Domestic Coalitional Analysis and the Democratic Peace
DEMOCRATIC PEACE THEORY - which postulates that democratic states do not wage wars against one another - has developed into a thriving research programme in international relations. The programme includes both supporters and detractors who apply statistically oriented, formal-modelling, and case-study methods.1 The last has particular affinity with historical analysis. Spencer R. Weart, in testing the dieory against evidence running from antiquity to the twentieth century, finds unqualified support for it.2 This article scrutinizes the democratic peace from the perspective of the relationship between domestic political processes and international behaviour. It explores an alternative, and in some cases complementary, explanation for war and peace that derives from a domestic coalitional approach to politics. The framework pays special attention to the effects of internationalization, in its economic and political dimensions. Some scholars, like Weart, have granted the democratic peace theory the status of a historical law; others only endorse its validity for the contemporary era. The coalitional argument oudined here offers more limited claims, taking the form of a set of general and falsifiable expectations, and acknowledges systematic world-time effects on die behaviour of states. For example, global world-time at the dawn of the twenty-first century is characterized by tension between a globalizing political economy and local or national challenges to it; resistance to an institutionalized global political order; conflicts between a pluralist (multicultural) political approach to human diversity and exclusivist ethno-religious forms; and similar conflicts between regionally differentiated versus globally homogeneous solutions to the opportunities and predicaments posited by the first three. Acknowledging die notion of a world-time could imply that our ability to discover historical laws of international behaviour is compromised, though not necessarily negated. In a landmark analysis of die impact of commerce on war and peace, for example, Richard Rosecrance mapped the longue durée stages in the evolution of states from territorial states to trading states and, more recendy, virtual states
