Rawls on agreeing to disagree: How democracies differ from non-democracies in justifying war

ABSTRACT

We use Rawls’s account of public reason and the Law of Peoples to test two hypotheses: democracies are more likely to invoke self-defense in justifications than non-democracies, and democracies are more likely to invoke human rights in justifications than non-democracies. Through an analysis of war justifications since 1875, we find that although democracies and non-democracies are similarly likely to use self-defense as a justification, democracies are more likely to justify war through human rights. Institutions and values centering on rights that promote domestic public justification also promote justifications compatible with those values and institutions at the international level.

KEYWORDS:

• Deliberative democracy
• democracy and war
• empirical study of deliberative democracy
• justifications for war
• public reason
• Rawls

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Tanisha Faizal, Lisa Martin, Jelena Subotic, Jessica Weeks, and Ayse Zarakol for feedback on earlier versions of this paper, along with audience members and discussants at Midwest Political Science Association and Northeastern Political Science Association conferences where the paper was presented. We also wish to thank the two referees who reviewed this manuscript, and Robert Robinson, who provided early research assistance.

Notes

^1. House of Commons Debates 1999, 16984–991.

^2. Brown, Lynn-Jones, and Miller 1996.

^3. Bennett and Stam, 1998; Slantchev 2004.

^4. Reiter and Stam 2002. See also Downes, 2009.

^5. Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003; Filson and Werner 2004.

^6. Vreeland 2008; Hollyer and Rosendorff 2012.

^7. Kaufmann 2004.

^8. Rawls 1997, 766.

^9. Finnemore 2004; Finnemore 1996. See also Schimmelfennig 2001; Cortell and Davis 1996; Risse 1999.

^10. Khong 1992. See also Anderson 1981.

^11. Campbell 1992; Doty 1996; Steele 2007.

^12. See Schelling 1960; Jervis, Lebow, and Stein 1985.

^13. See Fearon 1997; Smith 1998; Gerson 2010.

^14. Bohman 1998, 401.

^15. Rawls, 1997, 772.

^16. Ibid., 772.

^17. Thompson, 2008, 498.

^18. Rawls 1997, 767.

^19. Ibid., 766.

^20. Ibid., 767.

^21. Ibid., 767.

^22. Ibid., 772 and 769.

^23. Ibid., 768–769.

^24. Ibid., 769.

^25. Ibid., 770.

^26. Ibid., 765–766.

^27. Ibid., 772.

^28. Rawls 1971, 331.

^29. Rawls 1999, 8.

^30. Ibid., 14.

^31. Ibid., 29.

^32. Ibid., 91.

^33. Ibid., 33.

^34. Ibid., 37.

^35. Ibid., 53.

^36. Ibid., 55.

^37. Ibid., 79, 38.

^38. Ibid., 38.

^39. Ibid., 27. It is important to note here that deliberation may not be desirable or possible on timely and critical issues, like war. Indeed, Rawls (1999, 178) suggests in what he terms the “supreme emergency exemption” that states can set aside the strict status of civilians that normally prevents them from being attacked in war. However, we follow Rawls in defining democracy itself as deliberative so that even in decisions such as war, deliberation is theoretically involved through institutional design and the ideal disposition of leaders and citizens.

^40. Ryfe 2005.

^41. Bessette 1997, 3, 36.

^42. Moore 2010, 715.

^43. Events along these lines include: deliberative polls, citizens’ juries, randomly selected citizen panels or mini-publics, focus groups, town meetings, conferences, workshops, citizens’ summits, and participatory budget procedures. For some of the most detailed explanations, see Avritzer 2002; Baiocchi 2005; Fung and Wright, 2003; Hansen 2004; Mansbridge 1980; Mutz, 2008; Nylen 2002; J. Steiner et al. 2004; and Thompson 2008.

^44. For more, see Baiocchi, 2005; Fung 2007; Gastil and Levine, 2005; and Pateman, 2012.

^45. Rawls 1997, 769: “In a representative government citizens vote for representatives—chief executives, legislators, and the like—and not for particular laws (except at a state or local level when they may vote directly on referenda questions, which are rarely fundamental questions).”

^46. Rawls 1997, 769.

^47. Mearsheimer 2013.

^48. Rawls 1997, 766.

^49. See also Walzer 1977.

^50. Marshall 2014, 14.

^51. Rawls 1997, 772.

^52. Thompson 2008, 502, 504.

^53. Sarkees, 2010, “The Correlates of War Inter-state War 3.0 data,” http://www.correlatesofwar.org/data-sets (accessed September 13, 2017).

^54. All justifications were found through a search of the New York Times archive, with the following exceptions, whose sources we note: Soviet Invasion of Hungary, “Report of the Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary, UN General Assembly, Official Records: Eleventh Session” (Supplement No. 18 (A/3592), New York, 1957); The Iran-Iraq War, “Iraqi President’s Speech: Abrogation of 1975 Agreement with Iran,” BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, September 19, 1980; Lebanon War, “Letter from Begin to Reagan,” June 6, 1982, via http:www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/rrmblets.html (accessed January 3, 2012); Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait, “Iraq Ba’th Party Statement on Reasons for Downfall of Kuwaiti Government,” BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, August 6, 1990.

^55. Note that if the Polity IV data is instead coded dichotomously, all of the “partial democracies” become weak democracies, and the results, although consistent with the tri-partite coding, become somewhat weaker as well.

^56. “The Czar Declares War,” The New York Times, April 25, 1877.

^57. “In the President's Words: 'We Act to Prevent a Wider War,” The New York Times, March 25, 1999.

^58. “A NATION CHALLENGED; Bush's Remarks on U.S. Military Strikes in Afghanistan,” The New York Times, October 8, 2001.

^59. “MIKADO DECLARES WAR,” The New York Times, February 12, 1904.

^60. Thomson, Robert, “Hanoi Provoked Clash, Says China,” Sydney Morning Herald, January 8, 1987.

^61. See Walzer 1977.

^62. Justifying conflict to protect the rights of individuals from other nations is not exclusive to modern political thought. For example, an anonymous reviewer helpfully pointed us to the examples of the thinkers from the sixteenth-century Spanish School of Salamanca. For an overview of the school’s arguments on just war, see Pagden 2011.