross domestic product of nations per person in U.S. dollars. As can be seen so clearly, the more democratic freedom, the more wealthy the people are on the average, with a huge gap between the most free and the least: $7,300 average wealth, 1950-1985, for the most free thirty-two nations versus an average of $900 for the thirty least free. Those that live in democratically free nations are on the average eight times wealthier in gross domestic product per person than those in the least democratic nations.

Economic productivity and growth and a stable and incredibly varied supply of food and other goods are only some of the benefits of a democracy and its free market. There is also the great stimulus to new inventions and innovation. And there is the continuous reduction of the cost of goods compared to the average wage (inflation aside, which, after, is all caused by government printing too much money), such that even the most complex and advanced products are available to the common man.

Consider the hand held calculator, for example. When I was a graduate student and had to calculate statistics for my MA thesis in 1960, I used a large, desktop, Monroe mechanical calculator with a crank. In retrospect it was painfully slow, but better than doing the arithmetic by hand. The machine cost about $1,100 new. In proportion to the inflationary growth in average American personal income since then, this would be about $13,000 in current money. On it I could calculate sums, cross-products, and correlations, and it took me about two months to do all the calculations needed. By the early 1970s, I could pick up a hand held Hewlett Packard electronic calculator that would do all these calculations and many more (such as logarithms and trigonometric functions), and store one figure or calculation in memory. It cost about $400 (about $1,400 in current prices relative to income). Now one can get such an hand calculator for $10, and paying slightly more will get one a calculator that will do much more then that Hewlett Packard. And for $1,100 I could now buy a personal computer that has a capability undreamed of a mere decade ago and on which I could have done all the needed calculations for my MA thesis in seconds, not months. It is as though the free market, through innovation and competition, had brought the price of a vastly improved new automobile in 1960 down to the cost of a new shirt (which makes one wonder what in fact the price of an automobile now would be without any government regulations on its production and quality).

Also, I did my Ph.D. dissertation on the Northwestern University hard frame central IBM computer worth tens of millions of dollars in current money. It had a memory of 36,000 bytes and took up a huge air conditioned room with its blinking lights, spinning tapes, massive central processor, printer, batch input and output devices, and bustling attendants. The computer had an almost spiritual mystery about it. To use it one had to learn FORTRAN, and to change some of its functions there was a board or two that one had to physically rewire. That was in 1962-1963. Today I sit before a fourteen inch color screen with a new Macintosh Quadra 650 that has an 8 megabyte memory (expanded to 16 megabytes by virtual memory) and a 260 megabyte hard disk. The cost was several thousand dollars. Unbelievable power at an unbelievablely low cost compared to about a generation ago. Such are the fruits of freedom.

But why should freedom be so productive? One reason is that people have an incentive to work and produce because they are personally rewarded. If they can produce something that other people want at a reasonable cost, they can be rewarded handsomely, and, indeed, even become quite rich. There is something more here than simply material rewards. One takes care of one’s own. It is like driving a rented automobile versus one’s own—in subtle, perhaps even some extreme ways, one is inclined to be rougher with the rented car. After all, nothing is lost by rapid starts, fast cornering, screeching tires, grinding gears, ignoring potholes, and letting it get filthy. The rental cost is the same regardless.

This is like the commons. One takes care of one's house and yard. It is personal property and a reflection of the inner self, a matter of personal pride. As a result, the house will last longer and the yard will be noticed and will be a source of compliments. But the commons is owned by the public and therefore, no one person. The government that is the steward over such property, which means the bureaucrats have a different incentive. That is, they wish to do the least work for the most money.

Now I have seldom met bureaucrats that mistreated me, that were not friendly, and that I felt I would dislike if I got to know them. But nonetheless, their motivations are in general perverse. The public property of which they are the custodians is not their's personally and they do not have the prime motivation to take care of and improve it. Their personal motivation is usually to do the least work at the best wage, and, even if it is to do the best job possible, it is to do no more than necessary. Consequently, one sees trees and flowers that are planted along newly built public roads wither and die for lack of water; one sees grassy areas in parks soon overgrown with weeds and littered with paper cups and plates, beer cans, and all the debris of people who use facilities that they do not own.

The problem of the commons pervades all government activity, even when the lives of human beings are at stake. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago described how any of us might behave like the guards responsible for taking care of prisoners being transported in cattle cars to forced labor camps. Each car would be packed with prisoners, with perhaps one toilet at one end or a toilet for several cars. The guards would be responsible for not only preventing escape, but for the care of each prisoner, such as escorting them once a day to the one toilet at the end of the car, waiting for them to finish ("Hurry, hurry, you’ve done enough now, get out!"), returning them to their cells and bringing them food and water. These were difficult chores, tiring when a train was filled with hundreds of prisoners, especially the doling out of water. This might involve taking a heavy barrel of water from cell to cell in each car and ladling out the water to each prisoner, a slow, cumbersome, and tiring task. The prisoners were, of course, unappreciative of the guards efforts, and would yell and scream for the water, jostle and fight for their cup or hand full, and demand more when in the jostling they spilled most of it. As day after day and sometimes week after week the loaded trains worked their way toward some labor or dispersal camp, cannot one understand why occasionally the guards would forget the water, cuss out and hurry up the prisoners, or dole out less water than they needed? The prisoners were not their property and while the guards were given the responsibility of taking care of the prisoners, this was only a job. Aside from any humanity a guard might have had, the only major motivation was fear of what would happen to him if a prisoner escaped. There was little concern over the state of the prisoners when camp was reached or the number that died, for this was something of which their superiors took little notice.

We have here some understanding of why slaves bought by plantation owners would often be well taken care of, although they might be punished severely for stepping out of line, while the biggest slave establishment of modern times, the Soviet gulag (forced labor camp system) with its 10,000,000 to 20,000,000 prisoners at any one time from the middle 1930s to the mid-1950s, let their forced laborers die by the millions. These people were often worked to death or died of hunger and exposure. Their life expectancy in some camps, especially the mining camps in Kolyma was a matter of months. Throughout much of the gulag about 20 percent of the prisoners died each year to total, by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, around 39,000,000 dead. These poor people were killed by a bureaucracy that saw them as rocks and bricks, as lumber and nails, to use to achieve a camp’s work quota. The incentive for the camp managers was to get the most out of the workers for the least cost (which often then could be pocketed). This was the very worst of the commons.

There is more to freedom than the incentive of private ownership that comes with a free market. There is also the fact that each of us is an individual with our own perceptions and experience. While we share much with our neighbors, friends, and loved ones, we also are different. Each of our paths through life is unique. This means that we alone can best judge what we desire, want, and can do. To borrow a useful cliché, we alone know where the shoe pinches.

This is more fundamental than it may at first seem. In the free market we are free to buy and sell, to create and build, only restrained by the like freedom of others and government restraints that may protect us all against some negative effects of freedom, such as pollution and the exploitation of lower animals, as in dog fighting. This freedom enables us to best adjust to the world around us in terms of our interests and values.

Moreover, we can take account of our own experiences and learning in what we chose to do, whether at work or play. Thus, a farmer who has learned from his parents and his own direct experience how to till the unique soil of northeastern Ohio, to read the local weather patterns, and to plant and fertilize the seeds that will grow well in the rocky soil, will best know how to make his farm productive. No government official far away in Columbus, Ohio, or Washington, D.C., can do as well. And indeed, were they to command him as to how to farm, not only would his incentive to produce be lost, but even were he to work hard at the soil, the productivity of the farm would be reduced, if not destroyed. The loss of freedom by the people is a loss of knowledge and values that cannot be replaced by government commands.

Where there is a free market there is an automatic balancing of what goods cost and how willing the people are to pay for them. If the prices of goods get too low given the demand, the goods become scarce and it is then profitable for the prices to be raised. But higher prices attract more businesses to produce the product, which makes more of the product available. As this larger number of goods at the higher price begins to exceed demand the price will have to be lowered to compensate, perhaps forcing some less efficient producers out of the market, and so on. At some point a stable price may be reached which just matches the demand.

This dynamic nature of freedom has many consequences. One of which is that it is often more profitable to sell many of some product at a small profit than few at a high profit. This encourages lower prices and cheaper goods to meet the mass demand of poorer people. Of course, some producers will specialize in building yachts and make a profit at it. That is what they do best. But many others will find it most profitable to market cheap clothes, fast food, games, and a thousand and one devices that make life easier. They will constantly produce more, cheaper, and with better quality. We have seen this with regard to computers. Quality and capability have gone up unbelievably, while prices continue to drop sharply. A personal computer system selling for around $8,000 just three years ago is now superseded by a much better computer system presently selling for $2,000.

Second, this free market price mechanism is a massive, economy wide message system. It communicates shortages, where things are cheap, where production might be profitable enough for a business to move into the market; it also communicates where demand is slack and production might be cut back. In other words, prices tell business what to put on the supermarket shelves where and when and at how much.

And, as a result, the free market is equally a massive distribution system. Stop and think about this for the moment. Consider the miracle of the thousands of goods on the supermarket shelves, many from other countries and far away states. Who decides this? What great mind or computer figures out what is to be sold in what market for how much and when? This is with no shortages, no long lines waiting for a supply truck to arrive, as in command economies, and with relatively little wastage. How is this done? It is done automatically and spontaneously, by the decisions of hundreds of thousands of independent producers, suppliers, truckers, and market managers, all responding to different prices and demand.

This is precisely why the command market and government intervention fail to improve prices and allocation over the free market. No government officials, no social scientists, no central computer can possibly figure out what individuals want, when, and where. It is in this fundamental inability of government to possibly know what the individual knows for himself and to calculate how this personal knowledge for all the millions of people in a country will balance. The government cannot improve on the free market price mechanism, it can only destroy it.

And this is not theory. Consider how, in practice, command economies versus the free market have worked out, as I have illustrated. Command economies have been built at great human and social costs in over half the world, and in some countries like the Soviet Union, communist China, North Korea, communist Cambodia, Cuba, and elsewhere, the grandest of these social experiments are over. Their costs and benefits can now be recorded. No command economy has succeeded in much improving the standard of living over what existed previously, and some have utterly destroyed the economy that did exist. Some were utter calamities, such as China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, and Ethiopia, leaving their people hungry and ill clothed, and in some cases millions dead from starvation.

No reasonable person can now deny that the evidence overwhelmingly supports freedom as a means to the economic betterment of society and the satisfaction of human needs. Freedom produces wealth and prosperity.

Chapter 7

Freedom Promotes Social Justice

It would seem enough that universal democratic freedom could end war, reduce violence, nearly eradicate democide, and promote global wealth and prosperity. But it is not, for the simple reason that many peoples may not want to be democratic or see others free to follow a different religion, speak out against their government or monarch, or run a multibillion dollar corporation.

Many people believe in some form of authoritarian government, one like that of Singapore that assures law and order and clean streets and parks. Many, such as those in Islamic countries, believe so deeply in their own religion and its teachings that they do not doubt that this should be the only religion of their country and it should be supported and furthered by their government. Many believe that the government plays a positive and strong role in dealing with poverty and promoting the economic development of their country, that the economic rights of the people to a job, social security, and health, must be attended to before so called Western human rights. Many are still monarchists who believe in an inherited, authoritarian government that would maintain the great traditions and customs of their people. And although in the last half-century fascism and communism have collapsed as universal ideologies, they continue to rule in some parts of the world and still have their fervent supporters. Even if all these people were to accept the truth of what I say about freedom, they might still yell that freedom prejudices their values, is morally inequitable and unfair, that it is unjust.

To put this in another way, how many would accept a lifetime in prison in return for protection against violence from other inmates, good food, clothes, health services, a television, radio, and whatever reasonable reading and writing material they wanted. Nonviolence, security, and entertainment within the confines of the prison guaranteed for life? Some, perhaps among the very poor, might accept this. But most people would not, simply because they have other values, one of which is being free, even if this means some risk of violence and living on a minimum wage.

