2 - Thucydidean Themes: Democracy in International Relations

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The discipline of International Relations (IR) has often mirrored major real-world trends, and this has certainly been the case with democracy. There was a considerable growth in work on democracy after the end of the Cold War, as part of a more general resurgence of liberal ideas, policies and scholarship (Jahn 2013: 1–12). A further surge in interest followed the central role accorded to democracy and its promotion during America's ‘Global War on Terror’. For Tony Smith, these trends have been closely linked: the development of liberal internationalism between 1989 and 2001 would defend the position ‘empirically, theoretically, and philosophically that the promotion of democracy was not only feasible, but that it would serve American security concerns’ (T. Smith 2007: 49). This expansion in scholarship on democracy appears to be a significant change from the longstanding practice of regarding it as the preserve of political scientists and comparativists. As Ian Clark observes, ‘in general, IR theory has not been much exercised by concerns with democracy’ (Clark 1999: 146). This situation has only been partially rectified: a majority of the studies undertaken have been by liberal scholars, with other traditions continuing to display limited interest.

Despite this notable increase in the volume of work on democracy in IR, it has not resulted in a comparable development in our understanding of the way democracy is influenced by, and interacts with, the international realm. The nature, shape and possibilities of democracy have long been regarded as determined exclusively within the confines of the state (Walker 1993: 141–58). Alexander Wendt expresses this point well:

The Westphalian approach to sovereignty allowed democratic and IR theorists to ignore each other. The former were concerned with making state power democratically accountable, which Westphalia constituted as strictly territorial and thus outside the domain of IR theory; the latter were concerned with interstate relations, which were anarchic and thus outside the domain of political theory. (Wendt 1996: 61)

The most influential example of this tendency is structural realism's separation of systemic and unit level phenomena, whereby democracy is consigned to the unit level, and thus beyond the purview of IR (Waltz 1979). Against Waltz, democratic peace scholars have argued that the internal (democratic) nature of states does have a consequential impact on their international behaviour.