Few claims about international relations are as widely accepted as the claim of a democratic peace. Many scholars are convinced, along with President Clinton, that "democracies rarely wage war on one another."(1) This proposition provides an important rationale for promoting "democratization" as a pillar of American foreign policy: "ultimately the best strategy to insure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere."(2)
However, the search for a democratic peace, scientific though it may be, is not value-free. I argue that the democratic peace claim is not about democracies per se as much as it is about countries that are "America-like" or of "our kind." The apparently objective coding rules by which democracy is defined in fact represent current American values.
The democratic peace claim is ahistorical; it overlooks the fact that these values have changed over time. In no small part, this change has been influenced by changing international political realities. The values embodied in the current definition of democracy were historically shaped by the need to distance America from its adversaries. They are products, more than determinants, of America's past foreign political relations. The reason we do not fight "our kind" is not that "likeness" has a great effect on war propensity, but rather that we from time to time subtly redefine our kind to keep our self-image consistent with our friends' attributes and inconsistent with those of our adversaries.
In 1917 President Wilson denounced German autocracy, and declared war on Germany to "make the world safe for democracy." Wilson's legacy is embraced by the present proponents of the democratic peace theory.(3) I show, however, that as a political scientist Wilson viewed Germany not as an autocracy, but as a most advanced constitutional state, and that he admired Prussia's statism, administration, and its unequal suffrage. In the 1890s Wilson's political values were different from those currently associated with "democracy," and Germany as he perceived it was significantly more "normal" by his standards at the time than it appears by present norms. Only after U.S.-German political rivalry developed did Wilson begin to differentiate a democratic America from an autocratic Germany. Indeed, America's very self-portrayal as a democracy and the norms by which it defines democracy were in part shaped by the conflict with Imperial Germany. These norms, I argue, came to be selected because the difference between America's political system and its adversary's was greatest when measured against them.
In the following section I criticize the democratic peace literature and elaborate my argument. Then, I reconstruct the political theories and perceptions of Germany held by two prominent political scientists of the late nineteenth century: Woodrow Wilson, later U.S. president, and John Burgess, founder of the first graduate program in political science in the United States. I conclude with the theoretical and policy implications of the argument, especially that "democratization" provides but a frail foundation for U.S. security policy. The democratic character of foreign countries depends on the peacefulness of their foreign policies, no less than their foreign policies toward the United States depend on their democratic character.
The Appearance of a Democratic Peace
A remarkable finding emerged from recent empirical research in international relations: democracies do not wage war on one another.(4) In these studies, polities are coded on a scale that typically takes competitiveness and fairness of electoral processes, as well as constraints on the freedom of executive action, as the defining empirical features of democracy.(5) It is then shown statistically that, controlling for other variables, the likelihood of war between democratic countries is significantly smaller than between non-democracies or between democracies and non-democracies.
There is no consensus on explaining this finding. Two lines of explanation have emerged: one highlights the normative respect that democracies harbor toward each other,(6) while the other focuses on institutional features characteristic of democratic regimes.(7) The differences between these two strands notwithstanding, their proponents use essentially identical rules for coding regimes.(8) I question the objectivity and trans-historical validity of these coding rules, and hence my argument does not discriminate between the two explanations. It is the empirical claim of a democratic peace that I challenge, whatever its explanation.
CRITIQUE
The appearance of a democratic "zone of peace" is the product of three inter-related biases. First, the scientific claim of peace among democracies, let alone the claim's articulation by policy makers, is not value-free. This is hinted by the fact that in all studies America receives virtually perfect scores on the democracy scale.(9) America is the norm against which other polities are measured. American scholars are busier searching for a democratic peace rather than, say, a Moslem peace not least because democracy enjoys strong normative approval in present-day America. Furthermore, the selection of the empirical criteria by which this abstract concept is described - primarily fair electoral processes and executive responsibility - is consistent with the dominant image of democracy in current American culture.
The second bias of the democratic peace literature is betrayed by the fact that America's perfect democracy scores are applied to its past as much as to its present.(10) Current American values are projected backward and other polities, past and present, are ahistorically compared to the present American ideal. Considerable historical experience suggesting that political norms are elastic over time is ignored.(11) Thus, the tastes of present researchers, disguised as impartial coding rules, are conflated with the rather different tastes of past (and arguably of future) actors.(12)
Third, the studies of the democratic peace not only disguise elastic values as fixed coding rules; they risk mistaking the cause of these values for their effect. In postulating "regime type" as an independent variable, they rule out a priori the possibility that democratic norms are the products, as much the determinants, of America's past foreign relations.
THE ARGUMENT
Following these three critiques, my argument is in three steps concerning the "normalizing," historicizing, and endogenizing of the concept of democracy. First, I argue, "democracy" must be "normalized." The democratic peace proposition is not about democracy per se; rather, it should be understood as a special case of an argument about peace among polities that are similar relative to some normative benchmarks. What is special about the benchmarks represented by the coding rules of "democracy" is that they are American. They represent "our kind."
Second, I contend that "our kind" changes over time. Both the normative and empirical content attached to "democracy" by American elites changed notably over the past two centuries. In the nineteenth century, democracy was associated with socialism more than with liberalism. It was understood as the rule of a particular class, the working demos. Democracy was thus deplored by most American intellectuals, who feared that the untamed rule of mass majorities would lead to tyranny and subvert individual liberty.(13) Therefore, in the nineteenth century American elites were reluctant to identify America as a democracy, and instead associated America with republicanism, constitutionalism, liberty, and even Teutonism. It was only around the turn of the century that the moral sign of democracy was reversed. The reversal was facilitated by a re-conceptualization that cleansed democracy of its class connotation. By marrying it to the Prussian science of administration and thus insulating wide areas of decision making from the immature masses, democracy was made safe for the world before the world could be made safe for democracy.(14) Indeed, making democracy safe was precisely the project in which the statist political science of Woodrow Wilson and his generation was engaged in the 1890s. Still, the New York Times continued to contrast authoritarianism against "republic" or "constitutional government" (read: America) until 1917; only thereafter did "democracy" become America's chief self-portrayal.(15)
"Democracy" remains a moving target. Today the association of democracy with a set of classless electoral practices seems to dominate American culture - and, by extension, the scientific coding rules - but this image is not uncontested. It is challenged by the successors of "Students for a Democratic Society" and the New Left who wish to re-associate democracy with class, advocating greater participation of the demos.(16) Equally critical, if less radical, are political economists fearful of the atrophy of democracy into "demosclerosis" due to the malignant effect of "special interests."(17) And critics on the right wish to emancipate the people from "big government," i.e., the very administrative bureaucracy erected in order to make democracy safe for the world. Historical experience cannot tell us which challenge to the present vision of democracy will succeed, but from it we can draw two more modest lessons: that the present vision is not permanent - the future may bring different understandings of democracy or even a renewed disapproval of the concept - and that the future direction of "democracy" (or "our kind") will not be independent of the course of America's foreign relations, the third step of my argument.