There is thus a question that must be answered here. Regardless of the great benefits of freedom described in the previous chapters, they are after all practical and empirical effects. We must also ask whether freedom is moral or socially just in some way. Although in this context the question may seem strange, we ask this kind of question about possible public policies all the time. Abortion on demand may have considerable personal and social benefits for the pregnant women, but is killing a fetus moral? Providing young school children with condoms may reduce teenage pregnancies and help protect against venereal disease and aids, but is this proper? The execution of those who commit murder may remove these dangerous criminals from society, save society the cost of incarcerating them, and deter murder, but is it right?

Is freedom moral or just? One way of answering this is to treat the benefits of freedom themselves as moral goods. That people should organize and train themselves in a way to systematically kill other people in war and other forms of political violence is itself evil. It can be argued that all wars are evil and the only justification for going to war is when the war is a lesser evil, as in defending one's borders against an invasion. Philosophers and theologians have wrestled with the question as to when war can morally be fought. After centuries of dialog Christian theologians have generally concluded say that it is moral to go to war, that is the war is just, only if all other avenues of nonviolence have been exhausted and war remains the lesser of the evils threatened by not going to war. And if in fighting the war one only uses that force necessary to avoid the pending evil (such as a military invasion or attempted coup d'état) and does not attack noncombatants. In this view, that freedom carries within it the strong possibility of eliminating all war should make freedom itself an highly moral good.

This condemnation of war seems a particularly modern and Western moral perspective. Not all cultures seem to share it, and some ideologies such as fascism and communism have spoken frankly of the need for armed struggle and war against opponents. Moreover, many radical revolutionaries and terrorists argue that violence has a positive function of freeing a people from poverty, exploitation, racism, and enslavement.

Nonetheless, while the immorality of war may seem culturally and ideologically relative, making aggressive war is recognized by the world community as a crime against international law. This is defined by the Charter of the United Nations (Article 2) and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1929. After the Second World War high German and Japanese officials were tried for committing just this crime of launching aggressive war. But nations still wage war (both sides may argue they are defending themselves, which is permitted by the UN Charter) and were these to follow from declarations of war, they would kick in a different set of international laws, such as those governing the behavior of neutral nations toward the warring parties. Even if war is not declared, such conventions as the Geneva and Hague Conventions, among others, become relevant among the great majority of nations that have ratified them.

And genocide also is now recognized internationally as illegal according to the Convention on Genocide passed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. It has defined genocide as an international crime for those states that have ratified it (and possibly even under international law principles for those nations that have not). There may be some disagreement at the margins over what is genocide, but there is no disagreement that it is the greatest immorality to line people up at the edge of a trench and shoot them to death because they are Jews, Christians, Moslems, Armenians, or Gypsies. Since freedom would virtually eliminate this greatest of evils, then in these terms freedom is morally good.

There are other kinds of murder by governments than genocide that are international crimes according to treaties signed by an overwhelming number of nations, such as shooting prisoners of war, selecting people at random and hanging them in retaliation for sabotage, or bombing enemy civilians indiscriminately. For example, the UN Security Council has set up an International Tribunal for the prosecution of persons in the former territory of Yugoslavia who since 1991 are responsible for "Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law." This prosecution will not only be for willful killing that violates the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Protocols, but also for the violations of the "Laws and Customs of War," such as bombarding or attacking undefended towns (which would be democide), and "Crimes Against Humanity," such as murder and extermination (also democide). Again, such democide that is immoral is also illegal according to international law, and is virtually eliminated by freedom. Therefore, is not freedom even more a moral good?

Still, life is a balancing of many evils. This is why the same people who bitterly opposed the killing in the Vietnam War, such as the American columnist Anthony Lewis, could justify strong military intervention in Bosnia. And to some the good that freedom does in minimizing the immorality of democide may be balanced by the bad they see it cause by the loss of a state religion or loved authoritarian monarch, or the promotion of poverty and exploitation.

Let me try another tack. As pointed out in chapter 2, democratic freedom means also the existence of a free or partially free economy (as in the social democracies of Europe, like Sweden and Denmark). Can we move beyond the wealth and prosperity created by a free market, which are utilitarian virtues of the market, to establishing a free market itself as inherently moral? This is a controversial question, to say the least. It actually lies at the root of much radical and even revolutionary thought today. Many of these people see the free market as exploitive of the poor and disadvantaged, as a market place of greed and the fast buck, as the antithesis of caring for others and the community. It would be an oxymoron to these people to claim the free market is moral.

The profit motive is generally believed to be the sine qua non of the market. It is seen to be driven wholly by the desire for personal profit, even by its strongest supporters. This not only is to give ammunition to the enemies of the market, but to mischaracterize it altogether by what is an aspect and not the central psychological dynamic of the market.

Imagine this utopia. In it people are highly motivated to provide services and satisfaction to others, virtually all of whom are perfect strangers, and see it in their own self-interest to do so. Many of these people even go beyond this, spending fifty and sixty hours a week trying to provide such services. Also imagine, incredible as it may seem, that there are many people in this utopia that spend their life savings or borrow huge sums of money to discover or provide new things that people might want. That is, in this society the chief orientation of people, something to which they may at first sacrifice virtually all their time and resources, is to satisfy the wants of others or to discover how this might be done with the least expense to those getting the services or goods. Such an unbelievable other-directed society certainly does seem utopian. But if we could have such a society, would it not be inherently moral. Is not this the utopian dream of many communitarians, philosophers, and theologians? For people to spent the time, energy, and resources to provide people with what they need and want? Of course it is, at least in the view of many cultures.

And this is what the free market does. The free market is made up of professionals (lawyers, doctors, teachers), intellectuals (writers, authors, journalists), and businesses that fulfill some need or want. Consider the automobile repair shop, the computer discount house, the Italian restaurant, the Chinese laundry, the small Catholic college, the mom and pop grocery store, and so on and on. All exist to give people a particular service, and if this is actually not much wanted or the business charges too high a price, then it goes bankrupt. Moreover, entrepreneurs are constantly trying to invent new businesses or services that will fill some need or want not yet recognized by others. Thus we now have coming into operation used computer stores, sushi restaurants, and shoppers for hire. If in fact no such want exists or the satisfaction of the want is not worth the cost, the businesses fail. Surely such working and striving to satisfy others is highly desirable and moral.

Still, then, many say that the free market is inherently immoral because of the inequality it breeds. As a result of the market there are the very rich and the very poor, and this is wrong, regardless of the market's other directedness. This is seen to be wrong even if, as can be shown, the market has also been a mechanism for reducing such gross inequality. In addition, some will be unhappy that in the market people strive to help others for personal gain, because of the profit they might receive. This is not really moral as a result, they will argue. It is only moral if people work selflessly. Finally, there will still be some who say "so what?" The free market is not the rule of God put forth in some holy book. Even if in the market people do service for others, their thoughts are not clean, their spirit has not been disciplined, or they are not obedient to the holy law.

So far we have gone some distance in establishing that freedom is moral. It eliminates the evil of war. It minimizes other political violence. It virtually ends democide, the greatest evil of all. And it creates an other directed, service oriented market system. But we cannot yet universalize this, for there are still people and cultures that have a moral code that would either reject these virtues of freedom or claim they are irrelevant. So let me try the human rights approach, and, because of its importance to democratization, elaborate on this in some detail.

A human right is that due a person or claim a person has by virtue of being a human being. And can we not argue that all human beings are born equal, that no human life at birth is inherently better or worse than any other? If this be so, then should we not all be equal under the law and be free to speak our minds, pick our religion, and join other groups of our choosing, only limited by the like freedom of others? To say no to this is to assume that certain people for some reason are better than or should have more freedom of choice than others. But few have been willing to do this publicly. There is now wide international agreement on these rights and they have been written into international documents.

The term human rights is relatively recent. It was first used by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a 1941 message to the United States' Congress in which he propounded four freedoms- - -freedoms of speech and religion, and freedoms from want and fear. The idea of human rights is an elaboration of what used to be called natural rights or the rights of man.

These are a particularly Western idea that grew out of the medieval concern for the rights of specific groups, such as lords, barons, churchmen, kings, guilds, or towns. With the Enlightenment, philosophers began to consider whether people in general had any rights. John Locke in particular argued in his influential second Treatise of Government (1690) that all people have a natural right to freedom, equality, and property. He directly influenced the American Declaration of Independence, which almost a century later (1776) declared that "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." During the French Revolution the French National Assembly approved the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), which proclaimed that the end of political association is the preservation of the natural and inalienable rights of man, of liberty, private property, personal security, and resistance to oppression.

Such rights were further defined in The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States, among them the freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. These and other rights have been included in many other constitutions and now, but without the same enforcement in law, they have become part of an International Bill of Rights. This comprises the 1945 United Nations Charter (Articles 1 and 55), the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN General Assembly, and the two international covenants drafted by the UN and open to ratification in 1966. One is on Civil and Political Rights and the other on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. There is now a UN Human Rights Commission that can investigate (among nations consenting to its jurisdiction) alleged violations of human rights and also receive and consider individual complaints. This is a momentous advance for human rights in the state-centered international system, even though their acceptance is still voluntary. And there is the multilateral Helsinki process that began with the Helsinki Accord of 1975, with its Basket Three on human rights, and its periodic meetings to assess the progress of human rights among the signatories.

In addition, human rights have been pursued in several regions. To mention just some of this activity, the Council of Europe adopted the European Convention on Human Rights and Europe now has the European Court of Human Rights and the European Commission on Human Rights. The Organization of American States also adopted the American Declaration on Human Rights and, further, the American states have created the Inter-American Convention and Court on Human Rights (with jurisdiction subject to member state acceptance). And due to the Organization for African Unity there is now the African Charter of Human and People's Rights. Moreover, there have been numerous formal conferences among states and interested international government organizations on human rights, the latest being the World Conference on Human Rights among 183 nations in Vienna during June 1993.

Human rights have also been the concern of numerous private organizations that have sought to further define and extend human rights (such as to a clean environment), observe their implementation among governments, publicize violations by governments (as of the right against torture and summary execution), or pressure governments to cease their violations. Some of the many such organizations include the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Anti-Slavery Society, Amnesty International, the International League for Human Rights, and the International Commission of Jurists.

In sum, human rights now are very much a part of international relations and law. They define fundamental moral canons for criticizing international and national conditions and behavior. As such they are imbedded in the practice of nations and treaty prescriptions. Many states now even include human rights monitors or representatives within their foreign ministries. For example, the United States Department of State has a Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs run by an Assistant Secretary.

States have even bound themselves to moderating their warfare to preserve certain human rights, as precisely defined in their treaties, particularly the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their 1977 Additional Protocols. And under international law there is now a fundamental core of human rights for which there is universal jurisdiction and that no state can violate without risking mandated sanctions by other states. Piracy, slavery, and genocide, are examples of violations of these rights.

Along with all this activity on human rights the number of such rights has multiplied in the last half-century. There are at least forty human rights listed in the basic Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Civil and Political Rights, and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, and in other international documents on human rights, and even these human rights have been further extended, as for the right to development that was declared "an inalienable human right" by the UN General Assembly in 1982. But as with most international rights, their declaration is only hortatory and does not establish any legal right. The universally core of these declarative rights are those that protect the individual against the state. We can list these from those stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These include the rights

* to life, liberty, security of the person, recognition as a person before the law, equal protection of the law, remedy for violation of rights, fair and public trial, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty if charged with a penal offense, leave any country and return, seek asylum from persecution, nationality, marriage, property, the secret ballot and periodic elections, freely chosen representatives, form and join trade unions, equal access to public service, and participation in cultural life;

* to freedom of movement and residence, thought, conscience and religion, opinion and expression, peaceful assembly and association, and of parents to choose their children's education;

* and to freedom from slavery or servitude, torture, degrading or inhuman treatment or punishment, arbitrary arrest or detention or exile, arbitrary interference with privacy or family or home or correspondence, deprivation of nationality, arbitrary deprivation of property, and being compelled to join an association.

