Thucydides, Ancient Greece, and the Democratic Peace

Abstract

The hypothesis that democracies rarely fight each other is well-supported for the contemporary era. Yet evidence for it in another era of many democracies—Greece in the fifth century BCE—is weak at best. This article considers several reasons why the experience of the two eras may differ. It shows that the causal reasoning of the contemporary democratic peace depends on key assumptions about how institutions constrain leaders that did not apply well in ancient polities. Analysis of these differences helps to clarify theoretical understanding of interstate relations in both eras.

Keywords:

• Alliance
• democratic peace
• empire
• Immanuel Kant
• mobilization
• Peloponnesian War
• preventive war
• Thucydides

Acknowledgments

For comments I thank Daniela Donno, Benjamin Fordham, Jolyon Howorth, Nikolay Marinov, William Odom, Frances Rosenbluth, Nicholas Sambanis, Arlene Saxonhouse, and an audience at the Alexander Onassis Foundation in Athens.

Notes

1. This understanding motivates such analyses of the contemporary era as Mearsheimer (2001). But see Lebow (2003).

2. See Keohane (1983: 508) for the basic realist model, exemplified in the modern era by Waltz (1979) who substantially channels Hobbes’ 17^th-century world of monarchical autocracies for which some form of unitary actor assumption is not too inaccurate. Gilpin (1988), though a realist emphasizing structural power balance, also incorporates domestic regimes, including for ancient Athens its commercial imperialism.

3. Most famous is Thucydides (1.23), in the old Crawley translation used by Strassler (1996: 16), ‘the growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable’. Blanco and Roberts (1998: 11–12) words this as, ‘the truest explanation for the war is that Sparta was forced into it because of her apprehensions over the growing power of Athens’. Woodruff (1993: xxx–xxxii, 16) translates it as ‘the growth of Athenian power, which put fear into the Lacedaemonians and so compelled them into war’. He interprets compulsion as involving subjective human agency rather than objective necessity. Either way, alarm/fear/apprehension suggests a role for perception and emotion rather than fated inevitability. See the skeptical article in this issue by Pavel Baev, who holds that war was not strictly inevitable and that Thucydides did not believe it to be. Monten (2006) contends that Thucydides’ elaboration of domestic and personalistic motives was meant to illustrate the dangers of departing from the (realist) normative model of rational state-interest behavior. Immense numbers of pots, ribbons, and cartridges of ink have been devoted to deciphering what Thucydides may have meant about inevitability, and answers depend on far more than the translation. For examples, see all the ‘Interpretations’ in Blanco and Roberts (1998: 405–522). In this article I use the Blanco translation for all quotations.

4. This statement is based on my compilation from Thucydides and many other ancient and modern sources. The information covers 232 political units, of which 33 were democratic at some or all times during the Peloponnesian War.

5. I am not a major scholar of Thucydides, but did work on the ancient Greek inter-state system in Russett and Antholis (1992) and Russett (1993: ch. 3).

6. Frequency here is relative; i.e., fewer disputes per democratic dyad than per non-democratic dyad in the international system. For recent conclusions that theory and evidence adequately support this claim see Chernoff (2004), Rousseau (2005), and Kinsella (2005) in dispute with Rosato (2003, 2005). Mansfield and Snyder (2005) claim that when autocracies undergo a process of partial liberalization they are more likely to engage in militarized international conflicts, but even that claim fades when liberalization moves into the range of truly democratic institutions or when one looks at which side first used force (Oneal et al. 2004; Rousseau 2005; Bennett 2006).

7. The old apartheid regime of South Africa, with its whites-only franchise, might look about like Athens on the criterion of full popular participation.

8. Thucydides thus practiced what contemporary social scientists call selection bias in choosing which states and wars to discuss. That does not imply that he deliberately stacked the deck in that selection, only that because the omissions were not made randomly from a known ‘universe’ he omitted many years of peaceful relations between democracies, and perhaps disproportionately more, or fewer, wars between democracies than between other kinds of states. This is a common problem in historical analysis.

9. They are, however, more likely to resist and escalate in disputes when their adversary demands a change in their regime or territorial status (Sullivan & Gartner 2006). Souva and Prins (2006) suggest that the monadic pacific effect fades for that the most economically democracies.

10. Preemption is a term from the cold war, and always remained controversial. The conditions for preemption were those of self defense when a massive nuclear attack was believed virtually certain and imminent (in days, hours, or minutes), and could not effectively be defended. Preventive war is to arrest the growth of ‘military power through bold and timely action’, exploiting one's advantage while it lasted. (Freedman 1989: 126–127).