The process by which the definition of "our kind" changes in time is not entirely an internal one. To a considerable degree it is influenced by foreign affairs. America's identity has historically developed in ways that made political enemies appear subjectively further and friends subjectively closer to it. The estrangement of democracy from the demos can be better understood if we recognize that many of America's enemies in the twentieth century identified themselves as "people's democracies." By the same token, the reason why after World War I "constitutionalism" has become less central to America's self-definition must be related to the fact that Imperial Germany was widely regarded as an advanced constitutional state. America's Aryan and Teutonic identities were purged for the same reason.(18)
Current American social science is not insulated from this process. Polities have numerous objective dimensions by which they can be measured. The dimensions captured by the current empirical measures of democracy came to be selected through a subtle historical process whereby objective dimensions on which America resembled its enemies were eliminated, whereas those on which America differed the most from its enemies became privileged. Thus, the coding rules defining democracy are better understood as a time-bound product of America's historical international circumstances than as the timeless exogenous force that they are presumed to be.
THE CHANGING "CODING" OF IMPERIAL GERMANY
The contrast between the present and past "coding" of Imperial Germany by American political scientists provides a case in point. Examination of Polity II scores for the pre-1914 period shows that England and France are ranked close behind the United States (i.e., the norm) on the democracy scale, whereas Imperial Germany is significantly behind them, and Austria-Hungary and Russia are even further behind. Alas, the predecessors of today's coders, the political scientists of 100 years ago, subscribed to a different concept of the "good state." To them, Imperial Germany was a member of a select group of states - modern, constitutional, administrative, cohesive nation-states - that were politically the most developed on earth. The difference in political development between this select group (whose chief members included the United States, France, Germany, and England) and the rest of humanity was perceived as far greater than the differences among members of the group themselves. Certainly, members of this group, Germany included, were considered superior in their political development to countries such as Greece, Italy, Argentina, and Chile that are listed by Michael Doyle as members of the liberal club for the pre-World War I period.(19) Within the group of "modern constitutional states," Germany was not necessarily the farthest from the ideal. John Burgess's belief in the superiority of the German polity and culture was fairly close to the views of ardent German nationalists such as Treitschke and Droysen. And Woodrow Wilson's more Anglophile disposition did not exclude Germany from the small circle of the most modern nations, nor did it preclude high regard for important features of the German system. To Wilson circa 1890, for example, the Prussian administrative model was superior to the French one (not to mention Anglo-American administrative impotency); the Prussian constitutional state was preferable to the immature democracy of France; and Prussian local government was the shining model of "self-government" not despite but partly because of its three-class voting system. If any West European country deviated from Wilson's norms it was France, not Germany.
The "re-coding" of Imperial Germany cannot be attributed to the discovery of new facts regarding the nature of its political system. The political scientists of the late nineteenth century knew the facts full well since most of them trained in Germany, and they all read German. The disagreement between the current coders and their predecessors is rather about the selection of the facts. Imperial Germany, like any polity, was a complex multidimensional creature. What changed over time was not the objective creature as much as the dimensions by which it came to be defined. The selection of such defining dimensions is a subjective, normative exercise, and it fundamentally affects the classification of the creature relative to others: if one selects "constitutionalism," "rule of law," or "federalism," Imperial Germany appears "normal" relative to America; select "efficient administration," "progressive social legislation," or "academic freedom," and it becomes the norm; set the norm to Prussia and "one-person, one vote," and Germany becomes "abnormal" (although not so different from the United States if the latter's disfranchised black population is properly accounted for). Social scientists must recognize that their coding rules constitute such summary measurement norms, and that norm selection is not unaffected by the scientist's historical context.
The present coding of regime types in general, and of the Imperial German regime in particular, cannot be understood outside the context of the history of German-American political relations. Whereas in the 1870s and 1880s friendship between the United States of America and "the United States of Germany" was taken as axiomatic, around the turn of the century diplomatic tensions began to mount as both nations were simultaneously emerging on the global imperial scene (the focal points that triggered the tension included Samoa, the Philippines, and Venezuela).(20) The rising tension brought about a gradual erosion of Germany's positive image in America.(21) America's entry into the war in 1917 led to a more radical change in its image of Germany, including a re-characterization of the German political system. It was then that the sharp dichotomy between "autocratic" Germany and democratic America was born. Colleges across the country hastily introduced patriotic "War Issues" courses whose subject matter "presented itself as a clear-cut contest between the forces of light and the forces of darkness."(22) Not only did American social scientists bring war propaganda into their classrooms, some of them also participated in the administration's propaganda effort abroad.(23) Those who dared to take issue with the anti-German hysteria risked their jobs and professional reputation. For example, the chairman of the University of Minnesota's department of political science, William Schaper, was summarily dismissed by the university's regents for insisting that the blame for the war did not rest wholly upon Germany.(24) John Burgess, the father of the discipline of political science in America, is virtually forgotten today in part because of his unrelenting pro-Germanism.(25)
It is the 1917 image of Germany, greatly magnified by the experience of 1933-45, that pervades current American social science.(26) The coding rules employed by the democratic peace literature are heavily influenced by this image. Gurr's democracy/autocracy scales are explicitly informed by the notion that "the empires of Central and Eastern Europe - Germany, Russia, Austro-Hungary - implemented the trappings but not the substance of effective democratic participation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."(27) Now not only is it curious that a "scientific" data set relies so heavily on a particular interpretation of "trappings" versus "substance," it must also be recognized that this interpretation is ahistorical. For Wilson and the political scientists of a century ago did not consider Germany an autocracy, did not lump the German and Russian regimes in the same category (Russia was an autocracy), and were remarkably ambivalent as to whether mass electoral processes were the substance, as opposed to "mere trappings," of effective democratic participation. In sum, the perception of Imperial Germany imprinted in the present coding rules is grossly colored by hindsight and by contemporary values, which in no small part became our values because of the benefit of hindsight.
While the present definition of "democracy" was shaped by the social reality of past U.S.-German enmity, its endurance and universal appeal derive from the material reality of America's triumph. America's military victories established it as the world's leading military, economic, and academic power. But consider, as a counterfactual, the possibility of a German victory in 1917-18. Would Heidelberg not have remained more prestigious than Princeton or Oxford? Would it be common knowledge that Imperial Germany was autocratic, or would we instead remember Victorian England as the imperialistic "autocrat of the sea," as John Burgess described it in 1915? Would articles on peace among "our kind" have sprouted in American political science journals, or rather in German Staatswissenschaft periodicals? And would "our kind" not have been defined in terms of, say, powerful professional bureaucracies insulated from mass public caprice?
The science of the democratic peace is an American social science.(28) Citizens of small, vulnerable countries tend to be acutely aware of the historical contingency of their present circumstances, but from the perspective of an extraordinarily secure, triumphant superpower, counterfactuals such as the above are almost unimaginable. It is a social science written from the latter perspective that typically assumes away the historical contingency of the present. And it is from such a perspective that particular time-bound values can be mistaken for universal timeless truths.
The bulk of what follows is devoted to reconstructing the political theories and views of Germany held by two leading American political scientists, John Burgess and Woodrow Wilson. But first, two methodological issues must be addressed: why focus on political scientists, and, among them, why these two?
METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
The political scientists of the gilded age generally shared the socioeconomic background of contemporary American political elites. Whether by birth or by education, they belonged to a cosmopolitan gentry class that was mostly northeastern in residence, liberal or heterodox in religion, and whiggish in outlook.(29) But the socioeconomic affinity of academic and political elites cannot alone justify selecting political scientists to represent "America's" perception of Germany; academics, after all, exerted little direct influence over American diplomacy.
There are, however, two other important reasons for focusing on the views of past political scientists. First, they constitute the most appropriate "control group" for today's democratic peace theorists who are also mostly political scientists. Early American political scientists were deeply committed to inductive, if unimaginative, science "firmly bottomed on fact and experience."(30) They prized precision of definition and measurement no less than their successors.(31) Therefore, inasmuch as their account of Germany differs from the present account the difference cannot be attributed to pre-scientific idle speculation. Second, while political scientists qua academics had no direct control of the levers of government, one prominent member of the profession did go on to make a crucial mark on U.S. foreign policy: the relevance of Woodrow Wilson's scholarship to assessing the democratic peace proposition need not be rehearsed.
An examination of the political theory of John Burgess in addition to Wilson's makes the "sample" more representative of early American political science. Wilson and Burgess represent two distinct, if immediately successive, professional generations. Burgess was the most prominent member of the German-trained generation that founded professional political science in America, whereas Wilson belonged to the first Ph.D. cohort "minted in America." The two scholars also represent two distinct institutional settings. Burgess founded the graduate school in political science at Columbia University (1880) - the first, and for many years the leading, political science graduate program in the country.(32) Wilson was trained (1883-85) and for several years taught at Johns Hopkins University, then Columbia's rival for the discipline's leadership.(33) Burgess was a Germanophile, while Wilson's cultural and sentimental compass was more oriented toward England. Burgess and Wilson epitomize different shades of the theoretical concerns, political views, and professional experiences of mainstream American political scientists in the late nineteenth century.
Another reason for the inclusion of Burgess in this study is theoretical as much as methodological. There is one key contrast between Burgess and Wilson that is more than a matter of shade or nuance. Whereas Wilson's characterization of Germany changed radically in time, Burgess's positive view of Imperial Germany withstood the worsening of U.S.-German relations and even the hysteria of 1917-18. To the end of his life in 1931, Burgess regarded the German-American conflict, which he considered an intra-Teutonic one, as a calamitous error. The variation between the shifting views of one individual and the steadfastness of the other's elucidates an important theoretical point, namely that my argument operates at the social level more than the individual one. The contrast between Wilson and Burgess, in other words, suggests that a sociology rather than a psychology of knowledge may be appropriate if we wish to understand the process by which values and "coding" of nations change in time. Burgess's case demonstrates that individual scholars are not necessarily puppets in the hands of historical forces, nor do they readily revise their attitudes to accommodate changing political realities. But it also shows that the knowledge generated by, and clung to, by such individual scholars is liable to being forgotten by future communities of scholars. John Burgess was arguably the most important political scientist of his time, and yet few present political scientists recognize his name, let alone are familiar with his theory. Woodrow Wilson's legacy, on the other hand, is well remembered by present political scientists, notably by democratic peace theorists. But even in Wilson's case, collective historical memory is selective. It is the 1917 image of Wilson deploring German autocracy that is etched in the present recollection rather than the earlier Wilson who detested French "democracy," approved German constitutionalism, and admired Prussian statism.
The Nationalist Theory of John W. Burgess
Two episodes that critically shaped the life of John Burgess can also be said to have shaped the origins of academic political science in America: the Civil War and the encounter with Germany. The traumatic experience of disunion and Civil War "provided American political science at the moment of its birth with a compelling raison d'etre and a proximate task: formulating the grounds for an enduring and cohesive national political unit."(34) Of the members of his generation, John Burgess was the most effective in providing the nationalist postwar impulse with a "complete and scientific" theoretical foundation.(35)
Born in Tennessee in 1844 into a family that upheld firm Unionist principles, Burgess enlisted in the Federal army, and observed the horrors of the Civil War first hand.(36) When he graduated from Amherst College after the war there was virtually no academic institution in America that offered rigorous graduate training in the social sciences. Like thousands of other young Americans, Burgess was drawn to Germany, whose universities were the most advanced in the world.(37)
Virtually all the founders of academic social science in America studied in Germany. John Burgess earned his Ph.D. there in the 1870s, and the three young scholars he recruited in 1880 to join him at Columbia had also studied in Germany.(38) Herbert B. Adams, who was to lead the program in history and political science at Johns Hopkins and to supervise Woodrow Wilson's studies there, trained in Germany, as did Wilson's two other teachers.(39) Upon their return to the United States these scholars sought to emulate the model of the German research university.(40) Students in their German-style graduate seminars were required to master the German language, since German scholarship was held in the highest esteem.(41)
But Germany's appeal was not limited to academic excellence. Germany also provided a powerful model of national reunion and consolidation. Upon arriving in Berlin in 1871 Burgess witnessed the victory parade of the troops returning from the Franco-Prussian war, and compared it favorably to "the march of the Grand Army of the Republic through Washington six years before."(42) This personal experience foreshadowed a lifelong love affair with German institutions and culture.
NATION, STATE, LIBERTY, GOVERNMENT
The major theoretical work of John Burgess, Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law (pub. 1890) contains four sections: "the nation," "the state," "liberty," and "Government."(43) The first section opens with a "German," i.e., exact and scientific, definition: "A population of an ethnic unity, inhabiting a territory of a geographic unity, is a nation."(44)
Nations are not born equal, Burgess argued. They have talents latent in their character, largely determined by the racial composition of their population. At the bottom of the racial hierarchy are the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (who do not even merit "scientific treatment"), while the middle ranks are populated by the non-Teutonic European races. The Greek and the Slavonic races excel in the arts, philosophy, and religion, but their form of political organization "manifests a low order of political genius." The Celts "have never manifested any consciousness of political principles or developed any constancy in political purpose." The Romans have a gift for building empires. The most advanced polities were formed by "those nations that may be termed the political nations par excellence, viz, the Teutonic; and if the peculiar creations of these nations may be expressed in a single phrase it must be this: that they are the founders of national states." For Burgess, thus, the nation-state is the highest form of political development, a form that only the Teutonic nations are capable of approaching.(45) Fortunately, in America "an amalgamated Teutonic race is the dominant factor," although the Teutonic elements, "the Anglo-Americans, the Germans, and Scandinavians do not yet mingle their blood completely."(46) Also Teutonic were Germany, England, Holland, Switzerland, the Scandinavian nations, and France (although French blood is diluted by Iberian, Celtic, and Roman elements).(47)
Burgess subscribed to an idealist conception of "the state," subject of the second section of his treatise. The state is not the aggregate product of a contract among free individuals,(48) but an organic body that grows in historical time toward the ideal of the perfect state.(49) Along the state's evolutionary growth path, the creation of a national monarchy signals "the beginning of the modern political era." Then, "a large proportion of the population is awakened to the consciousness of the state, and feels the impulse to participate in the work of its objective realization." They "gather about their king" and "make him but the first servant of the state."(50) Once the king turns into a mere office-holder, subordinate to popular sovereignty, the state can be said to be democratic. Democracy is embodied in a revolutionary popular act of constitution-making, and is conditional upon national harmony and cohesion: "the democratic state must be a national state, and the state whose population has become truly national will inevitably become democratic."(51)
On this historical path, Burgess found both Germany and the United States in the most advanced category of (Teutonic) popular democratic states. For Burgess, the German process of constitution-making was no less revolutionary and progressive than its counterpart, a century earlier, in America. In both cases the people consciously formed a modern national state.(52) Moreover, Burgess identified the Prussian monarch, whether in his capacity as king of Prussia or as emperor of Germany, as a constitutional office holder,(53) a signal of the formation of the modern popular democratic state.
