Notice how in his “challenge” he did not offer to put up his own money. He made it so that if Clayton were right he would only take the $1000 he put up plus interest…to even be worth consideration it should have been $2000 plus interest - to even be worth considering.
@Centinel: I don’t agree that wagers are a useful way to settle academic disputes. Not all questions can be resolved by academic methods (actually, most cannot be) and for these questions an entrepreneurial approach is the correct approach. However, for those questions which can be resolved by academic methods (deduction, induction, etc.), wagers and “putting your money where your mouth is” just don’t make sense.
Complex social questions such as the tendency toward peace or war of different forms of government cannot be resolved by any empirical method, let alone wagering or venturing. The praxeological method, however, provides the ability to answer a difficult question such as “can a democratic government go to war with another democratic government or will democratic governments tend to remain at peace with one another?” and the answer is “yes, they can go to war and they are every bit as aggressive as any other form of government.”
Finally, your wager is flawed. What constitutes war? Only an official declaration of war by the legislative body of the country and a subsequent standoff of tanks across the border or a de facto state of war with UAV airstrikes, black ops infiltration and regime destabilization by intelligence services?
Clayton -
@gotlucky: Nice catch. Never trust a neocon… 
Clayton -
@ gotlucky
Of course I will wager my own money – who else’s money would I wager !!!
Moreover, I will wager $2000 against you that the list of liberal democracies that I cited will not wage war against each other within the next 10 years.
You find the reputable 3rd party that will hold the funds.
Match your rhetoric with cash.
This is a challenge.
@ clayton
We will identify a mutually agreed upon criteria for war. In fact, why don’t you start with your criteria or we can enlist a mutually agreed upon authority on the matter.
You find a reputable mutually agreed upon 3rd party to hold the funds until the expiration date of the wager.
This is a challenge.
Match your rhetoric with real risk or expose yourself and your ideological views as fraud.
Refusal to accept an ill-defined wager exposes ideas as fraud? Centinel, try less chest-pounding and more book-reading.
Clayton -
your passivity and lack of confidence is palpable.
The wager’s specifics have no been outlined, hence they can’t be ill-defined. The only thing ill defined is your ideological beliefs.
Again, I challenge you to accept this free market wager if you have confidence in your ideological beliefs.
Again, you find a 3rd party to hold the funds until the expiration date.
Again, you define the criteria that constitute war or better yet lets find a reputable third party authority to identify the criteria.
This is a challenge.
Match your rhetoric with substantive action or be exposed as a fraud!
@ Centinel
I am not in a financial position to put away $1000 for 10 years. I have financial obligations, and frankly, even if it were a $1 bet, I’d still rather spend that on a parking meter now than recieve $2 from you in 10 years from now.
So the only way the DPT could be wrong is if there was a war between at least two of those ‘liberal democracies’ in the next decade? Non sequitur. I think the DPT is fallacious, but I don’t think those states will make war against each other in the next decade. Having ‘democracy’ in common is not the only reason for peace (or war) between states.
In any case - democratic Athens made war on democratic Syracuse, so you lose.
I doubt Hoppe would take this bet, as he has already attributed this peace to the fact that “… an imperialist power such as the United States does not let its various colonial parts go to war against each other.”
Longer excerpt in case you’re interested:
What appears to be standing in the way of peace and civilization then is, above all, the state and democracy; and specifically, of course, the world’s model democracy the United States. But, ironically, if not surprisingly, it is precisely the United States which claims that it is the solution to the quest for peace. The reason for this claim is the so-called doctrine of democratic peace, which goes back to the days of Woodrow Wilson and WWI, and has been revived in recent years by George Bush and his neoconservative advisors. Now this theory of democratic peace claims the following:
First: democracies do not go to war against each other.
Second: hence, in order to create lasting peace, the entire world must be made democratic.
And, as a largely unstated corollary, three: today, many states are not democratic and resist internal democratic reform.
Fourth: hence, war most be waged on those states in order to convert them to democracy and thus create lasting peace.
Now I do not have the patience for a full critique of this theory. But I shall provide a brief critique at least of the theory’s premise, and of its final conclusion.
First thing: do democracies not go to war against each other?
Since almost no democracies existed before the 20th century, the answer must obviously be found within the last hundred years or so. And in fact, the bulk of the evidence that is offered in favor of this thesis is that the countries of Western Europe have not gone to war against each other in the post-WWII era. Likewise, in the Pacific region, Japan and South Korea have not warred against each other.
