The article included this map, which I think guts the argument:
Most of the "stable democracies" are not near each other. Costa Rica is the only stable democracy in Latin America. The two stable democracies in Asia are Israel and Japan. South Africa is the only stable democracy in Africa. Australia is its own continent and who the hell is New Zealand going to attack?
The Scandinavians are a special case. They've flirted back and forth with political union following their last war with each other two centuries ago. Other than Finland, they're constitutional monarchies and they've sort of realized that it's sort of better to try and get along (as much as there are Norwegians and Danes who detest the Swedes for being Quislings).
In central Europe, Germany for three decades of the time-frame was a divided country. Large numbers of foreign troops were based in West Germany to deter the Soviets from invading. Not to mention the point that Germany was rather shell-shocked from losing two major wars in the first half of the 20th Century (and for committing genocide in the second war).
North America may come the closest to making the author's point, but just barely. The peace between Canada and the United States was driven, in part, by Great Britain, which ruled Canada in the first half of the 19th Century (and more or less until the 1930s). One might argue that the treaties following the War of 1812 were de facto recognition by the British that their most direct threat came from their perennial adversary, France, and that they didn't need the distraction of having to defend a three-thousand mile border with little room for defense in depth.*
I would argue that the so-called "peace between democracies" is a consequence of geopolitical reality and, to some extent, the reverberations of the Second World War, and less a feature of the forms of governments of the nations mentioned in the op-ed.
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*Canada is geographically large, but the majority of its population, then as now, lives close to the American border.
5 comments:
I thought Quisling was Norwegian.
<g,d,r>
When I was a kid, one of the mothers on the street was a war bride from Denmark. She referred to the Swedes as "Quislings". She also inspected everything she was going to buy to ensure that it wasn't a Swedish product.
She didn't like the Germans, but she loathed the Swedes.
Quisling was the Prime Minister of the Nazi puppet government of Norway. He was executed by firing squad in 1945.
The Swedes though officially neutral, cooperated with the Nazis, allowing them to move troops and munitions through Sweden between Finland and Norway. Lots of Norwegians and Danes remember that fact. Later in the war the dam buster squadron flew over Sweden without asking permission to attack the Tirpitz since the German radars were pointed towards the sea.
Al_in_Ottawa
There is a lot wrong with that map .
India is stable . Brazil is easily as stable as South Africa .
Glenn
Brazil had a military coup within the time window. Don't know about India.
But even if you were to add them to the map, they're not close enough to another stable democracy for a war.
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