Burgess was a staunch defender of individual liberties, and he regarded the constitutional state as the ultimate guarantor of liberty; it protects individuals both from the incursion of government and from the tyranny of majorities. While in all modern nation-states individuals enjoy similar freedoms, it is in the United States that these freedoms are protected best. In America the fundamental principles of freedom "are written by the state in the constitution; the power to put the final and authoritative interpretation upon them is vested by the state in a body of jurists, holding their offices independently of the political departments of the government."(54)
How do the other modern democratic nation-states measure up? "Of the three chief European constitutions only that of Germany contains, in any degree, the guarantees of individual liberty which the constitution of the United States so richly affords." As much as Germany falls short of the American ideal, its system is superior to France where "there is not the slightest trace of a constitutional guaranty of individual liberty," or to England where the trouble is "that the whole power of the state is vested in the government, and that no sufficient distinction is made between the state and the government." As far as constitutional liberty is concerned, then, Germany is more America-like than either France or England (not to mention countries such as Italy and Greece which are currently coded as having been "liberal" at the time).(55)
John Burgess went to a great length to distinguish "the state" - an abstract organic concept - from the actual government. In fact, the form of the state and the form of the government need not necessarily be in harmony. "It is difficult to see why the most advantageous political system, for the present, would not be a democratic state with an aristocratic government, provided only the aristocracy be that of real merit, and not of artificial qualities. If this be not the real principle of the republican [read: American! form of government then I must confess that I do not know what its principle is."(56) In expressing a preference for a democratic state with a meritocratic government, Burgess anticipated the program of Woodrow Wilson and his generation - who sought to erect an efficient administrative state in the service of the nation - but he himself stopped short of fully articulating this agenda.
Having elaborated the distinction between state and government, Burgess ends his treatise by assessing the merits of various forms of government. A "representative government" is only good if it is constitutionally limited, i.e., "if the state confers upon the government less than its whole power, less than sovereignty, either by enumerating the powers of government, or by defining and safeguarding individual liberty against them." On the other hand, "if the state vests its whole power in the government, and reserves no sphere of autonomy for the individual, the government is unlimited; it is despotism in theory, however liberal and benevolent it may be in practice."(57) From Burgess's earlier discussion of liberty, the identity of the good and bad prototypes of representative government is unmistakable. The English system where "the whole power of the state is vested in the government" epitomizes the bad unlimited representative government; it is despotic in theory and there are no firm guarantees that would arrest a potential slide toward despotism in practice. The United States is the good limited representative state, and from Burgess's earlier discussion of liberty it can be inferred that Germany is closer to this ideal than either England or France.
Another interesting distinction in Burgess's taxonomy of governments concerns "the tenure of the persons holding office or mandate. Viewed from this standpoint, the government is either hereditary or elective." Burgess makes no normative judgment whatsoever regarding the superiority of one system relative to the other. Discerning four alternative hereditary principles, he concludes that "primogeniture in the male line appears the most useful and successful."(58) That this is precisely the Prussian principle should come as no surprise.(59)
Burgess also made a distinction between presidential and parliamentary government. In presidential systems "the state, the sovereign, makes the executive independent of the legislature, both in tenure and prerogative, and furnishes him with sufficient power to prevent the legislature from trenching upon the sphere marked out by the state as executive independence and prerogative." Burgess has high praise for presidential government: "it is conservative. It fixes the weight of responsibility upon a single person; and there is nothing like this to produce caution, deliberation, and an impartial regard for all interests concerned."(60)
Now one naturally associates the United States with presidential government, but Imperial Germany was also squarely a member of Burgess's "presidential club." In his essay on the "Tenure and Powers of the German Emperor," he refers repeatedly to the kaiser as the president of the German union or "president of a republic."(61) That the king of Prussia was the president of Germany was written in the German constitution, and for Burgess to have referred to him as such (accepting the form of the constitution as its substance) was entirely uncontroversial in 1888. The kaiser's lack of electoral approval did not matter to Burgess at all (the kaiser, after all, inherited the crown through the best hereditary principle); and if one "president of a republic" should emulate the other, then it was probably the American executive who could learn from his more powerful German counterpart. Burgess's comment about the emperor's veto power in his capacity as king of Prussia is instructive: "These are very wise provisions under existing conditions. I do not see how the Emperor would be able to discharge his great duties to the nation without them."(62)
Parliamentary government was regarded by Burgess as inferior to presidential government. Conspicuously alluding to England, Burgess suggested that the successful operation of parliamentary government depended upon peculiar conditions: a hereditary kingship "possessing the most sincere devotion and loyalty of the masses," a national religion that preserves "the morality of the masses," and "limited suffrage through which the intelligent, conservative and moderate classes shall be the bearers of the political power." The extension of the franchise was threatening to undermine the system. For "how with the present degree of popular intelligence in even the most advanced states can these qualities [stability, civility] be secured in a legislature whose members are chosen by an universal or a widely extended suffrage?"(63) To the extent that Burgess liked liberal England, then, it was the England envisioned by conservative whiggish liberals such as Walter Bagehot, rather than the increasingly democratic England of the late nineteenth century.
In sum, for John Burgess, Germany, England, and France were all closer to the American ideal than Italy, Greece, and the Slavic countries, let alone the colonial world, and among the ranks of those most advanced nation-states, Germany was clearly at the top.
