¹ The literature uses the terms ‘liberal state’, ‘democracy’, ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘libertarian’ state to signify virtually the same subject. I shall use the term‘ liberal state’, though when discussing particular authors shall use the term they themselves employ.

² Mintz, A. and Geva, N., ‘Why Don't Democracies Fight Each Other: An Experimental Study’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 37:3 (Sept. 1993), p. 484CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ For recent articles critical of the claim see Mearsheimer, J. J., ‘Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War’, International Security, 15:1 (Summer 1990), pp. 5–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Waltz, K., ‘The Emerging Structure of International Polities’, International Security, 18:2 (Fall 1993), pp. 44–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohen, R., ‘Pacific Unions: A Reappraisal of the Theory that “Democracies do not Go to War with Each Other”’, Review of International Studies, 20:3 (July 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Layne, C., ‘Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace’, International Security, 19:2 (Fall 1994), pp. 5–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Spiro, D., ‘The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace’, International Security, 19:2 (Fall 1994), pp. 50–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Owen, J. M., ‘How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace’, International Security, 19:2 (Fall 1994), pp. 87–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is sympathetic to the claim that there is a positive relationship between democracies and peace, accredits this to liberalism, though maintains that the relationship is manifest only in inter–liberal state relations.

⁴ I borrow the term ‘pacificism’ from Ceadel, M., Thinking about Peace and War (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar. It refers to the belief that peace is both possible and desirable, and is thus similar to ‘eirenicism’.

⁵ Babst, M. D., ‘A Force for Peace’, Industrial Research, April 1972, pp. 55–8Google Scholar; Small, M. and Singer, J. D., ‘The War–Proneness of Democratic Regimes’, Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, 1:1 (1976)Google Scholar, Rummel, R. J., ‘Libertarianism and International Violence’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 27:1 (1983), pp. 27–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Doyle, M. W., ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 1’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12:3 (1983), pp. 205–35Google Scholar; Doyle, M. W., ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 2’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12:4 (1983), pp. 323–53Google Scholar.

⁶ Rummel, ‘Libertarianism’, p. 28.

⁷ Doyle, ‘Kant, Part 1’, pp. 213, 225, 223.

⁸ There are a number of scholars besides Rummel who have considered different aspects of the relationship between liberal states and peace. Levy, J. S., ‘Domestic Politics and War’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 18:3 (1988), pp. 653–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has, as will be discussed below, drawn attention to the differences between the way historians and political scientists study the question of war. Schweller, R. L., ‘Domestic Structure and Preventive War: Are Democracies More Pacific?’, World Politics, 44:2 (1992), pp. 235–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has developed the interesting argument that democracies do not wage preventive war as this is inconsistent with liberal principles. A merit of this piece is that Schweller recognizes that liberal democracies recognize norms applicable beyond inter–liberal state relations. Forsythe, D. P., Human Rights and Peace (Lincoln and London, 1993)Google Scholar, has developed an approach which synthesizes the variables of rights and power in explaining the breakdown of peace, and supports his case with a number of empirical case–studies. This argument is, however, in the context of the claim that democracies don't fight each other. Lynch, C., ‘Kant, the Republican Peace, and Moral Guidance in International Law’, Ethics and International Affairs, 8 (1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar directed a discussion of Kantian ethics to the relationship between liberal states and peace.

⁹ Besides the works cited above in notes 2 and 3 see, for instance, Morgan, C. T. and Campbell, S. Howard, ‘Domestic Structure, Decisional Constraints, and War: So Why Kant Democracies Fight?’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 35:2 (June 1991), pp. 187–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morgan, C. T. and Schwebach, V., ‘Take Two Democracies and Call Me in the Morning: A Prescription for Peace?’, International Interactions, 17:3 (1992), pp. 305–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gleditsch, N., ‘Democracy and Peace’, Journal of Peace Research, 29:4 (1992), pp. 369–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Starr, H., ‘Why Don't Democracies Fight One Another? Evaluating the Theory–Findings Feedback Loop’, Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, 14:4 (1992), pp. 41–59Google Scholar; Ray, J. L., ‘Wars Between Democracies: Rare, or Nonexistent?’, International Interactions, 18:3 (1993), pp. 251–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Russett, B., Grasping the Democratic Peace Princeton, 1993Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, p. 32.

¹¹ Fukuyama, F., The End of History and the Last Man Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 263Google Scholar, my italics.

¹² Huntington, S. P., The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century Norman, OK, 1991), p. 29Google Scholar.

¹³ von Hippel, H., ‘Democratisation as Foreign Policy: the Case of Haiti’, in The World Today, 51:1 (Jan. 1995), pp. 11–14Google Scholar.

