Article Critique: ‘The Myth of the Democratic Peace’ by Thomas Schwartz and Kiron K.
Skinner
In their article ‘The Myth of the Democratic Peace’ Thomas Schwartz and Kiron K.
Skinner questioned and refuted the widely accepted theory of democratic pacifism which
asserts that “democracies share a form of government that prevents war between them”
(p.159). By overthrowing historical and theoretical examples in favor of democratic
pacifism, the authors demonstrated why the ardent belief that democracies are by default
peaceful is a result of a falsely alleged “empirical generalization” and “causal attribution”
(p.160.) Schwartz’s and Skinner’s classification of democratic peace as a myth
conclusively undermines the theory as implausible, with poorly defined key terms. The
article, published in the thought-provoking journal, Orbis, successfully exposes the
weaknesses of a utopian expectation that democracies do not engage in conflict against
each other. Schwartz and Skinner write determinately of the limits set by partisans of
democratic peace theory. It is the purpose of this critique to explain the major arguments
that the authors make, analyze the effectiveness of those arguments, and conclude as to the
value of this article in the vast domain of international relations today.
‘The Myth of the Democratic Peace’ is written in four main parts, along with an
introduction and a conclusion. In the introduction the authors lay out the purpose of their
analysis. In the first part of the article, they draw arguments opposed to democratic
pacifism from historical examples. ‘The Historical Problem’ refers to defining the breadth
and limits of democracy and democratic pacifism, a necessary step in supporting their
views in refuting the theory. According to Schwartz and Skinner a democracy fits six
criteria: “universal and equal broad adult suffrage, competitive elections, the usual civil
liberties, the rule of law, equality before the law, and popular choice or legislative control
of the executive” (p.161). Furthermore, they establish the theory of democratic pacifism as
a tendency, meaning that democratic nations do not fight each other because of their
common form of government. However, this poses the problem of magnitude, and how the
impacts of war are measured (p.162). In the second part, the authors refine their analysis
by examining pre-cold war democracies, starting from the late eighteenth century, the
starting point of the existence of democracies (p.162). In a third part, Schwartz and
Skinner use Cold War democracies to demonstrate that democracy in itself was not to
thank for absence of conflict, but rather that bipolarity resulted in stability, that war was
