Another ‘liberal’ approach to international security has gathered momentum the post-cold-war world. This centres on the argument that democratic states tend not to fight other democratic states. Democracy, therefore, is seen as a major source of peace (see Ch.8). As with ‘liberal institutionalism’. This is a notion that has received wide support in Western political and academic circles. In his State of the Union Address in 1994, President Bill Clinton went out of his way to point to the absence of war between democracies as a justification for American policies of promoting a process of democratization. Support for this view can be seen in the Western policy of promoting democracy in Eastern and Central Europe following the end of the cold war and opening up the possibility of these states joining the European Union.
Democratic peace theory has been largely associated with the writings of Michael Doyle and Bruce Russett. In the same way that contemporary realists have been influenced by the work of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Machiavelli, Doyle points to the importance of the insights contained in Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay, Perpetual Peace. Doyle contends that democratic representational an ideological commitment to human rights, and transnational interdependence provide an explanation for the ‘peace-prone’ tendencies of democratic states (1995a:180-4). Equally. the absence of these attributes, he argues, provides a reason why non-democratic states tend to be ‘war-prone’. Without these domestic values and restraints, the logic of power replaces the liberal logic of accommodation