¹⁴ de Montesquieu, C. L. de Secondat, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge, 1989 [1748]), pp. 132Google Scholar, 143, 338; Kant, I., Perpetual Peace, in Reiss, H. (ed.), Kant's Political Philosophy (Cambridge, 1991 [1795])Google Scholar; Schumpeter, J. A., ‘The Sociology of Imperialism’, in Imperialism and Social Classes (New York, 1955 [1919])Google Scholar. Doyle discusses Schumpeter at some length in Doyle, M. V., ‘Liberalism and World Polities’, American Political Science Review, 80:4 (Dec. 1986), pp. 1151–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, p. 30, cites ch. 4 of his own book; Bremer, S. A., ‘Dangerous Dyads: Conditions Affecting the Likelihood of Interstate War, 1816–1965’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 36:2 (1992), pp. 309–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Maoz, Z. and Abdolali, N., ‘Regime Types and International Conflict’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 33:1 (1989), pp. 3–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One of Maoz and Abdolali's general conclusions, for instance, is that ‘there is no relationship between regime type and conflict involvement at the national (or polity) level of analysis. This finding is extremely robust; it holds regardless of the indexes of regime type used, the aggregation of specific indexes to overall regime categories, the indexes of conflict involvement, and the breakdown of the temporal domain into subperiods’ (p. 30). Qualitative factors are, however, completely neglected and as such there is no indication of how the incidence of violence by liberal states is related to any normative framework. See also Mintz and Geva, ‘Why Don't Democracies…?’.

¹⁶ Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, pp. 30–1, 38.

¹⁷ Doyle, ‘Kant, Part 1’, p. 230.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 225; see also Doyle, ‘Kant, Part 2’; Doyle, ‘Liberalism and World Polities’, pp. 1156–7; and Doyle, M. W., ‘Liberalism and International Relations’, in Beiner, R. and Booth, W. J., Kant and Political Philosophy: The Contemporary Legacy London, 1993), pp. 176–7Google Scholar.

¹⁹ To be fair to Doyle, in his most recent work he does qualify his claim that ‘peaceful restraint only seems to work in the liberals’ relations with other liberals‘ with the qualification that relations with non–liberals do appear to be ‘more complicated’. Doyle, ‘Liberalism and International Relations’, pp. 176–7. In his ‘Kant, Part 2’ he discusses the relations of liberal states with non–liberal states at some length.

²⁰ See the heading of Doyle's lists of liberal states in Doyle, ‘ K a n t, Part 1’, p. 209, a n d Doyle, ‘Liberalism and International Relations’, p. 193.

²¹ Suganami, H., Reflections on the Causes of War provisional title, Oxford, 1996CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 3; Cohen, ‘Pacific Unions’, p. 214.

²² See Russett, B., ‘And Yet It Moves’, International Security, 19:4 (Spring 1995), pp. 164–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar, pp. 171–2 and n.16 therein; see also Maoz, Z. and Russett, B., ‘Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace’, American Political Science Review, 87:3 (Sept. 1993), pp. 624–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Russett, B., Ray, J. L. and Cohen, R., ‘Raymond Cohen on Pacific Unions: A Response and a Reply’, Review of International Studies, 21:3 (July 1995), pp. 319–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 325.

²⁴ Cohen, ‘Pacific Unions’; Mearsheimer, ‘Back to the Future’; Ray, ‘Wars Between Democracies’; J. MacMillan, ‘Liberalism and Peace’, D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford (1991); Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, p. 85; Spiro, ‘Insignificance of Liberal Peace’. Forsythe, Human Rights, pp. 27 – 31, draws on Mueller's ‘developmentalism’ enunciated in Mueller, J., Retreat from Doomsday New York, 1989)Google Scholar. The argument is in two parts: first, that all developed states (authoritarian as well as democratic) know that even a major conventional war would not be in their interests, and second that there is an increasing moral revulsion against war among such states which is a consequence of a broad historical learning process. Russett and Spiro continue their debate upon statistical methods in ‘Correspondence: The Democratic Peace’, International Security, 19:4 (Spring 1995), pp. 164–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Owen, ‘How Liberalism’.

²⁶ Doyle, ‘Kant, Part 1’, p. 216.

²⁷ Bosworth, R. J. B., Italy, the Least of the Great Powers Cambridge, 1979), pp. 123CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 132, 134. In fact, the situation is more complicated, for, by Italian standards, the leaders concerned would have regarded themselves as being liberals. In the Italian context, however, this led to an especial concern for certain territorial acquisitions in the interests of the completion of the Risorgimento. This indicates further questions for research in this area regarding the diversity of the liberal traditions in various national contexts and also that there is a degree of tension in the liberal tradition between universalism and particularism.

²⁸ Doyle, ‘Kant, Part 1’, p. 216.