In effect, these rights define what we mean by democratic freedom. Freedom of thought, expression, religion, association, are basic, as are the secret ballot, periodic elections, and the right to representation. That they have become part of an international document, that authoritarian regimes and dictatorships feel compelled to support such documents even though they do not grant such rights to their own people, shows the sheer power and legitimacy of these rights. That is, freedom is an internationally, cross-culturally, certified international right.

But we might still ask why a right is a right, and why these in particular. Philosophers have argued much about this question, especially in terms of natural rights. In its original meaning, a natural right was one that commended itself to reason. It was one that reasonable people for good reasons could agree on as a right of all people. For example, the right to life and equal freedom were two of the original natural rights that presumably fit this definition. But reasonable people often disagree on fundamentals and there consequently has been various attempts to find less apparently subjective grounds for natural or human rights. Such is the appeal to utility-people have only those rights that maximize the happiness of the greatest number of people and minimize their pain. This in fact may be the underlying justification for the acceptance of many of the rights listed above.

Another justification is that there is one core natural right that is self-evident, which is that of each individual to equal freedom, and that any other right must be a derivation or specialization of this right, as are the freedoms of religion, assembly, and speech. Otherwise what is alleged to be a natural or human right is only a human want or need, and other justification must be found to satisfy it.

Finally, there is the positivists' justification by the behavior and practices of states, including the international agreements on human rights. These, it is said, are what rights the world community has agreed to in their international deliberative assemblies, organizations, and treaties. And, therefore, they describe the multicultural, multinational consensus as to what rights human beings as human beings are entitled and may justly claim.

Besides justification there is the question of whether these rights are absolute, this is so fundamental as rights that they should not be abridged ever. This used to be a question raised with regard to basic civil rights such as that of the freedom of religion, and the answer was that no right could be absolute. One reason is that in concrete situations rights may contradict each other (as when one person's freedom of speech dictates the limitation of another's freedom of religion). Another reason is that even those which are considered to be the most important rights will have to be circumscribed to promote a just social order. For example, even in the United States with its Bill of Rights and Supreme Court, where jurists like Justice Hugo Black have proclaimed that freedom of speech is absolute, a person is not legally free to publish a defamation of the character or reputation of a non-public person.

In any case, this question assumes that all human rights already have a legal status in international and municipal laws. Some do, such as certain political and civil rights in democratic constitutions, but internationally these and the other human rights collectively are not what may be presently demanded of a state such that their denial enables legal or international action to be taken against a government. Rather, together, they are goals of state and international behavior. This is made clear in the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, which proclaims the document "as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society . . . shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance . ."

Most importantly, although freedom is thus an internationally recognized right, some governments consider other rights more basic and their satisfaction taking precedence. Even though the UN General Assembly resolved in 1977 that all human rights and fundamental freedoms are "inalienable and indivisible" and that all should be given "equal attention," the question of precedence has caused much international debate on human rights. Usually the democracies, and in particular Western countries, have argued that civil and political rights must take precedence, that without such rights as to the ballot and freely elected representatives, and the freedom of religion, speech, and assembly, no one can be secure in any social, economic, or cultural rights. On the other side, many of the leaders of nondemocratic and less economically developed states argue that this should be the other way around, that the drive to achieve economic development, a fair standard of living, social security, and other such internationally specified rights, initially precludes certain civil and political rights. Some of these leaders even go further and argue that Western nations have pursued a kind of cultural imperialism by interfering in their internal affairs-such as by tying economic aid to human rights progress-and trying to impose on them alien, inappropriate, or untimely human rights. Their human rights progress, they argue, should be judged within their own cultural context by their own "particularities."

This debate is implicitly about the means for achieving certain social, economic, and cultural rights. Those subscribing to the Western tradition of freedom see civil and political rights, what is ordinarily called liberal democratic freedoms, as not only rights in themselves, but also as means for achieving other rights, such as that to development, social security, employment, a reasonable standard of living, and the like. That is, when a people are free under a limited constitutional government, they argue that a free social and economic market naturally follows, and this will create the wealth and diversity to automatically secure social and economic human rights, such as to development and employment, as I have argued. The opposing position is that government must be fully involved in the economy and society through government ownership and control and intervention to achieve social, economic, and cultural rights. The main international human rights debate then reduces to the empirical question regarding the best route to social, economic, and cultural development, and human happiness and satisfaction. This is then a debate along two traditional dimensions, that between democrats and authoritarians, and that between individualists and socialists.

This debate notwithstanding, the international community has established certain rights as so basic that there is virtually no nation today dissenting in public from them. In practice they are not goals or are they to be held in abeyance while achieving other rights. They now exist for all people. Such is the right to be free from piracy, racism, torture, summary executions, slavery, starvation, and genocide. Even the foremost proponents of cultural relativism do not argue that nations or people should be free to violate these rights. They thus form a universal core of existing international human rights, and, I argue, legitimate by themselves the freedom that virtually eliminates these evils and that of war and other forms of violence. As Article 55 of the UN Charter reads: "With a view to the creation of conditions of stability and well-being which are necessary for peaceful and friendly relations among nations, . . . the UN shall promote . . . universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion."

All this not withstanding, some may still argue that freedom as a moral idea cannot be universalized anymore than Islam or Catholicism can. I still have one more arrow in my quiver, however. One basic Western justification for human rights, and particularly those defining what we mean by freedom, is that of the social contract. That is, these are the rights that in the state of nature all people, contracting to form a common government for their welfare, would impartially agree upon. A variant of this is to ask the question of all people as to what rights they would want to be guaranteed if they were completely free to recreate their society and state, while ignorant of their original position or status in it. Those rights theoretically agreed upon would then define what ought to be our human rights.

I will use this social contract approach to more fully explore whether people would in general, regardless of their religion, ideology, or culture, agree on universal democratic freedoms. To determine this I must set up certain conditions such that whatever would be agreed upon would constitute moral and just principles of governance, that is, what they would see as universal social justice.

First, we require that nearly all people agree upon these principles. Second, we require that all are blind to their own interests (as the female statue of justice that holds the scale of justice in her hand is blindfolded so that she can judge without attention to whether the defendant is fat or thin, rich or poor, man or women, black or white), such that the choice of principles is truly objective and fair. Third, we require that whatever the principles agreed upon, they are universal, they apply to all. And finally, we require that the principles be practical, they can be put into operation. There is also a requirement that does not define whether the outcome is just, but does give importance to the result: that the people must be highly motivated to seek, propose, and consider such principles. It is easy enough to say that one would like to be governed under the socialist principle, that from each according to his ability and to each according to his need, but is it a principle that virtually all people will passionately subscribe to, even at the risk of death? If so, and the principle also meets the other requirements, then it is truly a basic and just principle of governance.

To set up the necessary conditions, suppose that all people were suddenly to hear in their heads a message sent telepathically from space by alien galactic conservationists. They announce that they were sent to save the human species from extermination because the earth will be passing through a warp storm in two years and the resulting radiation will kill all life on earth." Further, they say that they have found a hospitable planet without competing intelligent life and wish to transfer all human life to it. "However," they point out, "according to the rules of our galactic federation, such a transfer of intelligent life can only be made if members of this species agree among themselves on the principles of government under which they will live. If a consensus is reached then the teleportation to the new world can be made. But you should understand that our technology for transferring alien life forms is not perfect and we cannot guarantee that minds and bodies can be kept together-some or many minds may end up in different bodies, but without physical harm." Finally, the message concludes, "We will telepathically set up a Convention of Minds in two of your months such that all of you will be able to propose the guiding principles of your new world, debate them, and vote upon them."

This hypothetical Convention of Minds and possible transfer to a new world meets the requirements set out. All will participate and the resulting principles, if they get a consensus vote, will be universal. Also, since people do not know what body their minds will end up in, they must make their judgments independent of their race, ethnicity, nationality, sex, age, handicaps, and other physical characteristics and abilities, as well as their wealth, power, and prestige. This assures objectivity. The fact that all will die unless they can find agreement provides the important push towards some universal solution.

Imagine, now, that the Convention of Minds is convened, proposals are made, and the debate begins. What will the patterns of these proposals be? Of course, they will reflect a variety of ideologies, religions, and cultures. Democratic individualists, democratic socialists, state socialists, fascists, and still believing Marxists and Maoists, will offer their principles, as will Buddhists, Catholics and Protestants, Shiite and Sunni Moslems, Confucians, and a variety of pantheists. And surely a variety of secular humanists, nonpolitical atheists, advocates of nonviolence, and many, many others will make their views known.

Could they all agree on one set of principles? I do not believe so, and simulations of this convention that I have set up in my classes over the years have all confirmed this. Even with death of our species as the inevitable result, the world's people would be unable to agree on one set of principles that all should follow. One has to understand that the many principles that people from different cultures and with different ideologies, religions, and philosophies hold to are held so deeply, in many cases so fanatically, that they are willing to die for them. Thus we get suicide bombers, terrorist attacks, guerrilla wars, violent revolutions, and the many people who volunteer to fight and possibly die in wars. To therefore expect a practicing Catholic to accept that all should live under a Moslem's principles of governance or a liberal democrat to similarly except Marxist principles is absurd. I say, flatly, the Convention of Minds would achieve no substantive agreement.

But there is still a solution. For, like a watermelon seed squeezed between two fingers, the prospect of personal death and that of the species would force the debate out of this substantive arena into another. The debate at first would be over what principles all would have to follow. If they were, for example, the libertarian principles of minimal government, free market, and civil and political rights, they would have to be the principles operating universally. Not only would this be the principle of the new world government, but since they would be the just principle all agreed upon, they would also apply to regional and local governments. There is, however, another kind of solution, a metajustice principle rather than a substantive one. This surely would be proposed in the Convention and to it even the fanatics of one principle or another would have to agree. It would follow the well known argument: "Well, if we can't agree, lets agree to disagree and do our own thing." That is, the final solution would be, I argue, two simple principles. One, a free choice principle, is that people would be free to form communities governed as they see fit. And two, a free exit principle, is that people would be free to leave any community. Thus, although the world would not be governed by any of the substantive principles of justice proposed, people would be free to organize themselves and live under their own substantive principles as long as they did not force them on others.

Of course, there would have to be consideration given to enforcing these two principles and protecting communities from aggression by their neighbors. For this purpose, I believe the Convention would agree to set up a very limited democratic federation. Members of each potential community would want a vote. Those seeing their community as being among the largest would want to protect themselves against rule by a majority of tiny communities and, thus, would argue for a second legislative chamber of the world federation that would give each community votes proportionate to its population. Moreover, even the most confirmed authoritarians would settle for some mechanism to check the power of this world government so that it could not unduly intervene in the affairs of their community. These would comprise the constitutional principles.

Finally, if a vote of all people in the world were to be taken on the two just principles of free choice and free exit, along with the limited democratic government to implement and secure them, I believe they would be overwhelmingly adopted.

The Free Choice and Free Exit principles along with their supporting constitutional principles outline at the global level for communities procedural freedom, what often is called procedural democracy. That is, people are free to be unfree. And this is part of what democratic freedom means. Freedom does not mean that people have to be free. They can join a group in which such freedom is strictly circumscribed, as in the military or a monastery. Freedom of religion does not mean that one cannot form a group in which only one religion is seen as legitimate and those with other religions are kept out as in a Catholic nunnery. And, although living under democratic principles, one usually is able to support and participate in antidemocratic political parties and movements. The communist party is legal in the Unites States and in most democracies. Democratic freedom is a procedural solution to a diversity of ideas, religions, and principles. When there is conflict over issues and principles for the greater society, those should be resolved by democratic methods. And in order to do this, these general freedoms are necessary.

