REASONABLE DOUBTS
Critics of the democratic
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peace hypothesis make two main counterarguments. Their first line of attack holds that the apparent pacifism between democracies may be a statistical artifact: because democracies have been relatively rare through out history, the absence of wars between them may be due largely to chance. Evidence for a democratic peace also depends on the time periods one examines and on how one interprets borderline cases like the War of 1812 or the American Civil War.Critics also note that strong statistical support for the proposition is limited to the period after World War II, when both the U.S.-led alliance system and the Soviet threat to Western Europe's democracies discouraged conflict between republics.