GERMANY: EUROPE'S BEST GUARANTEE OF PEACE
In "Tenure and Powers of the German Emperor," Burgess discussed the emperor's powers in the area of foreign affairs. The emperor was constitutionally empowered to make "alliances with foreign powers, and to declare [defensive] war and make peace." But he was "most heavily handicapped in the exercise of the power of declaring offensive war" since for such an act "the consent of the Federal Council is necessary." As king of Prussia, the kaiser controlled 17 seats in the Federal Council, yet in order to muster the 30 votes necessary to declare war, he needed "an agreement between the princely heads of at least three states besides Prussia." The German princes are not only "old" and "conservative," they are also "hostile to centralization of power in the Imperial government, and they know that war tends to that." Hence, the German constitution provides the best "safeguards against arbitrary, ill-considered, unnecessary declarations of war" that one could possibly devise.(64)
Burgess closes the essay with the following evaluation of the character of the German imperium:
It is full of the spirit of conservatism, and well regulated by law. Its constitution guards it well against personal arbitrariness or vacillation on the part of the Emperor or the princes, or fickleness and violence on the part of the people. It is Europe's best guaranty of peace through the power to enforce peace. In a sentence, it is a constitutional presidency; and if it needs any reform, it is in the direction of more strength rather than less.(65)
BRITAIN: "AUTOCRAT OF THE SEA"
John Burgess remained an unwavering Germanophile even after the turn of the century, when the mainstream of political science was beginning to moderate its German accent. His remarks before the Germanic society of America in 1908 betray a feeling of unease about the erosion of German-American amity.(66) In 1914 Burgess, who had retired from Columbia in 1912, was not alone in sympathizing with the German side. But on balance, when Burgess published The European War of 1914, he was swimming against the stream of public opinion.(67) Attempting to avert a German-American conflict, Burgess pulled no punches in venting his pro-German and vehemently anti-British views. He not only depicted England as "despotic" and "navalistic-militaristic," but also drew a most unflattering comparison between the "autocrat of the sea" and the "autocrat of the land" (Russia). Germany, however, Burgess proclaimed to be Britain's "opposing counterpart":
Its economic system is by far the most efficient, most genuinely democratic, which exists at the present moment in the world, or has ever existed. There is no great state in the world today in which there is so general and even a distribution of the fruits of civilization as in the United States of Germany. And there is no state, great or small, in which the plane of civilization is so high.(68)
The Statist Theory of Woodrow Wilson
Born in the South in 1856, young Woodrow Wilson shared his father's Confederate sympathy, but as an adult he came to support the Union's cause.(69) The Civil War experience cast a shadow on Wilson's thought no less than it did on the older Burgess; one theme that recurs throughout Wilson's writings is the concept of an organic, cohesive nation-state. Yet whereas for Burgess the state remained an abstract expression of the nation, Wilson sought to endow the nation with a concrete, efficient, administrative state.(70)
Woodrow Wilson was a well-published political scientist, but he never completed The Philosophy of Politics, the treatise he hoped would become his definitive theoretical book. According to the editors of Wilson's papers, the book would have consisted of a series of essays or addresses on "the modern democratic state," the historical chapters of his book The State, and above all, Wilson's notes for his lectures on administration, law, and jurisprudence.(71)
These materials were produced mostly in the decade subsequent to Wilson's receipt of the Ph.D. (1886), during which he taught at Bryn Mawr College, at Wesleyan College, and from 1890 onward at Princeton.(72) My analysis focuses primarily on Wilson's writings and notes from that period because they constitute the core of his never-completed big book, because the book he did complete during that period (The State, 1889) is considered his "greatest scholarly achievement," and because it was the period of Wilson's greatest productivity as a political scientist. (In later years he increasingly turned to popular, largely historical, writing and speaking and to academic administration.)(73)
Before turning to Wilson's Philosophy of Politics, a few comments are in order with regard to his earlier writings. Woodrow Wilson is rightly remembered as an Anglophile. His family maintained a strong sentimental attachment to their Anglo-Scottish ancestry,(74) and the young Wilson advocated the adoption of the parliamentary system in the United States.(75) The fascination with England did not indicate an anti-German attitude, though. Bismarck in particular was the subject of Wilson's admiration. The chancellor was not above intrigue and deceit, Wilson wrote, but he was nevertheless a most "creative," "insightful," and "energetic" statesman. "We can find on record few instances in which a comparatively small and virtually dependent kingdom has been raised in eight years to the proud place of a first class power by the genius of a single man."(76)
But even more important is the fact that from his earliest writings Wilson had displayed extraordinary animus toward France. In his unpublished essay on "Self-Government in France," Wilson argued that the French people were not ready for self-government.(77) French peasants are "almost hopelessly ignorant" and "acquiescent" (p. 529), while members of the bourgeoisie are "not of the stuff of which trustworthy citizens are made" (p. 527). Inspired by Edmund Burke, Wilson complains that the French are impetuous.(78) They try to install methods of self-government by way of revolution, methods that can only be applied successfully in England and America, where they evolved naturally over time. "The history of France since the opening of the Revolution has been little more than a record of the alternation of centralized democracy with centralized monarchy, or imperialism, in all cases of the sway of a virtual despotism" (p. 523). The parliamentary system fits France "as ill as independence of parental authority fits a child" (p. 524); "for more than a century its forms have been observed" (p. 533; emphasis original).
In various subtle ways, the derogatory language of the essay reappears in Wilson's later writings. Throughout his more mature scholarship, references to the French polity are laced with terms like "intoxicated," "poisonous," "mechanical," "unstable," and "impetuous."(79) The view of the French political system as dissonant with French national character, of France as a democracy in form only, and of French administration as inferior to Prussia's is a virtual constant in Wilson's "philosophy of politics." Unlike current social scientists who tend to single Germany out as an aberrant case of political development, Wilson rather considered France the "abnormal" case. In his political theory Germany was in the proper place in its natural trajectory of political development; "impetuous" France was not.
Let us now turn to Wilson's "philosophy of politics," written in fragments at a time when Wilson had conquered the German language, and when his intellectual horizon expanded to cover foreign polities other than England alone.(80) Wilson's scholarship was typical of his generation in combining a historical account of political development with a current cross-national comparison.
Wilson's theory of political development is reminiscent of Burgess's in that it is racialist-hierarchical in nature. To understand the origins of modern government, Wilson wrote, one need not study the "savage" traditions of "defeated" primitive groups but rather the contributions of the "survived fittest," primarily the groups comprising the Aryan race.(81) From the infancy of Slavonic village communities,(82) Wilson traces the Aryan path to political maturity through the history of the Greeks and Romans, the Germanic tribes, and the English people. Each group adopted the positive practices of its predecessor and added the ingredients consistent with its own character The Teutons "brought about that fusion of German customs with Roman law and conception which . . . was to produce the conditions of modern political life."(83) They also bequeathed to England "the principle of representation."(84) In England, "out of the freehold and local self-government grew the constitutional state; out of the constitutional state grew that greatest of political developments, the free, organic, self-conscious, self-directing nation, with its great organs of popular representation and its constitutional guarantees of liberty." Finally the English nation "gave birth to America."(85) In sum, the Aryan race left behind more backward races and embarked on a slow march toward political progress. At the pinnacle of Aryan political development is the organic, free, constitutional nation-state, and America is its best exemplar.