Now this moral justification for freedom was determined abstractly through a bizarre science fiction tale. Is there any more direct and real basis for accepting it? The answer is yes, from the evolution of the general world principles that already govern us.

Throughout the many centuries of world history, through the growth and collapse of civilizations and empires, through the many wars and revolutions, and through the growth and decay of religions and ideologies, has evolved a system of world governance that is based, in effect, on these two principles. Consider that the most fundamental principle underlying the modern nation-state system is that of state sovereignty, to wit, the self determination of a people. This is a principle that legally allows a community to govern itself in any way it sees fit. Although, by agreement, central international restrictions have been placed on this sovereignty, as to the right to carry out genocide or slavery (restrictions that undoubtedly would have been placed on the free choice principle in the Convention of Minds), nation-states remain virtually free to govern themselves.

Second, the right to immigration and particularly political asylum has become a norm of international relations. This is, in effect, the free exit principle.

Note also that the United Nations has become a global, democratic federal government that in its operation meets the constitutional principles required to guarantee and administer the two just principles. The major difference is that the UN does not monopolize force, and, therefore, must be dependent on contributions from member states to use force, as in peacekeeping operations. In no way could the UN militarily oppose even a middle-range power. However, this is changing and, clearly, the UN is evolving toward a more powerful and capable world body.

Thus we find that in our very evolution as a species, we have slowly adjusted to our different groups, societies, cultures, and environments by developing the basic just principles. We have practically institutionalized for the world society the Free Choice and Free Exit principles of the Convention of Minds; that is-the freedom to be free or unfree.

There is one more supporting argument. Even though the Jews were being increasingly discriminated against by the Nazi government in the late 1930s and incarcerated in concentration camps, while they had the legal right to immigrate many Jewish families still decided to remain in Germany. Here was where they and their forefathers had been born, where they had their friends and relatives. They could not easily just pull up their roots and leave, and there were many knowledgeable Jews arguing that the Nazi regime would change for the better or that at least things would get no worse. But taking no chances with their children, many decided to send them abroad. Thus came the question. In what country would they have the greatest opportunity, regardless of their potential, the skills they would develop, or in what they would come to believe? And generally what was chosen was a country democratically free, such as Great Britain, France, or the United States. That such a choice was made under these circumstances is not unlike the choice made by those in the Convention of Minds.

So we find that not only this Convention, but also human evolution and individual choices in similar circumstances to the Convention define procedural freedom as globally just. Since procedural freedom resolves a great diversity in values and beliefs, it also should be promoted at the community level. If socially just for all, then would it not be just locally so that a people would be free to choose their own governance rather than having it imposed on them? After all, the free choice principle means that people are free to choose their own government, to choose the principles they would live under. This is the essence of freedom. But in much of the world people have not been given the chance to make that choice. The argument here is that morally they should have that choice, even if, in the end, they choose to be unfree.

To pull together all the arguments, to foster freedom is to promote social justice through the eradication of the evil of war and the minimization of other political violence, the near elimination of genocide and government mass murder, and the creation of an other directed and service directed free market. Moreover, procedural freedom, which is that which this book has focused on, is what all people would objectively select as their own universal governing principles given the opportunity and blinded to their own self-interests. All this argues that freedom promotes social justice. It is not only the practical and utilitarian solution to solving our major problems of war, violence, democide, and poverty, but it is a moral solution.

Chapter 8

An Enlightened Foreign Policy

But, relevantly here, in the last years of the Bush Administration high officials were making comments clearly showing that they appreciated the relationship between democracy, international cooperation, and peace, and had made promoting democracy an operating principle. For example, Secretary of State James Baker pointed out in 1992 that The Cold War has ended, and we now have a chance to forge a democratic peace, an enduring peace built on shared values-democracy and political and economic freedom. The strength of these values in Russia and the other new independent states will be the surest foundation for peace-and the strongest guarantee of our national security-for decades to come. There was thus a variety of American attempts to help democratization in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and especially in born again Russia. President Bush clearly linked aid for Russia to democratic peace:

A victory for democracy and freedom in the former USSR creates the possibility of a new world of peace for our children and grandchildren, but if this democratic revolution is defeated, it could plunge us into a world more dangerous in some respects than the dark years of the Cold War . . . This effort will require new resources from the industrial democracies, but nothing like the price we would pay if democracy and reform failed....

Still the Bush Administration articulated no overall strategy within which these ideas could be given more than an ad hoc life. And perhaps it is unfair to demand one, for, after all, this was the Administration that saw and indeed was partially responsible for negotiating the end of the Cold War. Clearly, however, the Bush Administration was moving toward a general policy of democratization and might well have articulated one if they had won a second term. But it was left to their successor, President William Clinton, to finally conceptualize such a policy.

From day one the Clinton Administration had a firm foreign policy goal of democratization-to help other nations become democratic and to help solidify the newly democratic ones. The reason was clear. They saw democracy as a way to peace and greater international cooperation. The President himself had stated that democracies do not make war on each other. In one of his campaign speeches during the 1992 election campaign he pointed out that "Democratic countries do not go to war with one another. They don't sponsor terrorism or threaten one another with weapons of mass destruction." As President he expanded on this when in his 1994 address to the UN General Assembly he said that "Democracies, after all, are more likely to be stable, less likely to wage war. They strengthen civil society. They can provide people with the economic and political opportunities to build their futures in their own homes, not to flee their borders." And he made the foreign policy consequence of this view plain in his 1994 State of the Union address:

"the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere."

This idea has become a basic foreign policy principle of the Clinton Administration shared by virtually all top officials. In foreign policy speech after speech the basic understanding that democracies do not make war on each other is reiterated and the cooperative nature of democracies underlined. In the words of Secretary of State Warren Christopher published in the U.S. Department of State Dispatch, Democracies do not threaten their neighbors. They do not practice terrorism. They do not spawn refugees. They respond to the needs of their citizens and thereby achieve greater stability and prosperity for all. From this belief has flowed a policy of democratization, what the administration calls a guiding concept of (democratic) enlargement.

Moreover, this overall foreign policy goal is being implemented through a variety of organizations, many of which were specifically created during the Cold War to further democracy and some of which have changed their fundamental policies to put democratization front and center. Such has been the Agency for International Development (AID), which now has as its strategic objective the creation, stabilization, and deepening of democracy. It is doing this through a systematic program of promoting the free market, experience and understanding of democratic institutions, civil society, political parties, the enfranchisement of women and minorities, the creation and implementation of constitutions and civil rights, the rule of law, and fair elections. Just in fiscal year 1994 AID is spending about $400 million to foster democratization and to assist new and shaky democracies.

Similarly the US Information Agency is engaged in a number of activities to build democratic institutions. The Endowment for Democracy, created under the Reagan Administration, has been engaged in the same efforts. And so have a number of private groups, such as the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute of International Affairs, the Center for International Private Enterprise, and the Free Trade Union Institute.

Nor are such efforts limited to the United States. A number of countries, such as Great Britain, Germany, and Japan are officially involved in democratization, and private and quasi-private groups within these countries and others are also pursuing similar programs. Such, for example, are the German Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Hans Seidel Foundation, Friedrich Naumann Foundation, and Friedrich Ebert Foundation; the Westminster Foundation in Britain; and the Canadian International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development.

And there are many international institutions and agencies similarly involved. The most important of these is the United Nations, which established as its major priority the pursuit of human rights and democratization. In June, 1992, the former Secretary General of the United Nations laid out his "An Agenda of Peace" before the General Assembly. There is a new requirement for technical assistance which the United Nations has an obligation to develop and provide when requested: support for the transformation of deficient national structures and capabilities, and for the strengthening of new democratic institutions. The authority of the United Nations system to act in this field would rest on the consensus that social peace is as important as strategic or political peace. There is an obvious connection between democratic practices-such as the rule of law and transparency in decision-making-and the achievement of true peace and security in any new and stable political order. These elements of good governance need to be promoted at all levels of international and national political communities. The United Nations has thus helped to certify the fairness of elections and toward this end has set up an Electoral Assistance Unit. It has tried to help with transitions to democracy, as in its largest ever effort in Cambodia that ultimately involved 16,000 military personnel, over 6,000 civilian officials and police, and 2 billion dollars.

Not only the United Nations but the European Union, NATO, and the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) are directly engaged in democratization efforts, as are such regional organizations as the Organization of American States (OAS), which proclaims that "representative democracy is an indispensable condition for stability, peace and development of the region." This has gone beyond rhetoric. In 1991 the OAS adopted a resolution requiring that upon the fall of a democratic government in Latin American there be an acceptance of "procedures to ensure the promotion and defense of representative democracy."

In general, then, what is the United States and other democracies and international organizations doing to foster democracy? They are giving economic aid, of course, but of no less importance they are providing help to establish sound constitutions and the rule of law; improving civil-military relationships, especially the subordination of the military to elected civilian authorities; strengthening and democratizing local governments; giving decision and rule making and material aid like computers to elected legislatures; furthering an independent and neutral judiciary and politically neutral police; improving the fairness, openness, credibility and effectiveness of elections; fostering civil and political rights and the rights of women and minorities; encouraging independent labor unions, professional associations, educational institutions and the like; improving the independence and responsibility of the media; advancing a competitive, aggregative and stable political party system; advance governmental accountability and responsiveness at central and local levels; assisting educational efforts for adults and children, particularly with regard to the nature of democracy and democratic tolerance; and nurturing trust in democratic officials and institutions.

All this is impressive and would seem to leave little to add. Is not the miracle that is freedom already recognized and this understanding fully transformed into foreign policy? No, it is not yet what it could and should be. And to see why this is so I will need to more fully describe Clinton's foreign policy. As required by Section 603 of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, in July 1994 President Clinton submitted his report elaborating A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement. This not only lays out his new national security strategy but also his foreign policy. In the signed preface the President defines the central goals of this strategy:

* To credibly sustain our security with military forces that are ready to fight.

* To bolster America's economic revitalization.

* To promote democracy abroad.

He believes that our goals of enhancing our security, bolstering our economic prosperity, and promoting democracy are mutually supportive. Secure nations are more likely to support free trade and maintain democratic structures. Nations with growing economies and strong trade ties are more likely to feel secure and to work toward freedom. And democratic states are less likely to threaten our interests and more likely to cooperate with the U.S. to meet security threats and promote sustainable development.

The body of the report spells out what the central goals mean operationally. The strategy of enlargement means working with other democracies toward this end, emphasizing those regions and countries that create the strongest security concerns for the United States and those where American involvement can make the greatest difference. Obviously, Russia is number one on this list. But, also, of great importance are Central and Eastern Europe, Asia and the Pacific, our Hemisphere, and Nigeria and South Africa in Africa (since what happens in these two countries can influence the rest of Africa).

The creating and strengthening of democracy is to be done by American leadership in mobilizing world resources toward this end; by publicly opposing the overthrow of democratic governments (as the U.S. did with regard to Haiti, Guatemala, and Nigeria); by integrating democracies into foreign markets (as was done with the North American Free Trade Agreement and General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs); and by strengthening the civil society-the groups independent of government. Moreover, the U.S. will emphasize strengthening civil rights around the world. In this and democratization the U.S. will use what is called diplomacy multipliers, the power of private groups such as unions, businesses, and human rights and environmental groups to help in this effort. Finally, this approach will be integrated with regional approaches, such as that of NATO and its Partnership for Peace that so far has signed up twenty-one nations, including Russia.