²⁹ Sanderson, G., England, Europe and the Upper Nile 1882–1899 Edinburgh, 1965), pp. 342Google Scholar, 349; Gallagher, J., Robinson, R. and Denny, A., Africa and the Victorians London, 1963), p. 375Google Scholar.

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³¹ See Cohen, ‘Pacific Unions’, p. 219, and Layne, ‘Kant or Cant’, pp. 28–33. Their interpretation of the conflict in terms of superior British power probably overplays the assumption of ‘rationality’. They overlook the possibility that the parties could have been pushed to war through concern for other factors such as credibility, honour, or domestic political pressures.

³² Holbraad, C., The Concert of Europe Harlow, 1970), p. 145Google Scholar.

³³ de Mesquita, B. Bueno and Lalman, D., War and Reason: Domestic and International Imperatives New Haven and London, 1992), pp.160–4Google Scholar

³⁴ See J. MacMillan, On Liberal Peace (London, forthcoming) for the development of this approach.

³⁵ Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace being the paradigmatic case.

³⁶ Dumbrell, J., Vietnam: American Involvement at Home and Abroad, BAAS Pamphlets in American Studies (Keele, 1992)Google Scholar.

³⁷ See MacMillan, ‘Liberalism and Peace’ and On Liberal Peace.

³⁸ Doyle, ‘Liberalism and World Polities’, p. 1157, a n d ‘Liberalism and International Relations’, p. 186.

³⁹ Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, p. 22; my italics.

⁴⁰ Although I do discuss the implications of Kant's political philosophy for the ‘democracies don't fight’ debate, and the way in which Kant's thought has been interpreted by liberal peace theorists, in ‘A Kantian Protest against the Peculiar Discourse of Inter–Liberal State Peace’, Millennium, 24:3 (Winter 1995), pp. 549–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁴³ Doyle,‘Kant, Part 1’, p. 232.

⁴⁴ Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, pp. 30, 39.

⁴⁵ Doyle, ‘Kant, Part 1’, p. 230.

⁴⁶ Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, p. 31.

⁴⁷ Ibid., pp. 32–3; Doyle, ‘Liberalism and World Polities’, p. 1161.

⁴⁸ Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman, War and Reason, p. 160.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 158. Z. Maoz and B. Russett adopt a broadly similar explanatory framework in ‘Normative and Structural Causes’.

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⁵⁵ Doyle, ‘Kant, Part 1’, pp. 231–2.

³⁶ Doyle, ‘Kant, Part 2’ p. 326.

⁵⁷ Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, p. 26.

⁵⁸ M. Leifer, ‘ASEAN's Search for Regional Order’, Faculty Lecture 12, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, 1987.

⁵⁹ For a critical discussion of the adoption of the neoliberal model of economic development see Lee, K., ‘A Neo–Gramscian Approach to International Organisation’, in MacMillan, J. and Linklater, Andrew (eds.), Boundaries in Question: New Directions in International Relations London, 1995Google Scholar. Rosecrance, R., The Rise of the Trading State New York, 1986Google Scholar; Ziegler, C., Foreign Policy and East Asia, Learning and Adaptation in the Gorbachev Era Cambridge, 1993Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ In this vein, Lumsdaine, D. H., Moral Vision in International Politics: The Foreign Aid Regime, 1949–1989 Princeton, NJ, 1993Google Scholar, shows convincingly the way in which the foreign aid regime emerged after World War II as the international counterpart of the domestic welfare state and increasing awareness of world poverty and beliefs regarding the interdependencies of peace, prosperity and justice.

⁶¹ For a study of the relationship between domestic political ideologies and foreign policy assumptions see Ceadel, Thinking about Peace and War.

⁶² Levy, ‘Domestic Polities’, pp. 654–5.

⁶³ See for instance Cox, R., ‘Social Forces, States and World Order: Beyond International Theory’, Millennium, 10:2 (1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wendt, A., ‘Anarchy is What States Make of it: The Social Construction of Power Polities’, International Organisation, 46 (1992), pp. 392–425CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Neufeld, M., ‘Reflexivity and International Relations Theory’, Millennium, 22:1 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lumsdaine's Moral Vision is a major study to have linked philosophical factors with policy developments.

⁶⁴ Allison, G., Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis Boston, 1971)Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Meinecke, F., Machiavellism (London, 1957 [1924])Google Scholar. In case readers think it odd that I should draw upon Realist writers to support an argument rooted in liberalism, it should be remembered that a number of liberals (e.g. Kant) held similar views regarding the impediment to moral development presented by the anarchic nature of the international system.

⁶⁶ Lumsdaine's analysis of the foreign aid regime in Moral Vision is a notable model of how to disaggregate the significance of particularly liberal elements upon policy–making within a liberal democratic state.