Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace

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The study of international relations has fairly produced few widely accepted generalisations. One such generalisation, (Levy 1988), is the belief that democracies do not fight wars with one another. The credence that democratic states do not go to war with one another has become a commonplace of western beliefs. Likely as it may be, it is a dangerous presumption with which to approach the future. It is, however, an idea susceptible to historical analysis. There seven realistic consistencies that relate war-proneness and democracy. These observations are that; democracies are not at all immune from fighting wars with non-democracies, democracies tend to win an unbalanced share of the wars they fight, when disputes occur, democracies turn to …show more content…

The idea that democracies are inherently disposed to peace, can be traced back at least to Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century German philosopher, who made a similar argument in an essay called "Perpetual Peace". In determining what constitutes democracy one would have to lower your standards and more exceptions will emerge. But if there is plenty of scope for political scientists to argue about what constitutes a democracy and what constitutes a war, there is a pattern nonetheless: democracies have fought one another only rarely. There is a number of democratic states that were deemed to have been at war and yet questions were raised about their state of democracies and whether was there coercion or whether was it a coup. The sizes of the countries were also taken into account, so these stringent measures make one wonder whether are the proponents of democracy trying to preserve the term at the expense of human behaviour or are they genuinely being fair in assessing the possibility that democratic states can and have been involved in war in the past and could possibly be in the future. Even though their democracies may not be as stable as they would like them to be but the fact that certain democratic criterion are met should also not be ignored but be taken into

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