From all this it certainly seems that the Clinton Administration has taken the miracle that is freedom to heart and that government and non-government efforts are strongly at work on democratization. What more is there to add?

In answering this we must recognize at the outset that foreign policy cannot be wholly driven by slogans and abstract principles. Whatever the policies, they must be attuned to recent and current wars, such as those in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, Armenia-Azerbaijan, Sudan, Rwanda, Yemen, Cambodia and elsewhere. They must recognize crises, as over North Korea developing nuclear weapons, the huge influx of Haitian refugees to Florida fleeing terroristic military rule, the subsequent mass influx of Cuban refugees, and Iraq's movement of major military forces toward the Kuwait border, and manage them on a day-by-day basis within the relevant context. They must deal with economic problems, threats to American citizens abroad, the interests of American foreign investors and businesses and a multitude of other interests, demands, problems, and threats. For this reason some foreign policy practitioners eschew the idea of foreign policy theory and grand designs altogether, believing that the best and wisest we can do is meet the problems as they come in terms of our knowledge and experience with foreign affairs.

But we can discriminate between the grand strategic foreign policies, like that of containing Soviet power during the Cold War, and foreign policy tactics and ad hoc procedures. The first lays the fundamental thrust of policy, what overall we are trying to achieve and the tactics we use to achieve it that take into account local threats, problems, or opportunities. Tactics are local in time and space; strategy is global and attuned to a distant future. Of course, the world fits no model or principles well, and regardless of what a nation's strategy and tactics are, to new and odd events one can only respond as they develop. The strategy I will offer should be looked at as a vector of action. It is like a sailboat trying to reach a certain port. The goal is to get to Honolulu from Los Angeles. The strategy is to do this by the maximum use of wind and currents. The tactics involve knowing when to tack one way or another depending on the direction of the wind and currents and the deployment of one's sails to make maximum use of the wind's power. That is sailmenship. In foreign policy we call it statesmanship.

This having been said and recognizing the complexity of foreign policy and its inherent dangers in much of the world, of the possibility of violence and limited war, a foreign policy that recognizes the great utility and morality of freedom would have the two primary components: promoting democracy and anticipating threats to our national security.

In this new post Cold War world it is morally appropriate and historically and politically wise to put front and center the strategy of democratization. This would frame all other foreign policy concerns in terms of how well they promote democratization in other countries and support or enhance existing democracies (the justification of this is straight forward and given by the previous chapters in this book).

But what about Clinton's stated foreign policy of bolstering economic prosperity at home? Would not a more prosperous United States better enable us to employ resources toward democratization. Of course, but this is not a foreign policy strategy, tactic, or goal. The question of how and in what manner we make the United States more prosperous is a matter of domestic policy and deserves special attention of its own. Certainly all policies are interrelated and must work together. But, as one must separate for practical purposes what one does in the family from what one does at work, foreign policy must be concentrated upon as an especially important arena, for it concerns our vital national interests and the ever present possibility of war.

And surely, therefore, we must anticipate threats to our national security and respond to them whatever they may be. Is not this as important as democratization, if not more so? But how do we anticipate these threats and gauge both the required diplomacy and military capability? We conventionally do this by judging nations and their leaders along two dimensions. One is their capability to militarily effect our interests, as did Iraq in invading and taking over oil rich Kuwait. As difficult as it is to judge the military and related capabilities of another nation, we can discriminate, say, between the military threat to us of Peru versus that of China, or between that of Russia and Saudi Arabia.

The second dimension is the more important one. This is to judge the actual and potential threat of other nations by the intentions of their leaders. What are the likely policies of those who have the capability to threaten us? Are they antagonistic to us? Will they use their power to attack our interests? Indeed, will they endanger our security? Judging intentions is critical and because of this there is a whole government industry of analysts inside and outside of the intelligence services that are concerned with this and there is a major academic field, called strategic studies, in which this is one of its foci.

Intentions enter into virtually every level of strategic policy and our responses. When the Soviet Union existed and had a dangerous stockpile of nuclear weapons, we not only needed to determine the capability of these deadly weapons but we had to weigh whether the Soviets were intending to develop more and deadlier ones; whether they were planning a surprise attack to destroy our weapons; whether they were intending to invade Europe or provoke a war with China; or whether they were sincerely interested in arms control, the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente, and in lessening tensions.

An assessment of intentions is no less central to foreign policy. What are the intentions of Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia? Although much reduced, the nuclear stockpile at his or at his military's disposal can still destroy the United States. What about the intentions of his military-are they thinking of a coup against him and establishing an aggressive, fascist government? And does the Yeltsin government intend to establish a new Russian hegemony over its neighbors, such as the Baltic states, Georgia, Armenia, etc.? Were this so it would have grave consequences for our relations with Russia and possibly lead to severe crisis between us. And then there is North Korea, a country led, until his death a few years ago, by the same leader that invaded South Korea in 1950 and who continually threatened the South with frequent border incursions, secret tunnels under the demilitarized zone for the passage of troops into the South, attempts to assassinate its president and bombing out of the air one of its passenger planes. Did Kim Il-sung, and with his death, does his ruling son Kim Jong-Il, plan to develop nuclear weapons? If so, what does he plan to do with them? If he does intend to develop nuclear weapons, should we not take action of some sort to prevent this proven and outspoken aggressor regime, which has likely murdered over a million people, from having these incredibly destructive weapons? Then there is the puzzle of Bosnia. What is the intention of the head of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, or of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic? Milosevic, doubtlessly, had been providing the major military equipment for the Bosnian Serbs to fight and defeat the Bosnian Muslims and carry out their ethnic cleansing. Is his end game to unite the conquered territories with Serbia? This would have serious implications, for these territories were part of an independent and sovereign Bosnia-Herzegovina which we and many European states diplomatically recognized. But, also, does Milosevic eventually intend to clean the Muslims out of Muslim Kosovo. If so, this might well mean war with Turkey and other Moslem states who could hardly allow such further aggression against their religious brothers.

And so on and on. Intentions, intentions, and intentions. Gauging these are at the heart of foreign and defense policy. Mistakes can be expensive, as in having to fight the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein just a few years after sending him considerable economic and military aid. Mistakes about intentions can also be nearly fatal, as happened when the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Neville Chamberlain, misjudged Hitler's intentions in signing the Munich agreement of 1938 gaving him part of Czechoslovakia. By misjudging Hitler's intentions, Britain started rearming late and thus came very near to losing the air war over Britain, which would likely have meant a successful cross channel invasion by Nazi forces. If Britain had fallen, which would have led back to just this misjudgment of intentions at Munich (which encouraged Hitler in his designs and strengthened the support of his military that otherwise might have deposed him), the Nazis probably would have consolidated control over Europe and succeeded in their invasion of the Soviet Union. To this day we might have to deal with a fascist Europe and the inheritors of the Nazi empire.

Now, whether another state is democratic or not bears directly on our assessment of its intentions. This is not sufficiently appreciated, but consider: Great Britain and France have dangerous nuclear stockpiles and the capability to deliver them. In the mid-1980s Great Britain had four nuclear submarines, each with sixteen Polaris missiles. Each missile carried three nuclear warheads equivalent to about 200 kilotons of TNT apiece (the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima was equivalent to 12-18 kilotons of TNT). The French had five nuclear submarines with a total of eighty nuclear missiles carrying sixty-four one megaton and ninety-six 150 kiloton warheads. Moreover, France had eighteen intermediate range ballistic missiles each with a range of about 2,200 miles and a 1.2 megaton nuclear warhead. Also France had some fifty-two nuclear capable Mirage tactical bombers to deliver her stockpile of 60 to 150 kiloton nuclear bombs. Therefore, Great Britain and France had and still now have the capability to launch a surprise attack on American cities and military installations, and although they cannot wipe out our nuclear capability or destroy the United States, the damage they could do would be the worst we have ever suffered in war-tens of millions of Americans could be killed.

And what is even more serious about this capability of Great Britain and France is that we have no defensive stance against them. We do not have submarines patrolling, aircraft circling, or even, to my knowledge, spy satellites in place to monitor their military activity in order to prevent such an attack or protect ourselves against it. Why? How can we allow this dangerous capability to exist without countermeasures?

The answer is simple. They are both democracies and we are not threatened nor do we feel threatened by fellow democracies. We recognize that they are like us, a free people with whom we will settle our differences by negotiation and concessions. We have utterly no expectation that they will attack us and know that they do not expect us to attack them . We are so confident about this that we not only leave ourselves wide open to attack from them, but we share secrets and military equipment with them. Great Britain's nuclear capability was largely due to what we had given them, sold them or transferred to them in exchange agreements.

It is interesting to note that somewhere along the line in theoretical work on foreign policy, the emphasis on intentions, so well known to the strategic analyst, got lost. The guiding rule of classical and modern foreign policy has been the balancing of power, that is creating an equilibrium of political and military forces such that potential aggressors would not find it in their best interests to risk war. The modus operandi of such policy has been that through economic and military aid, military alliances, executive agreements and under the table deals, a nation lines up a balance of other nations on its side. By means of public statements and the disposition of military forces, as with American "trip wire" forces in South Korea, a nation tries to communicate its will. Alliances, ready military power, clear communication and attention to credibility are the essentials of this game. This is the so called realist theory of international relations, the balancing of power as the basis of policy.

Intentions, of course, were not lost in this analysis. They were a central part of it. Everyone knew that Britain, Canada, Sweden, Norway, France and so on for a list of several dozen countries, did not threaten us, did not intend to make violence against us and there was no expectation of war between us. But what was has been lost in this, except to a few, is the explicit realization that these were all democracies and that no democracy was ever a threat to us or any other democracy. The realist theory of foreign policy simply does not take into account that democratically free nations are always with us, that they are always on our side of the balance. We now have a natural alliance among over a billion people, a zone of peace. It is the remaining part of the world against which this diplomatic game must be played.

What democracy means to foreign policy, then, is this. It vastly simplifies the central foreign policy equation. Who do we trust? Who is a danger? What do other nations intend to do? The answer is that we trust democracies, we have nothing to fear from them and we need not worry about their intentions. Moreover, they are our natural allies if danger or war threatens. If we expand the zone of democracies to all major powers, then to three-fourths of the world, and finally, hopefully, to nearly all the world, the national security problem so central to current foreign policy becomes less and less important until the question is no longer salient. For a fully democratic world would be one in which there is no longer a national security problem, in which, in fact, international war no longer happens and military forces are no longer necessary.

To aim for this world, to make such a world the utmost long run target of our foreign policy, should be our greatest goal and most important and central strategy. A policy of democratization is inherently the best strategy of national security.

Besides national security our foreign policy should also be one of cooperation with other nations on common problems like collective security, ethnic conflict, world health, the environment, and poverty. But here again there is no better way of strategically supporting this than to promote democracy. For democracies are naturally cooperative among themselves. They ally more among themselves than do other types of regimes and they are, as mentioned, naturally disposed to negotiate and conciliate conflicts. Moreover, as pointed out, democratic freedom promotes wealth and prosperity. By making democracy our highest foreign policy goal, we are not only pursuing our national security interest, but we are also promoting global prosperity and cooperation.

Now an overriding strategy of democratization does not mean that a concern with human rights is to be demoted. A foreign policy of democratization also must involve an emphasis on human rights. There should be no divorce between them, for the promotion of one is the promotion of the other. Here it is important to realize that democracy is not a threshold, that it is not true that the benefits of democracy can only be realized when a full blown democracy comes into existence. Rather, democracy is at one end of a scale of freedom versus power. At the other end is the totalitarian regime-Hitler's, Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's, and many others. As we encourage a regime to move along this scale toward the democratic end, the benefits of freedom increase. The more democratic and less totalitarian a regime, the less it engages in foreign and domestic violence, the less it murders its citizens, and wealthier it is.