Wilson stressed even more emphatically than Burgess the organic nature of the nation-state.(86) The state is "an abiding natural relationship"; it is the eternal "expression of a higher form of life than the individual, namely the common life which gives leave to individual life."(87) The embodiment of the most fully-grown modern nation-state is the constitutional state: "a self conscious, adult, self-regulated (democratic) state."(88) This definition is important, for it suggests that the "democratic state" was a sub-type, the most radical form of the most advanced political form, the constitutional state. Constitutional states are characterized by four elements: first, that "the people have some form of representation. It does not make any difference what the representation is, as long as it be broad enough";(89) second, administration subject to the laws; third, an independent judiciary with independent tenure; and fourth, a more or less complete formulation of the rights of individual liberty.(90)
There is absolutely no doubt that Wilson regarded both the German Federation and its chief member, Prussia, as members of this elite group of "constitutional states," along with England, the United States, France, Switzerland, Sweden-Norway, and Austria-Hungary. These are the states that are the subjects of "country chapters" in The State and that are most often used by Wilson to illustrate his arguments on constitutional law and administration. The most important of them in Wilson's eyes appear to have been England, the United States, Prussia/Germany, France, and Switzerland, whose constitutions Wilson explicitly compares to the U.S. constitution in his lecture on the "modern constitutional state." These constitutions are not precisely alike; they should not be, because "they originated in the circumstances of the time." Their differences notwithstanding, none is inferior to the others. All of these countries possess the four elements characteristic of the modern constitutional state, and in all of them the constitution is supreme. For example, "the King of Prussia cannot change the constitution made by him: it is held fast in its place by the feeling that it would be unsafe to play with it. Once given forth, it cannot be withdrawn."(91)
Wilson's theory of organic political development stressed the importance of harmony between actual legal and political institutions and the readiness of the national "habit" to benefit from such institutions. Consider Wilson's commentary on the then new Japanese constitution, "copied, in the main, [from] the Constitution of Prussia." The chief point of resemblance between the two is that "the ministers are responsible to the Emperor, not to the legislature. . . . Here the model is not one of responsible government in the English, French, Italian sense." Now, from a present perspective this sounds like a serious indictment of the Prussian and Japanese arrangements, but Wilson says that "considering the stage of development in which Japan now finds itself, the Prussian constitution was an excellent instrument to copy. Her choice of it as a model is but another proof of the singular sagacity, the singular power to see and learn, which is Japan's best constitution and promise of success."(92) Notice that this is not only a direct endorsement of the Japanese constitution but also an indirect approval of the Prussian one. Prussia is not indicted for deviating from the English norm, but rather praised precisely for not copying it mindlessly. Prussia's legal institutions are properly consonant with its national "habit." In contrast, the history of France illustrates the perils of copying English arrangements in form only and of adopting legal institutions "not sustained by habit."(93)
THE DEMOCRATIC STATE
As noted earlier, in Wilson's thought the "democratic state" is a sub-category of the "modern constitutional state." The membership of this category is extremely limited: it includes the United States, Switzerland, Australia, and to a lesser degree England, where there remain "some rebellious pulses" and "the drill of liberty has not extended to all classes." (Fortunately, though, "it was [England's] drilled classes that she sent to America.") France would not become a democracy unless "she shall have . . . [a] few more hard lessons in self-control."(94) To both France and Spain, moreover, democracy is a "slow poison" and South America suffers from a "maddening drought" of democratic institutions.(95)
While Wilson used "democracy" with approval, his understanding of the term was quite unlike its present meaning. First, the concept of democracy was as attached to the notion of organic national development as the wider category of "constitutional state" was. Democracy and "nation" were inseparable, for democracy is only possible when the nation is ripe for it. Thus, Wilson did not denounce the continental states for not being democratic enough, since he recognized that they were disadvantaged by their "hazardous" geographical and historical circumstances.(96) The English race was fortunate (like "closeted" Switzerland) to be insulated from the "fierce contests of national rivalries" that characterized the continental experience. For the continental countries prematurely to adopt institutions which developed slowly and organically in the English-speaking world would be a greater sin than to remain less democratic yet in national habit. France was the impetuous sinner, whereas Germany's institutions were in harmony with her organic development.(97)
Second, Wilson greatly downplayed the role of elections as the proper touchstone of democracy. A democracy is properly ruled by "the men of the schools, the trained, instructed, fitted men." As long as these men get a fair opportunity to govern - through ballot or through civil service examinations - the requirements of democracy are met. The civil service method of selection is "eminently democratic" since "it draws all the governing material . . . from such part of the people as will fit themselves for the function." Selection by merit "is but another form of representation."(98) In Wilson's eyes, then, democracy was not an electoral process as much as a meritocracy. Indeed, one is struck by how little Wilson expressed concern about electoral equality: "Not universal suffrage constitutes democracy. Universal suffrage may confirm a coup d'etat which destroys liberty."(99) He had little moral problem with the fact that the U.S. Senate was not popularly elected or with the disfranchisement of blacks in the South. In The State he reviewed the details of the unequal three-class voting system of Prussia in a purely factual manner without moral condemnation. At the municipal level he unambiguously endorsed this very voting scheme for the United States.(100) Moreover, a democracy qua meritocracy - the rule of the educated and trained - was for Wilson a bulwark against the ignorance of the masses. As much as he championed the forces of public opinion, his view of the mass public was very unflattering. The average citizen's mind is fickle: "you cannot expect him to have a 'sound conviction' on the silver question, substantial views on the Behring Sea controversy, or original ideas on the situation in Brazil."(101)
Thus it is not surprising that Wilson approved of insulating foreign affairs from the scrutiny of popular assemblies. Noting that the House of Commons exercised but minimal control over the conduct of British foreign policy, Wilson opined that some matters are "of too delicate a nature to be publicly discussed in Parliament; some plans, particularly of foreign policy, would be simply frustrated by being prematurely disclosed. . . . A certain wide discretion must be allowed the Ministers as to the matters they will make public."(102)
In short, Wilson is better interpreted as a Burkean conservative than as a champion of mass electoral democracy. His aim was to purify the concept of democracy from its association with (French) revolution, Jacksonian populism, and the rule of the unenlightened demos. Electoral equality was good "only up to the point where all are equal in capacity to judge," but since that point can at best be only "roughly approximated," government must be entrusted to an educated, not necessarily elected, administrative elite.(103) Enter Prussia, a model of rational administration.
WILSON ON ADMINISTRATION
At the turn of the century, "public administration" - local and federal - was at the center of the agenda of American political science. Woodrow Wilson was among the pioneers of the academic study of administration. In his first essay on the subject, published in 1887, Wilson lamented "the poisonous atmosphere of city government, the crooked secrets of state administration," and federal "corruption," which "forbid us to believe that any clear conceptions of what constitutes good administration are as yet widely current in the United States."(104) The solution was to study the science of administration "developed by French and German professors." In France, administrative machinery was perfected by Napoleon. In Prussia, an "admirable system" of administration was "most studied and most nearly perfected"(105) by great kings and reformers who "transformed arrogant and perfunctory bureaux into public spirited instruments of just government."(106) The English race, on the other hand, "has exercised itself much more in controlling than in energizing government."(107) Americans must learn from continental administrative wisdom, and "distill away its foreign gases" to suit the American system.(108)
In the following years, as Wilson's knowledge of the German language and of the continental literature improved, he mitigated his view that the continent was "foreign gas." Especially in the area of city government, Wilson was to determine that the Prussian system was not foreign as much as "Pan-Teutonic" in nature, and that it was the highest form of self-government.(109) He was to discover, furthermore, that to the extent that continental ideas contained foreign gases, the French ideas were more lethal than the Prussian.
The administrative state envisioned by Wilson was not the "night watchman" of the English liberal model but was rather patterned after the statist German model. It was a state that fulfilled many tasks that as far as Washington was concerned still lay in the far future: "poor relief, insurance (pensions and other); savings banks; forestry, game and fishing laws"; promoting the "economic and other activities of society by means of . . . posts, telegraphs, telephones, etc.; Maintenance and supervision of railways; . . . Establishing of institutions of credit" and so on.(110) Furthermore, Wilson admired the model of the University of Berlin - a university harnessed in the service of the nation.(111) In sum, Wilson was an admirer of German statism, and in regard to the functions of the state he unambiguously wished that the United States would become more like Germany than England.(112) He was by no means a maverick within the ranks of American political science at the time.
