Macht Demokratie die Welt wirklich friedlicher?
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/global-elections/does-democracy-really-make-the-world-more-peaceful/89646855
Macht Demokratie die Welt wirklich friedlicher?
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/global-elections/does-democracy-really-make-the-world-more-peaceful/89646855
6 Kommentare
In times of shifts towards autocracies, that create their hubs, networks and value argumentation, it seems of utmost importance to enter a science based discussion about the question whether democracies are more peaceful. Only that way international democracy promotion can tackle the attack from countries like China. This article gives some well founded insights about these questions.
My personal takes is: it depends on the type of democracy.
In a direct democracy where every citizen get to vote on every single major bill that being pass, then yes since most regular people don’t want war.
In an indirect/representative democracy such as the U.S. where citizens have little/no power after they cast their vote, and politicians are in the pocket of $ military industrial complex $ or $ lobbying groups that wants war $, then no. Look at how many conflicts the U.S had involved in since WW2 because of ’national interest‘.
Does anything?
The USSR funded every conflict we funded, invaded most of the same countries the US later invaded. Russia is doing the same. Most of Europe has funded stuff in the middle east that America gets FlAk for. China is lobbing missies over peaceful neighbors. Etc etc.
The difference is the reasoning. America provides the world with global shipping protection, free GPS satellite usage, merchant support, weather data etc etc etc. China wants to literally own oceans, Russia wants satellite states, and the USSR wanted to expand their economy.
I’m not going to say the world is more peaceful because of democracy, but I will say that it’s more peaceful because of shipping security, economic opportunities given to poorer countries by GPS, and the general restriction of China from breaking beyond the East and South China seas.
I think people will always fight. There is no system to terminate that.
The U.S. rather Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, DRC or the UAE to remain autocracies because they benefit from the status-quo. Those countries becoming democratic could potentially challenge our material interests so we refuse to egg it on.
A democracy is just a system of government, it’s not necessarily more peaceful and there isn’t really a lot of evidence to support that. Can’t remember who said this but the quote comes to mind “ a dictatorship is only as good as its leader, a democracy is only as good as its people”
[Hans Rosling ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNX31t7Cees)makes some interesting observations on the relation between Democracy and Health/Wealth in populations in [this presentation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNX31t7Cees).
The basic idea is that he finds no statistical relationship in those concepts.
So if peace can be measured by the distribution of health/wealth in the world then the answer would be we don’t really know(If democracy is affecting this, on a large scale).
Rosling also makes some interesting comments about that(why we don’t know) if you are patient enough to sit through until the end of the presentation.