Now does this evidence prove the case? The democratic peace theorists obviously think so. As they see it, there are plenty of cases on which they can build their case. Germany did not war against France, Italy and England; France did not war against Spain, Italy and Belgium, and moreover there are pemutations involved also; Germany did not attack France and France did not attack Germany.
Thus we have seeemingly dozens of confirmations and not a single counter example for more than 60 years - but, do we really have that?And the answer is of course no. What we actually have is no more than one single case. With the end of WWII, all of Western Europe and Japan and Korea in the Pacific region became part of the United States empire as indicated by the presence of United States troops practically everywhere in these countries.
What the post-WWII period of peace then proves is not that democracies do not go to war against each other, but that an imperialist power such as the United States did not let its various colonial parts go to war against each other. (You also did not see, by the way, any wars breaking out between all those countires that were dominated by the Soviet Union as long as the Soviet empire existed, from which we also do not draw the conclusion that communist dictatorships under Russian control do not go to war against each other so because of that we have to introduce something like this.)
Second point is, what about democracy as a solution to anything?
First point, the theory involves a conceptual conflation of democracy and liberty or freedom that one can only call scandalous. The foundation of liberty is private property. And private or exclusive property is incompatible with democracy which is nothing else but majority rule. Democracy is a soft variant of communism. And rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else but this.
Second, the theory of democratic peace distinguishes only between democracy and non-democracy - which it all summarily labels as “dictatorships.” Everything that is not a democracy is a dictatorship for them. Thus not only disappear all aristocratic republican regimes from its view, but also all traditional monarchies. They all are equated with dictatorships a la Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. In fact however, traditional monarchies have little in common with dictatorships. Monarchies are the semi-organic outgrowth of hierarchically structured natural stateless societies. Kings are the heads of extended families, tribes and nations. They commmand a great deal of voluntarily acknowledged authority which was accumulated over many generations. And it is within the framework of such orders that liberalism, in the European sense, first developed and flourished. In contrast, democracies are egalitarian in outlook. Characteristically, the transition from monarchical age to the democratic age beginning in the second half of the 19th century, has seen the steady decline of liberal parties (again, in the European sense of the term liberal) and a corresponding strengthening of socialists of all stripes. Democracy and socialism go hand in hand.
Third, it follows from this that the view democratic peace theorists have of conflagrations such as WWI must be considered to be grotesque. For them, WWI was essentially a war of democracy against dictatorship, and hence it was progressive, peace-enhancing, and ultimately a justified war.
In fact however, matters are very different. To be sure, pre-WWI Germany and Austria may not have been as democratic as England or the United States, but Germany and Austria were not dictatorships but increasingly emasculated monarchies and as such arguably as liberal, if not moreso, than their counterparts the United States and England. For instance, in the United States anti-war proponents were jailed. The German language was essentially otulawed and citizens of German descent were harassed. Nothing comparable occurred in Austria and Germany at that time.
In any case however, the result of the crusade to make the world safe for democracy was less liberal than what had existed before and the Versailles peace dictate precipitated, as we all know, WWII. Not only did state power grow faster after wwI - after the democratization taking place - then before; in particular, the treatment of minorities deterioriated in the democratized post-wwI period. In the newly founded Czechoslovkia for instance, the Germans were systematically mistreated until they were finally expelled by the millions and butchered by the tens of thosuands after WWII by the majority Czechs. Nothing remotely comparable had happened to the Czechs during the Hapsburg reign, for instance. And the sitaution regarding the relations between Germans and South Slavs in the pre-war Austria vs. post-war Yugoslavia was quite similar. Democracy then - and this is something that Mises recognized in his 1919 book on Nation, Economy and State - democracy does not work in multi-ethnic societies. It does not create peace there but promotes conflict and has potentially genocidal tendencies.
Fourth, the democratic peace theorists claim that democracy is a stable equilibrium. This has been stated most clearly by Francis Fukuyama who labeled the new democratic world order as the “end of history.” However, evidence exists that this claim is patently wrong. On purely theoretical grounds - how can democracy be an equilbrium if it is possible that democracy can be transformed democratically into a dictatorship? That is, a system which is considered to be not stable. The answer is that makes of course no sense whatsoever.
In addition, empirically democracies are anything but stable. As indicated before, in multi-culutural societies, democracy regularly leads to the oppression or even expulsion or extermination of minorities. That seems to be hardly a peaceful equilibrium. And in homogenous societies, democracy regularly leads to class warfare, which leads to economic crises, which leads to dictatorship.