Turning now from the functions of administrative states to their governmental structure, Wilson customarily classified states into three classes based on their "type of headship." In "autocratic" polities such as Russia and Turkey, "there is an entire absence of any constitutional means of controlling the acts of the head of the state." In "republican" polities such as the United States, France, and Switzerland, "the Head of the State is made subject to complete subordination to the laws, and is besides held to a personal responsibility for his observance of them." In the third category - "constitutional" systems - the head of state is subjected to "constitutional control" while "there is no personal liability on his part to arrest or other punishment." Interestingly, both England and Prussia exemplify the latter category (as do Bavaria, Spain, and Italy). In constitutional states, royal sovereignty "is nowadays mediate; and mediate sovereignty is no sovereignty at all. The modern monarch is, consequently sovereign only representatively and by reason of his participation in the determinations of the highest body of the State."(113)
To learn about the status of the head of the "Federal State," Wilson compared the United States to Germany. The U.S. head of state is "the executive agent of the central government," whereas in Germany he is "member of the sovereign body [Bundesrat] as head of a presiding member state [Prussia]." Yet, "in all these cases the head of the State is strictly subject to the laws, to constitutional rule and procedure, though in some cases the responsibility is direct and personal, while in others it is only through ministerial proxy."(114) What the latter phrase shows is that in 1894 Wilson perceived the German emperor as an indirectly responsible executive. Overall, from Wilson's lectures and from The State, the picture arises of the kaiser as a hereditary chief executive who "possesses no slight claim to be regarded as the most powerful ruler of our time" yet who is nonetheless bound by a fine constitutional machinery. "There are distinct limits to his power as Emperor, limits which mark and emphasize the federal character of the Empire and of it a state governed by law, not by prerogative."(115)
Nowhere in Wilson's writings from that period was I able to find references to the emperor - whether in his capacity as federal president or king of Prussia - as an autocrat. The adjective "autocrat" was reserved for absolutist tsars and caliphs, and it was not counterposed to democratic rule but rather to republican and constitutional forms of government.
Wilson was as interested in local as in national government, for the "local organs of self-government are . . . after all, the most important to the life and vigor of political liberty."(116) American city government lacks vitality and "is conspicuous chiefly because of its lack of system."(117) In France, centralized "interference in local affairs . . . more and more minute and inquisitive, results in the strangulation of local government."(118) Prussia offers by far the best model of local self-government. Whereas the highly centralized French system "misses the principle of life, which is not uniformity but variety," the Prussian model of "concentration" (centralized oversight, but not control of local government) secures "local variety and vitality without loss of vital integration."(119) In a framework such as Wilson's which emphasizes organic national life, the term "vitality" is the ultimate compliment.
Self-government is not about mass voting, but rather "consists in taking part in the government: If we could give, say, to the better middle class the whole power of government then we should have discovered self government. . . . What we should seek is a way to harness the people to the great wagon of state and make them pull it."(120) Wilson regarded Berlin - "the most perfect flower of the Prussian municipal system"(121) - as the best example of this ideal system, where the "better" citizens (but not the demos) actively participate in administration, and where rights are tied to service. In Berlin "over 10,000 people [are] associated in the Government, besides the paid officers of the civil service." They must serve without pay "or else lose [their] franchise and have [their] taxes raised." Berlin's electoral system is "characteristic of the Prussian system. The voters are divided into three classes, according to their contribution to the taxes." Although unequal in size, "each of these classes elects an equal number to the Board of Alderman."(122) These facts are recounted with Wilson's highest stamp of approval, namely with a certification of English origins. Berlin was not a foreign example but "just as truly an English example. It is a Pan-Teutonic example of processes that seemed to inhere in the ancient policy of the people to which we belong . . . so we shall not find ourselves on unfamiliar ground by going back to Berlin."(123) Berlin, in sum, embodied the highest form of "self-government": a most successful blend of popular participation with great administrative efficiency, a shining model to be emulated by American reformers.
Conclusion: Implications for Theory and Policy
The claim that democracies do not fight one another is not about democracies per se; it is better understood as a claim about peace among countries conforming to a subjective ideal that is cast, not surprisingly, in America's self-image. Democracy is "our kind," and the coding rules by which it is defined are but the unconscious representations of current American political values. These values are elastic over time, and their historical change is influenced by America's changing international circumstances. The normative standards embodied in the present definition of democracy were selected by a subtle historical process whereby standards by which America resembled its adversaries have been excluded, while those that maximized the distance between America and its rivals have become privileged. In the process, not only has the perception of friends and adversaries changed, but so has America's own self-perception. Democracy, therefore, is not a determinant as much as a product of America's foreign relations. The reason we appear not to fight "our kind" is not that objective likeness substantially affects war propensity, but rather that we subtly redefine "our kind."
American political scientists do not stand apart from this historical process. The political values espoused by scholars a century ago were rather different than present values. John Burgess's ideal political system was a Teutonic, national, "democratic [read: constitutional] state with an aristocratic government."(124) Woodrow Wilson was as fearful as Burgess of the untamed rule of the demos, and by purifying the concept of democracy of its radical French content he sought to make it safe for the world long before vowing to do the converse. Wilson's ideal polity was a constitutional (Aryan) state administered efficiently by a selected, not necessarily elected, educated elite, insulated from the ignorant masses. Relative to contemporary ideals, Imperial Germany appeared more "normal" than relative to present norms, which prize fair electoral process and executive responsibility. For both Burgess and Wilson, Germany was a member of a select group of the most politically advanced countries, far more advanced than some of the nations that are currently coded as having been "liberal" during that period.(125) And within this group Germany was ranked either as second only to the United States itself (Burgess), or as positioned below England yet above France (Wilson). What has changed since the 1890s was not the objective nature of the (Imperial) German polity as much the nature of its political relations with America and, subsequently, the subjective norms by which it came to be measured. American social scientists are deluding themselves if they believe that their scientific definitions are value-free, or that their values are fixed in time and place. It is only from the perspective of a secure and overwhelmingly victorious country that a time-bound illusion can so easily be taken for a universal truth.