11. The combination of Athenian size and wealth made possible the extravagance of its armada to Syracuse (6.30; also Forde 1989: 52; Ober 1998: 114). An open economy with high levels of international trade and investment does not, however, serve as a marker for imperialism and increased conflict. To the contrary, contemporary states with open economies tend to be more peaceful in general, not just with other trading states (Russett & Oneal 2001: 148–149; Souva & Prins 2006).

12. The contemporary equivalent might be the all-volunteer professional armed forces equipped with high-tech weaponry.

13. See Ober (forthcoming: ch. 4) on this and other examples of initiative. On the Athenian navy in particular, see also Hirschfeld (1996) and Shaw (1993).

14. A theme of the combination of democracy and imperialism as cause of Athens’ downfall is prominent in Thucydides (Ober 1998: ch. 2).

15. In the contemporary era, Fordham and Walker (2005), report that democracy is associated with relatively lower military spending as a percentage of GDP, and possession of an empire with higher spending. But democracies with large empires spend more than autocracies (personal communication from Benjamin Fordham).

16. One also should not forget, as Thucydides does not, the influence of particular leaders’ perspectives, such as a ‘we-versus-them’ attitude (Keller 2005) or a conviction that peace is served by forcibly transforming other states’ regimes (Saunders 2007). For a view that democratic peace theory is perverted, normatively and empirically, when claimed as a reason or excuse to spread democracy by force see Russett (2005).

17. Free-riding is also common in alliances during peacetime. It emerges in the big superpower alliances of the cold war era (NATO, Rio Pact, Warsaw Treaty Organization), to which most of the smaller members contributed much less, even proportionate to their GDPs, than did the big powers (Oneal & Whatley 1996).

18. This may be partly due to a rational choice bias of institutionalists who perhaps dominate political science in the United States. Yet there is also a strong constructivist wing in the study of international relations. Such theorists, though strongly committed to cultural explanations, frequently resist a claim that democracies are culturally disposed to peace in general. I do not regard some cultural explanations of the DP as irrelevant or inconsistent with the view that a DP may have plural causes depending on context. That rigorous DP theory largely follows rather than motivates the basic empirical observations disturbs some observers. Yet such efforts have a long history in science. While the idea of evolution was in the air of 19th-century Britain, no one had a good causal explanation for it. Charles Darwin spent his five-year voyage on the Beagle collecting thousands of specimens before he conceived the theory documented in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

19. Thucydides (7.55) was well aware of the loss of the Athenians’ mobilization advantage when they engaged democratic Syracuse.

20. A related argument is that in the modern era the transparency of democracies’ debates makes their diplomatic threats more credible when the opposition is united, and inhibits leaders from making threats when opinion is divided (Fearon 1994; Schultz 2001). Wars arising from misperceptions thus would be less likely. But I doubt this influence was very important in the Greek world, given the distance and barriers to ‘real-time’ information on each other's intentions.

21. In a list of competitive national elections in 140 countries from 1945 to 1998, the United States ranks 114th in turnout of voting age citizens (International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, www.idea.int/vt/survey_voter_turnout_pop2-2.cfm, accessed 4 July 2006). The US turnout is depressed partly due to elections being held on workdays, requirements for registration, and the disfranchisement of felons (disproportionately low-income and minority). It would be even lower if the large number of resident non-citizens, legal and illegal, were included in the denominator. Note also that war casualties are concentrated in the relatively disfranchised groups of citizens who are over-represented in the armed forces.

22. In recounting the Athenians’ reaction to news of the final destruction of their forces at Syracuse, Thucydides (8.11) says, ‘When the truth sank in, “the people raged at the politicians who had promoted the armada—as if they themselves had not voted for it!”’ See also Ober (1989: 336), who contends that orators who tried to control the people were ‘never able to define a sphere of influence, authority, or power for themselves’. Nevertheless, Thucydides is not always consistent in such judgments. When looking back on the Sicilian campaign elsewhere (2.65) he draws a more complex picture, blaming competing leaders for ‘surrender[ing] even policy-making to the whims of the people’. See Saxonhouse (2006) for her nuanced discussion of this issue.

23. The quotations are from Kant ([1795] 1970: 100, 101, 123). Out of 16 EU and NATO members, eight require parliamentary approval before sending troops abroad, but none of the long-term major powers (France, Britain, and the United States) do so (Born & Hanggi 2005). Such a constraint may not be compatible with the activist foreign policy typically pursued by major powers. Kant would also be skeptical of contemporary ‘illiberal’ democracies (Fakaria 2004) that hold elections but lack serious restraints on the executive.