This means that we should encourage human rights wherever possible and make them the benchmark for our cooperative activities with other nations and our aid to them. This should not be seen as simply imposing Western values or trying to make the rest of the world like us. It is rather making the world more peaceful and productive, it is both saving lives and promoting the good life for all. Now, how is the strategy of democratization to be implemented? In other words, what should be its tactics? Democracy can be promotes through four major policies: communication, organization and unification of public and private democratization efforts, facilitation of foreign direct investment, and international politics.

Very few Americans know that democracies do not make war on each other, even those actively interested in public policy. Outside of those doing research in this area, those professionally engaged in writing and research on national security and foreign policy and President Clinton's foreign policy team, there is a vast ignorance of the role that democracy now plays in our foreign policy and the factual basis for it. I have never read a newspaper article on this nor heard the discussion of this in any foreign policy forum. It has come up as an item in a foreign policy speech, but that is about all. Here is Clinton's foreign policy devoted to the "long-term goal is a world in which each of the major powers is democratic, with many other nations joining the community of market democracies as well," and all this is widely unknown. But even more unknown or unstated is the fact that democracy is even more powerful in restraining violence, since democracies have the least domestic political violence and democide.

The first policy of democratization, therefore, should be the clear communication of Clinton's policy in its factual and historical basis, including the fact that democracy is an overall method of nonviolence. This should be done through national speeches, press releases, press conferences and all the other communications means available to the President. It is not good enough to file documents with Congress laying out our policy. The president must use his bully pulpit to argue the case for promoting and strengthening democracy and the means by which this will done. This should help generate support and resources and warn dictators and those that may be planning anti-democratic coups that the United States is solidly behind democratic forces everywhere. Such open communication will also give heart and spirit to those working for democracy within and without such countries. Yes, this is a crusade but a nonviolent one devoted to the elimination of tyranny and the growth of freedom, peace, and prosperity. Has there been a better crusade than that to end slavery?

Second, as I tried to make clear in the beginning of this chapter, there is already considerable effort by international organizations, governments, and private groups to promote and solidify democracy around the world. But these efforts are largely ad hoc, often redundant and sometimes at cross-purposes. An effort must be made to coordinate all these efforts and to increase the resources available to them. This can be done through the creation of a national agency for democratization with the singular role of overseeing government efforts at democratization and coordinating these with those of private groups and international organizations. Additionally, the creation of a national foundation for democracy would further scholarly research on democratization, generate professional and international conferences on aspects of democratization and help provide the needed knowledge base for fostering democracy. In particular, this effort could help answer some important questions, such as how do we measure the progress of democratization, and what factors should be emphasized in promoting democracy? This agency would supplement the work of A.I.D. and the Endowment for Democracy that are more concerned with actually providing help to newly democratic or democratizing countries.

Third, the United States should focus on democratization the most powerful force now available-foreign direct investments (FDI). These are foreign investments that give investors some control over their assets. General Motors building a factory in Mexico to assemble automobiles for export is an example of this. By virtue of their sheer global volume (the world stock of FDI reached $1.5 trillion by 1990-). These investments are a huge resource to help in democratization. No public resources available for this can come close to those available through FDI.

Of prime importance is the transfer by FDI of technological know-how to the host country. It provides jobs. It trains indigenous people in the business. It helps nations develop their resources and human capital and create an efficient and diverse free market. And, very importantly, it furthers a civil society independent of government. Already, for some less developed nations, FDI is a significant part of their economy. For example, in 1986 FDI in Brazilian manufacturing constituted 34 percent of total sales of manufactured goods; it represented about 50 percent of total sales for the Philippines in 1987 and a huge 75 percent for Thailand in 1986. The importance of such investments is not only development, per se, but democratization. For it is clear that economic development has a positive effect on democratization and the stabilization of democracy.

However, most FDI goes to developed nations. In 1987, for example, the world total inflow of FDI to all nations was $188 billion, but only $25 billion went to developing ones. As for the newly democratic nations, they are poor. Most are suffering severe economic problems, and they are often politically unstable. For investors these conditions make them less attractive than stable developed nations. Understandably, investors will put their money where the most profit is possible with the least risk. Especially troublesome is the instability of too many new democracies, near democracies, or democratizing nations. Investors fear uncertainty, especially when a coup, a rebellion, or even the election of a radical group could mean the total loss of one's investment. Consider Mexico. In 1994, from January through most of October, the Mexican peso fell by 11 percent as investors fled the country. During March and April alone, $8 to $10 billion in portfolio investments (stocks and bonds) was taken out of Mexico. Much less fluid FDI followed as this uncertainty deepened. The simple reason for this flight was Mexico's apparent political instability. There was the assassinations of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donald Colosio and the ruling party's second-ranking official, the arrest of a gunman near the home of President-elect Ernesto Zedillo, the kidnapping of two billionaires and the insurgency in Chiapas. But those lost investments and particularly FDI were essential if the government's liberalization of the economy and democratization was to continue.

Of course profit is much more assured in developed and stable democracies like Canada, Great Britain, and Germany, but profit is also at a moderate level. It is in the new democracies or those liberalizing or democratizing, such as Mexico, Russia, and China that great profit potential exists. But to further entice investment in these nations foreign investors need to be given protection against political risks and the promise of sufficient profits.

Unfortunately no effective international organization exists to help educate and aid leaders of developing nations in structuring their laws and institutions or creating other inducements (such as a transportation infrastructure) to help attract FDI. Nor are there international institutions through which multilateral pressure or retaliation can be applied to nations that invalidate foreign contracts, impose price controls on foreign owned businesses, mandate their performance, limit their ownership or nationalize them. Of course, nations can do this bilaterally. For example, the United States did impose an economic boycott on Cuba for Castro's nationalization of all American owned firms and assets. But such retaliation is ad hoc, its application subject to political winds. Thus there is no general expectation by foreign investors that state action against their assets will be deterred. Some insurance against such risks does exist through the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency in the World Bank. There is also the investor help programs of the Foreign Investment Advisory Service. What is needed here, however, is an insurance and help program that targets countries for FDI in which the possibility of democracy seems high or in which a great infusion of foreign investment will help stabilize an existing democracy. This should be a multilateral effort of democracies through existing organizations, such as The World Bank, or through a new international organization. The aim is to provide risk and profit incentives for investments where they can best help democratization.

Of course, insurance is only one mechanism for this. One can also encourage such investments through special home government services and tax and subsidy advantages. Also favorable policies regarding convertibility of foreign exchange and remittance of earnings will promote investment. In the first eight months of 1994, under NAFTA, American and Canadian companies invested 2.4 billion dollars in Mexico. The United States should now move to extend NAFTA to Chile (Chile is now negotiating with Canada and Mexico for such extension, but nothing can be done without the United States) and then to other Latin American countries.

The United States also can put its shoulder to integrating new and economically struggling democracies into GATT (The General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) and the new World Trade Organization created by GATT. Just establishing free trade with Latin America might increase Latin imports and exports by $300 billion by the year 2000. This would certainly help democratic reforms in the region. Finally, the United States can try to accelerate the development of an Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) free trade community. It would cover about 40 percent of the world's trade and clearly encourage a huge jump in FDI in the region. Foreign ministers for eighteen Asian-Pacific nations are now drafting a plan for free trade by 2020, much too delayed given the importance of such trade and resulting FDI to democracy.

All this should ultimately lead to a free market among all democracies with guaranteed admission for new democracies. The incentive for democratization among elites in nondemocratic countries would thus be increased and the success of democratization would be fostered by integration in such a global market. The critical idea here is to focus, and not ignore or replace, the forces of international capitalism.

Finally, part of our strategy of democratization and human rights should involve the organization and unity of democratic peoples. This does not mean federalization or a common government. It means organizing and leading a vigorous, global movement for democracy by forming an international political party. The basis for this movement exists in interests and numbers: in 1996 there were about 118 democracies (62 percent of all countries with some 3.2 billion people), 79 of which were liberal democracies with extensive civil rights and political liberties (and with a combined population of over 1.3 billion people). This is a critical mass of nations and peoples, but they lack a coherent focus on promoting democracy.

One facet of our diplomacy with deep roots in Western diplomatic history is its traditional, authoritarian style. Now, all democracies have political parties whose purpose is to win elections and pass into law their policies. In the United States these are, ideally, defined in a platform on which their candidates run for office. These parties promote and politically fight for their policies and use the tools of politics to win elections and get their programs into law. They organize, campaign, count votes, marshal support, and point out their opponents negatives. That is democratic politics.

But the diplomacy of democratic countries seldom operates this way. The United Nations is a case in point in which the United States usually refuses to use its political muscle to gain support or sanction those who vote against it; or to use speeches to draw distinctions between our side and the other. Rather, the approach is discussion, consultation, negotiation, encouragement, and, of course, the friendly speech making in which all are complimented for trying to solve the difficult issues facing the world. This surely is important, and politicians do this as well, but what is often missing is the other face of politics, the nonviolent struggle to win a resolution, a bill, an election, a dispute. This is the arm twisting, the public appeals, the use of interest groups to apply pressure, and the use of specific rewards or sanctions. Somehow the way one gets bills passed in the Senate of the United States is frowned on by our diplomats in the General Assembly of the United Nations. Saying this is not new. Such has been pointed out by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, both former American ambassadors to the United Nations.

My argument here is that fostering democracy as a strategy should involve, among other things, using democratic party tactics. This is playing the good game of politics internationally. At the heart of this is the effort to form, in effect, although diplomats (of course) might wish to conceptualize this differently, a transnational political party that will fight internationally for democracy like political parties within democracies fight for their programs. This, then, establishes a whole group of political tactics: getting democracies together to define their program of democratization, communicating this program far and wide, gaining domestic support and financial contributions, electing the party leader, encouraging volunteers, and above all, relating international issues within and outside of the United Nations to its program.

I do not doubt that many diplomats of democracies will reject this out of hand. This is not the way diplomacy traditionally operates. However diplomacy is, ironically, usually carried out by nonpoliticians, especially those with long years of experience in the foreign service. Diplomacy involves in depth learning about other nations and, in particular, about potential or actual enemies. This means getting to know foreign leaders and their top officials publicly and privately, their interests and intentions, their secrets and hidden affairs. Then one sits down with them, deals with common concerns and tries to negotiate conflicts and differences. With antagonistic nondemocracies, diplomacy and the threat of force are seen as two fingers of the same hand, for both must work together. Military aid and alliances, helping one's friends against their enemies, all then become part of the international game. Particularly among diplomats of democracies, the aim of this game is to settle conflict and to minimize upsetting the complex international balance.

Such diplomats are congenitally opposed to the change and struggle of political warfare, and not without reason. In a time of peace, one's country is part of an international equilibrium of interests, capabilities, and wills. When war can result from mistimed or misconceived action, when well intended demands or changes can, like a stone thrown on a still pond, cause ripples that will spread in all directions with unknown consequences, the diplomats read the nuances and fear uncertainty.

For this reason I have been a strong advocate of prudence and small incremental changes in foreign policy. Just a few years ago people were dying by the thousands in Bosnia and by the hundreds of thousands (perhaps 200,000 in just two weeks) in Rwanda. More were dying in Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Burundi, Sri Lanka, Cambodia (yes, still, even in 1994, from the Khmer Rouge guerrillas), Armenia and Azerbaijan, Georgia, and many other places. War is no longer unthinkable between Russia and Ukraine over the Crimea. Moreover, starvation is still occurring in many poor and badly governed countries in the world and hundreds of millions live in utter poverty with tens of millions of children dying even before the have a chance to see their first teacher. At the same time, there is no longer any nondemocratic superpower or any military alliance of nondemocratic states that endanger world peace. The 79 liberal democracies that now exist dominate international relations economically and militarily. One, the United States, is now the only superpower.