Think for example, of the post-czarist Russia, or of post-WWI Italy, or of Weimar Germany, or of Spain or Portugal, or in more recent times of Greece, Turkey, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, and Pakistan. Not only is this correlation between democracy and dictatorship troublesome for democratic peace theorists; worse they must face the fact that the dictatorships emerging from crises of democracy are not always worse, from a libertarian point of view, than what would have resulted otherwise. Cases can be cited where dictatorships were preferable. Think of Italy and Mussolini - definitely preferable for having a democratically established communist Italy. Or Spain and Franco.
In addition, how is one to square the advocacy of democracy with the fact that dictators, quite unlike kings, who owe their rank to an accident of birth, are often favorites of the masses, and in this sense, highly democratic? Just think of Lenin and Stalin, who were certainly more democratic than Czar Nicholas II, or think of Hitler who was definitely more democratic than Kaiser Wilhelm, or Franz Joseph.
Now according to the democratic peace theorists then, it would seem that we are supposed to war against foreign dictators, whether kings or demagogues, in order to install democracies, which then turn into modern dictatorships, until finally, one supposes, the United States itself has turned into a dictatorship owing to the growth of internal state power, which results from endless emergencies engendered by foreign wars.
Now better I dare say to heed the advice of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and instead of aiming to make the world safe for democracy, we try making it safe from democracy, everywhere but most importantly of course in the United States.
Now after this excursion into the theory of democratic peace, I am back to the proposition that there is no greater threat to lasting peace than the democratic state and in particular, the United States.
Cheers
If Centinel were intellectually honest, he wouldn’t even call it the “Democratic Peace Theory”. He’d call it the “Higher-Order Democratic Peace Theory” since his claim is that only “higher-order democracies” don’t go to war with each other. Of course, he hasn’t bothered to explain just what in the world he means by that term!
Your desperation is palpable.
Clayton’s refusal to accept your wager in no way means he necessarily lacks confidence in his beliefs. I submit that this whole wager thing is a giant red herring - a desperate attempt to distract the rest of us from the intellectual bankruptcy of your “Democratic Peace Theory”. As I’m sure you’re well aware, I already revealed this in a previous post. I’m not surprised that you haven’t responded. But let’s see if I can play your little game.
I hereby challenge you to respond to my post in full. Match your rhetoric with substantive action or be exposed as a fraud!
@ LC
I will address some of the numerous fallacies you cited in your post:
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No theorist of DPT believes that lasting peace is possible. Statists never rest and no political system is irrefutable, including liberal democracy.
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No theorist of DPT believes that war must be waged on autocracies in order to convert them to democracy and thus create lasting peace. Western civilization does not have the economic or political wherewithal to democratize the globe by coercive means.
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Higher order democracies did not emerge until after WWII with the advent of electronic communications, universal sufferage and real civil rights protections. The US was not a higher order democracy until after black Americans and other minorities were granted equal protection under the law in the 1960’s.
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There have been numerous interstate wars since the end of WWII and the Cold War despite US hegemony, yet none have been between liberal democracies. Hence your argument that hegemonic peace is the causal mechanism for liberal peace is wrong. The inconsistent evidence with this flawed view is that (1) there have been wars, hence no peace has existed and (2) none have been between democracies.
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Monarchism is dead, get over it. It was a failed illegitimate absolutist system that favored power based on hereditary instead of freedom.
It is absurd to make the claim that monarchism bred capitalism and liberal democracy when monarchism existed for thousands of years before these beneficial institutions begin to flourished. Liberal democracy both destroyed monarchism and encouraged capitalism which can only be realized when complemented by civil and political freedoms present within liberal democracies – not absolutist monarchic regimes.
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Of course, liberal democracy can be usurped by statist forces. However, it has more often reduced statist structures than the other way around. Also, anarchism favored by Hoppe is a fantasy that doesn’t even exist, hasn’t existed and has a stability similar to that of Yterrium in its natural state. So it is absurd that the adherent of a completely failed ideological model rejected by every society, culture, elitist and citizen criticizes the most ascendant contemporary system as unstable. The US has had scores of examples of peaceful transistions of power, anarchy has none.
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Amusingly the balance of your diatribe is an indefensible defense of dictatorship as being desirable because it is stable. Nothing could be further for rational truth since dictatorships are collapsing around the globe and giving way to more representative governance. As the citizenry have access to electronic communications the truth is spreading – and it aint anarchism that is dominating.
Luddism and Marxism has nothing on yours and Hoppe’s failed and irrational view of world affairs.
Cheers
+1 Aristippus
The whole methodology is shot through with holes big enough to sail an oil tanker through. Imperial hegemony and colonial subjugation are good explanation for the low likelihood of war in the immediate future between most of the states in Centinel’s list. I bet Texas won’t be going to war with California any time soon… but that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Texas and California are liberal democracies and has everything to do with the fact that both governments are the tamed subjects of Washington, DC.