I am not calling for the use of armies against tyrannies and other dictatorships. Nor am I calling for the arming of indigenous democratic movements to violently depose their nondemocratic regime. I am not calling for the use of democratic intelligence services to covertly depose these regimes. Rather, I am calling for the application of inducements and nonviolent pressure to persuade nondemocratic elites to improve the human rights conditions of their people and to negotiate gradual transitions to democracy where possible. I am asking for open help to people and movements in their nonviolent fight for more human rights and freedom. That is, I am calling for the use of nonviolent democratic political techniques-a combination of the more useful arts of diplomacy with the tactics of the democratic politician.

The mass of existing democracies marshaled into an international democratic party using their knowledge, resources and political muscle to foster human rights and freedom could make a huge difference in the world. They could, as incredible as it may at first seem, possibly within a generation or two, eliminate war, reduce political violence to a minimum, practically end genocide and mass murder and encourage a huge jump in living standards in the poor nations of the world. This is not only the best foreign policy consistent with our knowledge and modern times, it is the most moral of policies, and in our national interest.

Chapter 9

But What About . . . ?

It is natural that the revolutionary content of this book should

provoke a variety of questions. Many of these I have tried to answer in

previous chapters and here I will deal with others that have been raised in

my classes, presentations, or by colleagues.

On the facts that well established democracies do not make war on each other and never have in history and also for the inverse relationship between violence, democide, and freedom, see the annotated bibliography. I have screened all the empirical and statistical work on this in English three times in the last two decades and have carried out my own statistical analyses. All consistently support what I say here. It is because of this great empirical support and the fantastic importance of these findings that I have come out of the academic closet to make them more generally available and to promote their use as a basis for our foreign policy.

I have spent my whole research career (beginning in 1958, if one counts my first undergraduate research paper) on the question of what causes war and other violence. But as I noted, one does not have to take my word for it. Others doing their own research have arrived at the same conclusions, particularly about war and democracy, and they are also noted in the bibliography. In other words, I am not making my assertions simply based on one research study or one person's overall research but on what has become a wealth of research accumulated over several decades by diverse social scientists and historians using different data and different methods. But has there not developed among political scientists a consensus that democracies are as prone to make wars as nondemocracies? Such a consensus has, in fact, been mentioned in the literature, but was based on a misreading of research results and inappropriate methods. My own research and a detailed assessment of over a dozen other studies substantiate that the more democratic a nation, the less severe its wars. Others, such as Professor James Lee Ray mentioned in the bibliography, have also come to agree with this. You have claimed that even in previous centuries democracies have not made war on each other.

For previous centuries the definition of democracy has been loosened to include at least two-thirds of males having equal rights (as long as the lower classes were not excluded), while maintaining the other characteristics that define contemporary democracies (equal rights, open competitive elections, etc.). Democracies so defined in previous centuries, such as the United States in 1800 and democratic classical Athens, saw themselves as democratic, called themselves democratic and were perceived by other nations as democratic. Still, even with this looser definition, "well established democracies" did not make war on each other ("well established" means that a regime had been democratic long enough for it to be stable and for democratic practices to become established).

The fundamental question about any definition is: does it work? Does it define something in reality that predicts systematically to something else. If we have so defined an x such that it regularly predicts to y, then that is a useful and important definition of x. In the definition I have given above of democracy it predicts to a condition of continuous peace (nonwar) between nations defined as democratic. If one does not agree that these are democracies, fine. Then call them xcracies. We then still can say that xcracies do not make war on each other and by universalizing xcracies we have a solution to war.

No, for two reasons. One is that they may have fought many wars, but many of these were for them low intensity wars, whereas, many nondemocracies like Japan (1900-1945), Germany (1900-1945), and the Soviet Union fought more violent wars, as judged by their casualties. The number killed that a nation suffers in war is an important indicator here. The theory is that in democracies there are many restraints that inhibit leaders from choosing to go to war and that the more potentially violent the war might be the greater these inhibitions. Moreover, as the body bags start coming back from a war, the domestic opposition to the war rises and makes it increasingly difficult for democratic leaders to pursue the war. Nondemocratic leaders, however, not having a domestic opposition to contend with and not being responsible to their people through elections, are free to seek victory without such concerns. Thus, for example, we have the human wave attacks so characteristic of Chinese communist warfare or the Soviet use of prisoners, their own citizens, to clear minefields by walking back and forth across them.

The second reason is that my assertion is a statistical one. On the average, the more democratic a nation, the less severe its wars. A democracy that has been involved in some very severe wars would not disprove this anymore than the facts that a few people die from penicillin shot and some more fail to get well in spite of these shots would disprove that penicillin is a miracle drug in the fight against infection and disease. Regarding your claim that democracies don't make war on each other, what about the British-American War of 1812, or for that matter the Spanish-American War and World War I?

At the time of the War of 1812, Great Britain was not a democracy, regardless of the existence of a parliamentary government. Voting was not secret, the franchise was highly restricted to a small minority, many new cities (such as Birmingham and Manchester) had no representation in the House of Commons while many small villages might send two or three members and, in any case, less than one-third of the Commons was properly elected. The greater majority of seats were appointed or selected (such as by guilds) or bought or rented. Democracy did not come to Great Britain until the franchise was extended to the middle class by the Reform Act of 1832, to industrial workers by the Reform Act of 1867, and to the agricultural laborers by the Reform Act of 1884.

As for Spain, at the time of its war with the United States, the two major political parties alternated in power, not by election but by arrangement preceding elections, and the election outcomes were then controlled. This was hardly democratic.

Then there was Imperial Germany's war against the democratic allies in World War I. Its citizens did have certain civil and political rights, including universal male suffrage, and the legislature was fully elected. But the unelected Kaiser appointed the chancellor, directly controlled the army and involved himself in foreign affairs, all major reasons that the well established democracies of the time did not see Germany as a fellow democracy.

As noted in the bibliography, political scientists Bruce Russett and James Lee Ray and historian Spencer Weart have intensively studied these and other possible exceptions to the claim of no wars among democracies. None were found.

Whether the definition of democracy is broad or narrow, we have statistical means of calculating whether the number of democracies is, in fact, significant (the same kind of statistics medical researchers use to test the significance of drugs or symptoms). The empirical finding that there have been no wars between democracies since, say, 1816 is statistically significant. That is, given the historical number of democracies, the probability of the hypothesis that democracies have never made war on each other being wrong is very low (odds of millions to one).

True, statistics can be misused and have been, but this is true of any scientific method. Virtually all the medical drugs one takes today are based on statistical tests not unlike those used to test whether the finding that democracies do not make war on each other is a chance occurrence. If one is going to be cynical about these statistics, then one should also be very wary of taking any modern drugs for an illness or disease. This issue is really not statistics but how well they have been applied and whether the data meet the assumptions of the statistical model used.

Here are some actual statistics. If one defines an international war as any military engagements in which 1,000 or more were killed, then there were 33 such wars, with 353 pairs of nations (e.g., Germany vs. USSR) engaged during 1816 to 1991. None of the fighting was between two democracies, 155 pairs involved a democracy and a nondemocracy, and 198 involved two nondemocracies fighting each other. The average length of war between states was 35 months, while average battle deaths equaled 15,069 people.

A good way of calculating the statistical significance of democracies not making war on each other is through the binomial theorem (a way of determining the probability of a number of events happening). To do this requires several statistics: the number of nondemocratic pairs and democratic pairs of states in the world for the period during which the wars between these types of pairs occurred, and the number of wars between each type. The problem has been in determining not the number of democratic pairs but nondemocratic pairs in the world. This has been confronted in the literature and, for those periods in which this number could be defined, the lack of wars between democracies has been very significant, usually much less than a probability of .01. Just one example follows.

For the years 1946-1986, when there were the most democracies and thus the hardest test of the proposition that democracies do not make war on each other, there were 45 states that had a democratic regime; 109 that did not. There were thus 6,876 state dyads (e.g., Bolivia-Chile), of which 990 were democratic-democratic dyads. None of the 990 fought each other. Thirty-two nondemocratic dyads engaged in war. Thus the probability of any dyad engaging in war from 1946 to 1986 was 32/6876 or .0047; of not engaging in war was .9953. Now, what is the probability of the 990 dyads not engaging in war during this period? Using the binomial theorem, it is .9953 to the 990th power or .0099, which rounded off, equals .01. This is highly significant. The probability of this lack of war between democracies being by chance is virtually 100 to 1.

One should not take this result in isolation since the lack of war has been tested in different ways for other periods, other definitions of democracy, and other ways of defining war and in each case the result has been significant. Thus, the overall significance is a multiple (or function, if some of these studies are not independent) of these difference significant probabilities, which would make the overall probability (subjectively estimated) of the results being by chance alone at least a billion to one. But your statistics were for the Cold War period.

My above test for the years 1946-86 is not the only one. As mentioned, other tests have been done for different years, including 1816-1960. Now it may be true that the Cold War accounted for the lack of war between democracies, but what about other periods? Also, ignore the statistics and consider Europe, the historical cauldron of war, and what has happened since the end of the Cold War. Unity has continued to grow rather then hostility. And, incredibly, those old enemies, France and Germany, have considered forming a common army. Moreover, once the former enemies became democratic, they have tried to join and are being integrated into a larger Europe.

All statistical tests on humans suffer from the inability to truly meet the assumption of randomness (equal likelihood of each case, event, sample point) basic to the model. In a medical test, whether double-blind or not, the sample is usually constrained to Americans, students, doctors, etc. and in this way may introduce unknown masking factors. Ignoring this, any statistical test is only giving results in terms of probabilities, and for that one test the improbable may in fact have happened. This is why no researcher should accept any one or two tests as definitive. It is only when a range of tests are consistent over many kinds of data, researchers, and methods can one have confidence in the results. Such has been the case for the propositions that democracies do not make war on each other and that they are more domestically peaceful.

I am the only one who has done the relevant statistical research on this so far, and I had to spend eight years collecting the comparative data to do so. I have subjected these data to all forms of statistical analysis, testing particularly for the possibility that it is not democracy that is really inversely related to democide, but economic development, education, culture, ethnic-religious-racial diversity, war, or revolution. In each case or for all together, democratic freedom comes out as the only or the most significant factor.

A number of studies have tried to determine whether there is a hidden factor accounting for the fact that democracies do not make war on each other. Economic development, industrialization, geographic distance, trade, and alliances represent the many factors considered. Always, democracy comes out as the best explanation.

"Best" is meant in a statistically significant sense. That is, the probability that democracy would not be a determinant when these other factors are considered is very low (odds also of tens of thousands to one). This has been gauged through such statistical techniques as analysis of variance and regression analysis.

Yes there are, but on this one must be careful because of the effect of scale. Very poor countries can have high growth rates whether they are democracies or not because they are at a low level of development. It is like a country with only one factory-its growth rate is 100 percent if it builds a second factory. Economically developed countries, with their massive and diversified economies, cannot easily grow more than 4 or 5 percent per year. However, China, which had an abysmal command economy in 1975, has grown at double digit rates since it began liberalizing its economy. Moreover, such comparisons between the growth rates of democracies and nondemocracies do not take into account the effect of greater freedom on nondemocracies like China. Were this entered into the analysis, one would find that when economies were given more freedom, even within a partial command structure, they experienced dramatic growth. In addition to communist, but economic liberalizing China, consider the economic miracles of authoritarian Singapore and the colony of Hong Kong, and newly democratic Taiwan and South Korea, with their largely free markets.

Now lets step aside from growth rates altogether and note the economic progress and status of countries that have allowed their economies to be relatively free. They are virtually all the most developed and modernized countries of the world. Then consider in what countries economic conditions are at their worst or have decline sharply over the years. They are generally those in which there is or has been until recently a controlled or command economy.

There has been considerable effort among social scientists and historians to understand why freedom has the effect it does. In fact, in some cases, as in my own research, a theory about democracy and violence led to the remarkable results given here, rather than the other way around. This theory has been melded into the previous chapters and for a more explicit and technical presentation see my Power Kills mentioned in the annotated bibliography. In sum, freedom produces a diversity of groups and interests that inhibit violence and a culture of discussion, negotiation, and compromise, of tolerance. Moreover, freedom produces bonds and restraints between democracies and where each democracy perceives the other as democratic they expect their differences to be resolved by peaceful means. Economically, by theory, freedom should release creative forces, motivate people to improve their products and services and create a most efficient use of resources.

All predictions of the future are based on the past. All our public policies implicitly predict the social, political and economic consequences of certain government actions. And they are usually based on unsystematic suppositions, intuition, particular cases, or common experiences like the appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1939, the Cold War, or the Vietnam War. Very seldom, if ever, has a foreign policy been based on a careful, systematic weighing of all relevant cases. Actually, I know of no research in international relations that has involved so many positive replications and such solid results as those underlying the foreign policy recommendation given here.

But there is another point involved in the question. It may be that when we have a world of democracies a new factor may emerge to confound our prediction about world peace. Researchers have tried to anticipate this by looking for hidden or masked factors in determining the relationship between democracy and violence, but none have appeared. Moreover, there is good theory to explain why democracies should not fight and why they should minimize violence and produce wealth and prosperity. And the theory and empirical results jointly lead me to recommend the foreign policy I do. Still, the possibility that a democratic world will defy predictions exists.

Nonetheless, should we not act on these results because something that has not, so far, made an appearance and, by theory, should not still has a very small probability of defeating the effects of democracy in the future? Furthermore, if we do not act on the knowledge we now have, consider what peace and prosperity would be lost to the world if we let this small chance of being wrong stand in the way. Even if there were much less support for this prediction than is now available, as a nation and people we must act on it. The global benefits to mankind of being right are too great.

These are not ignored and have been taken into account in the analyses on which this book and the relevant ones of my colleagues are based. To say that democracy will minimize internal political violence is not to say it will eliminate such violence. Nor is it to say that, in some cases, for particular reasons (keep in mind the Civil War was fought over freeing slaves-over greater freedom), there may not be great violence. What can be said is that on the average democracies have much less violence than other forms of government, and this knowledge gives us the greatest practical tool for reducing world political violence by and within countries. Incidentally, regarding examples of democracies with "high" levels of internal violence, one can easily point to cases of much more deadly violence within nondemocracies. The Teiping Rebellion in China during the 19th century may have killed 20,000,000 people, even possibly 40,000,000. The Mexican Revolution near the beginning of our century left about 2,000,000 dead. Ignoring the associated famine, the Russian Civil War killed over 2,000,000 people. Then there was the Chinese Civil War which was fought from 1928 to 1949 and killed at least 10,000,000 Chinese. Even the much lesser internal conflicts in smaller nondemocratic nations has been deadly. The list is long and sad, including El Salvador (during its nondemocratic periods), Colombia, Haiti, Sri Lanka, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, Cambodia, Mongolia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Czar's Russia, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Uganda. Just recently 500,000 or more Rwandans were likely slaughtered in a couple of months of civil war.

At the time of the Civil War the South was not a sovereign democracy. For one, it was not recognized by any major power, which means that it was not recognized as an independent state. Aside from this, the franchise was limited to free males (which constituted about 35-40% of males) and President Jefferson Davis was not elected but appointed by representatives themselves selected by the confederate states. There was an election in 1861, but it was not competitive. As with many facts by which we guide our lives, we need not be hung up on such possible exceptions. All alleged exceptions are at the margins of what we call democracies. Even though none have been accepted as truly exceptions to the rule by those who have done research on them, even if they were exceptions it would not weaken the proposition that well established democracies do not make war on each other. This is because in no case have undoubted democracies, such as Sweden and Norway, Belgium and France, the United States and sovereign Canada, made war on each other and none are mentioned as exceptions.

During the age of colonization which ended in the three decades following World War II, many democracies took and managed colonies. In some cases this was a bloody conquest, involving many massacres as in the American-Philippine War of 1899-1905. However, democracies committed far less democide during this period and were involved in much less severe violence than were other countries. All one need do, for example, is compare the treatment by the United States and Britain of their colonial subjects with that of Kaiser's Germany in Africa where Germans launched a systematic campaign to eradicate the Hereros and massacred perhaps as many as 65,000 or the Soviet Union viz. her foreign subjects. The Soviets systematically killed a country's intellectuals, clerics, and possible leaders and deport hundreds of thousands to labor camps in Siberia where few could expect to survive. And the Japanese colonization of Korea and Manchuria is another story of massacres, executions, and horrific cruelty.

Moreover, one should keep in mind that colonization by democracies was generally seen as a civilizing duty ("white man's burden"), bringing the fruits of more advanced countries to Asia, the Pacific, and Africa and preparing their people for independence. No matter the associated excesses, and there were many, the instincts were often positive. That they failed, that they were infused with self interests (as in China), should not distract from their justification. In many colonies schools were built, the rudiments of an economic infrastructure were laid, natives were trained, and preparations were made for independence. When the time came, the democracies usually gave up their colonies without much violence. Examples of this include Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, and dozens of other colonies in the Middle east and Africa. Hawaii, at first made a territory of the United States by force, voted overwhelmingly to be a state of the United States and became such in 1959. Puerto Rico, another territory, voted to remain a territory of the United States. There were some exceptions to the comparatively favorable colonial record of democracies, most notably French Indochina and Algeria where France fought bloody wars to keep them. But what was an exception for democracies was a rule for nondemocracies which gave up their colonies only at the point of a gun. Such was the case for Kaiser's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, militarist Japan and fascist Spain and Portugal. Well, democracies may not make war on each other, but they do conduct covert action against other democracies and have participated in their overthrow by force and the creation of nondemocracies. What about this? This is true. Democracies have engaged in covert action. The U.S. did so in Chile, the Dominican Republic, and Iran. However, this was done secretly by agencies of government, such as the CIA, operating with minimum democratic oversight. The agencies were really enclaves of power acting abroad without the normal restraints of democratic leaders and outside of the democratic culture. They were insulated from the effects of freedom that operate within a democracy. The same holds true for the military in time of war (and our intelligence agencies during the Cold War saw us as involved in a deadly war). They were largely given their head to operate like a fully authoritarian government within a government, to impose the utmost secrecy on their behavior, to permit minimal freedom to those within their control and to punish severely for insubordination. This may be justified, of course, but too much or too little democratic control is not the point. The point is that everything a democracy does should not be looked at as the actions of a free people and culture. Some of this behavior may come from peculiarly nondemocratic agencies which for good or bad reasons are allowed to operate outside of normal democratic constraints.

Because it will take the investment of much resources by the United States and other democracies to help nations democratize. Russia alone needs tens of billions in aid to further democratization. Such aid will be more forthcoming and more broadly supported if there is a wider understanding among the democracies that by providing human and financial resources to democratize we are not only promoting the freedom and prosperity of other countries but also peace and nonviolence. Such aid is cheap compared to the likely human and material cost of future wars.

There is also the struggle for human rights in many countries. It will help this fight to not only justify human rights for their own sake but to point out their importance for global peace and security.

Actually, the United States does have the highest murder rate among Western democracies, but there is much more criminal and social violence in other countries, such as Colombia, Peru, India, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, and Brazil. Still the question is important. In any case, do not take such violence in the United States as paradigmatic of democracy. We could as well focus on the lack of such violence in Sweden or Switzerland.

The argument here is that freedom reduces to a minimum political violence, not civil violence between racial groups, strike violence, or interpersonal murder and assaults. Although this violence is important and we must find a way of reducing it (empirical research, as a matter of fact, really has yet to be done on the relationship between the types of governments and such internal group and interpersonal civil violence), this violence is irrelevant to my argument. This is not to say that my argument only covers a narrow range of violence. It includes the most violent and deadliest-civil wars, revolutions, coups, guerrilla wars, anti-government riots, rebellions, mutinies, assassinations. It involves any violence against or by governments. To minimize all this kind of violence would alone be a revolutionary step toward world peace. Does not freedom lead to excess? Look at the United States today with its breakdown of families, lose of traditional values, increase in illegitimate births, use of dope, violence in movies and on television, murder by school children, etc.

There is no agreement on what the source of this cultural collapse is. In my view much of it is caused by an excess of government involvement in interpersonal and social affairs, that is, by a lack of freedom. But this question need not be decided, for the issue is not the amount of democratic freedom a nation should have, but that of democracy itself. The United States is not the model, nor should Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand or Switzerland be models of the ideal democratic government, although one can counter the alleged excesses of freedom in the United States with the lack of such in other democracies. It is enough that no democracy makes war on each other, that compared to nondemocracies, particularly totalitarian ones, democracies have the least political violence and democide and that democratic freedom promotes wealth and prosperity. Whether there is such a thing as too much freedom in a democracy or too little is a matter we can debate once having achieved the dream of no war, a virtual end to democide, and much improved global standard of living. You are promoting universal democratization?

I have tried to make clear that this is not an imposition of foreign values, but the enabling of people of all cultures to realize the values inherent in their being human beings. Everywhere people oppose the genocide and mass murder that would be virtually eliminated by democracy. They fear the horrors of war that democracy would end. They desire the wealth and prosperity democratic freedom would produce. They desire the freedom, at least the freedom to choose to be free or unfree, that democracy entails. And, therefore, they would accept the democratic principle of freedom, that they be free to chose their way of life and kind of government.

Chapter 10

Annotated Bibliography

Bibliography On Democracy and War

This is an English language bibliography of works on the relationship between democracy and war. It is as complete as I could make through 1994 and also includes those works that have come to my attention in 1995.

Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce and David Lalman. 1992 War and Reason: Domestic and International Imperatives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Babst, Dean V. "A Force For Peace," Industrial Research (1972) pp. 55-58.

Babst, Dean V. "Elective Governments-A Force For Peace," The Wisconsin Sociologist 3 (1964) pp. 9-14.

Babst, Dean and William Eckhardt. "How Peaceful Are Democracies Compared With Other Countries," Peace Research 24 (1992) pp. 51-57.

Bremer, Stuart A. "Dangerous Dyads: Conditions Affecting the Likelihood of Interstate War, 1816-1965," Journal of Conflict Resolution 36 (1989) pp. 309-341.

Bremer, Stuart A. "Are Democracies Less Likely To Join Wars?" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science

Association, Chicago: September, 1992.

Bremer, Stuart A. "Democracy and Militarized Interstate Conflict, 1816-1965," International Interactions 18 (1993) pp. 231-249.

Butterworth, Robert Lyle. 1976 Managing Interstate Conflict, 1945-1974: Data With Synopsis. Pittsburgh: University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh.

Chan, Steve. "Mirror, Mirror On The Wall...Are Democratic States More Pacific?" Journal of Conflict Resolution 28 (1984) pp. 617-648.

Chan, Steve. "Democracy And War: Some Thoughts On Future Research Agenda, " International Interactions 18 (1993) pp. 205-213.

Cole, Timothy Michael. 1987 United States Leadership and the Liberal Community of States. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington.

Cole, Timothy Michael. "Politics And Meaning: Explaining The Democratic Peace," Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 30-September 2, 1990.

Crawford, Neta C. "A Security Regime Among Democracies: Cooperation Among Iroquois Nations," International Organizations 48 (1994) pp. 345-385.

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