I think that France and Germany (WWII) also falsify the claims of DPT, unless the DPT theorist wants to mount wheels on his goalposts.
Clayton -
Brother, and I’m called a troll? anyways, just for the record, besides superior technology, and a more centralized invasionary effort, the big star of the European conquest was unquestionably disease. Imagine if some phenomena you couldn’t explain concurring with the arrival of strange foreigners wiped out 95% of everyone you know. I know I’d despair and likely roll over.
Democratic peace theory is that democracies don’t go to wear with each other. Of course, when you point out historical examples of such (Athens, India, the UK, France), they shift the goalposts and No True Scotsman you until all they’re left with is “modern Western multiculturalist democracies have not engaged in major conflict with each other since the end of World War II and the development of globalization and nuclear weapons when they were under the hegemony of the US and the USSR who had a policy of mutually assured destruction towards each other”.
In a sense Retopper is right. If we change the word “democrat” and look at a more grounding term like Liberal - he is at least somewhat correct. Liberalism has won the day. Who had the least to lose and the most to gain in the world wars, and who did gain the most and lose the least? The Liberal nations.
This has been obvious since the Enlightenment. The only real battles that matter anymore are minor quibbles of liberals trying to clarify their ideas better; such as post-keynesians, austrians, monterists etc. The closest thing we have to a threat is the far left of liberalism, social dems who take the word “democracy” and "community"as a “thing in itself”- and the fact that leftism is still somewhat of a “priestly” and polite language makes the threat a bit more real. The retarded bastard children of liberalism; communism and LL’s only live on college campuses in the more laughable academic departments - so they are no longer a threat to relevant society.
But yes, liberal values have and do win - because they recognize the nonsense of looking at these “grand ideals” as things in themselves. One of the biggest differences we have with most of them in political science, is we realize that the market system is the root of all sociological interaction, where as democracy and govt are practiced arts that aren’t really “things”.
Nothing can really be said about democracy as a whole. The reason why it might work better than most other forms of govt is because it has the best chance to parrot a market. But all those countries on Retopper’s list are built off of markets, not democracy. Markets are a science and philosophy of human action - the results of which, when recognized tend to create a liberal order. Democracy is just a word of custom. A word which has one of the better chances to parrot market activity if good property rights are already in order - the mutual benefits people see in each other should already be somewhat obvious - the biggest threat is left wing language subversion through academic subsidy, not democracy.
@ jackson larose
Native Americans suffered from European disease and not the reverse because they were a primitive culture that couldn’t sustain large populations that would ultimately breed resistance to disease --see Black Plague.
Disease was a symptom of a backward culture, not the cause of it or some lucky phenonmena that a vastly superior European culture capitalized on.
@ vive la insurrection,
Markets and liberal democracy are not possible for long without each other.
You can’t have a sustainable and productive free market without civil and political freedoms. Statists seek to undermine all or one of these pillars of beneficial society because they understand that none can function for long without all.
That is why capitalism never flourished for thousands of years under monarchism. However, once classical liberals begin to challenge the monarchy and promote liberal democracy – capitalism began to flourish in parallel with civil and political freedoms.
@ clayton,
Imperial hegemony and colonial subjugation existed for thousands of years without examples of vigorous capitalism, freedom or any kind of substantive and long lasting peace among its adherents.
It is amusingly contradictory that the prevailing (faulty) argument on this anarchist website is that peace can only be explained by absolutist rule with an iron fist.
Equallly inexplicable is that many anarchists, including Hoppe, frequently defend monarchism which is simply statism or absolutism with a hereditary face. And monarchism is neither stable, prosperous or capitalist – unless anarchist dogma suddenly believes that mercantilism benefits any but the few in power.
@ aristippus
Allow those who propose the theory to identify what constitutes a liberal democracy.
No, neither Athens of Syracuse were liberal democracies. In fact, any knowledgable and rational contemporary analyst would conclude that if Athens and Syracuse existed today they would be consider far worse violators of civil and political rights than even a nation like the former South Africa.
Liberal democracies do not practice chattle slavery and they have universal sufferage.
Prior to Europe becoming democratized it was constantly at war. Today it is utterly pacific, as is formerly militaristic Japan. Liberal democracy is the only substantive independent variable that has changed from pre-WWII conditions.
You stated that democracy in common is not the only reason for peace – then provide your rationale for an utterly peaceful Europe if not democracy leading to improved economic, political and military ties borne by a common respect and bond for civil, political and economic liberties ?