THE THEORETICAL CONTEXT
In the late 1930s, E.H. Carr was inspired by Mannheim's sociology of knowledge to expose the idealist foundations of the young English science of international relations. Building upon "the outstanding achievement of modern realism" - revealing "the relative and pragmatic character of thought" - he criticized the Wilsonian-liberal paradigm of the harmony of interests as the unconscious product of the peculiar historical and geographic circumstances of the English-speaking countries. Beneath the veneer of the objective concept of international harmony, Carr argued, lay a post-hoc ideological justification of Anglo-American mastery.(126)
By the dawn of the Cold War era, international relations has become a predominantly American science.(127) To Hans Morgenthau and fellow realists, whose agenda was shaped by the lesson of Munich, Carr's thought held only a partial appeal, for as much as they admired his analysis of the bankruptcy of liberal thought, they were justly reluctant to accept the policy conclusion the analysis led him to: support of appeasement.(128) Later, while the Cold War was evolving into a "long peace," the attraction of Carr's historical realism eroded further as a generation of "neo-realists" understandably found the analytical tools of microeconomics more suitable for making sense of "the stability of a bipolar world,"(129) and for designing "deterrence" of a conveniently fixed adversary. Indeed, in recent decades Carr's legacy has not been upheld by realists (or neo-realists) as much as by critical theorists, who were attracted to Carr's historicist-sociological approach.(130)
Now that the stability of the Cold War has given way to greater fluidity, and so long as the new multipolarity does not yet seem to coincide with major war, neo-realist theory appears out of alignment with the times. Its appeal is diminishing precisely when Wilsonian internationalism is re-issuing a formidable challenge to realist pessimism in the form of the democratic peace claim. The scientific, ahistorical tool kit of neo-realism is ill equipped to deal effectively with the equally ahistorical and ostensibly more scientific neo-Wilsonian challenge. Engaging democratic peace theory on its own scientific ground - quibbling over particular coding decisions, the significance of statistical coefficients, or the details of diplomatic cases - may usefully bruise it but does not critically damage it.(131) Instead, it may be time for realists to offer a more fundamental critical exposition of the limits of the very ground. It is time for pessimists to re-acquaint themselves with Carr's historical sociology of knowledge.(132) This is the path I attempted to follow here.
OTHER CASES AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS
Germany may not be the only nation that underwent a substantial transformation in the American mind, for in the twentieth century America faced two other bitter enemies: Russia and Japan.
Several times in the past century Americans have come to believe that Russia was closer to their ideals than they previously thought. In 1917-18 the United States and Russia's new Menshevik government were allied against Germany. Woodrow Wilson then declared that "Russia was known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought." Wilson himself apparently was not among those who knew Russia best, since in his past writings he had never described it as anything but a backward autocracy. In 1917, though, he discovered that autocracy, "terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, character, or purpose."(133) A writer in the American Political Science Review struck similar themes when he sought to refute the myth that the Russians were "Asiatic" (read: inferior), to establish that "Russian Slavs in the early periods of their national existence were democratic," and to attribute the excesses of Russian despotism to pervasive German influence.(134)
Russia's image in America, tarnished following Wilson's anti-Bolshevik military intervention, improved again in the early 1930s. Against the backdrop of deep capitalist crisis many liberal intellectuals (and not just "fellow travelers") looked to Russia for inspiration. Not only were they awed by Russia's rapid economic growth (contrasting sharply with America's stagnation), they were especially enamored of Soviet centralized planning.(135) With the rise of the Fascist threat and the formation of the popular front in 1935, Russia's attraction had grown so much that many liberal intellectuals were all too willing to apologize for Stalin's atrocities. Perhaps the most cogent philosophical justification of "progressive" unity against Fascism was provided by political scientist and popular commentator Frederick Schuman. Liberalism and communism, he argued in 1936, shared common philosophical roots, and were both on the "democratic" side; Russia and America were both democracies, and they might become even more alike as the Russians moved toward greater political liberty while America progressed toward greater economic equality.(136)
The positive image of Russia receded in 1939 as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact, only to be revived in 1941. The uncritical depiction of Russia and "Uncle Joe" Stalin during the wartime alliance was not limited to the mass media. Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin attributed the friendship between Russia and America to the compatibility of their fundamental values and their sociocultural similarity.(137) Harvard philosopher Ralph Barton Perry found that the Soviets were moving away from Marxism "in the direction of ideas that we can call, in very broad terms, democratic." And theologian Reinhold Niebuhr echoed Schuman's view when he wrote that "we have, on the whole, more liberty and less equality than Russia has. Russia has less liberty and more equality. Whether democracy should be defined primarily in terms of liberty or equality is a source of unending debate."(138) The "unending debate" ended abruptly with the outbreak of the Cold War. Not surprisingly, it was resolved in favor of American liberty, against socialist equality, thus opening the door to a historic reconciliation between the formerly contentious ideas of democracy and free market capitalism.(139)
After the end of the Cold War, Americans again rushed to embrace Russia's "transition" toward American democratic ideals (now wedded to free market ideals). American economists hurried to advise the Russians how to dismantle their previously admired planned economy, while lawyers and political scientists were eager to help remake Russian legal and political institutions. In those euphoric days Americans widely agreed that if Russia were not a mature democracy yet, it surely was a nascent one. At the present moment, however, many Americans are far less certain of Russia's democratic credentials. Why? Has the Russian Parliament been shut down or the constitution suspended? Has the president been violently overthrown? No, what has changed is not the objective nature of the Russian political system as much as Russia's external behavior. The recent change in the American perception of the Russian polity has been driven by an erosion of trust in Russia's commitment to political cooperation more than by a genuine erosion of Russian "democracy." Another Chechnya, another demonstration of Russian foreign policy assertiveness, and those voices that currently invoke the "nascent democracy" image of Russia might also turn silent.(140)
The practical moral of the story is straightforward. If history is any guide, the American view of the democratic or non-democratic identity of Russia (or the other formerly communist countries of Europe) will continue to depend on the peacefulness of their foreign policies more than their foreign policies will depend on their democratic identity. The current American policy of "democratization" may be good for other reasons, but as a pillar of international peace and security it is extremely shaky, for it lacks solid historical foundations.
As for Japan, given that in the late nineteenth century its leaders emulated the Prussian model, and that it later fought alongside Germany against America, it is not surprising that Japan's image in America underwent a transformation similar to Germany's. As noted above, Japan's adoption of Prussian constitutionalism was hailed by Woodrow Wilson in 1889 as proof of her "singular sagacity." As Japan turned to external aggression, the notion of her distinctiveness lingered but the moral sign attached to it shifted from positive "singularity" to negative peculiarity. This view is echoed, for example, by Barrington Moore, a prominent social scientist who assigned Imperial Japan (with Germany) to the "capitalist and reactionary" category of political development.(141) As Japan was remade by the American victors after 1945, a distinction was drawn between its deviant past and its more normal present.(142) Indeed, by the coding rules used by students of the democratic peace, Japan is presently a democracy, which is reflective of the mainstream view of Japan in America today. But there is also a dissenting account of Japan, depicting it as democratic in form only (like France in Wilson's eyes). Proponents of this minority view stress the enormous power wielded by unelected Japanese bureaucrats and argue that in Japan "the idea of 'citizen' as distinct from 'subject' is hardly understood. Pluralist representation exists on paper, of course, but to believe that this informs Japanese practice is taking very much on faith."(143) Which of the competing views is more accurate, I do not know. But what I do know is that if America ever fights Japan again, the current mainstream and the minority views will trade places. This is what happened to Imperial Germany (and probably to Japan itself). If, however, America and Japan ever find themselves fighting a common enemy, Japan will be happily vindicated from the charge that it is democratic in form only. This is exactly what happened to France. Either way, the theory that "our kind do not fight each other" will be safely salvaged.
I thank the following individuals (some of whom disagreed with my argument) for helpful counsel: William Dixon, Geoff Eley, Scott Gates, Jeff Legro, Rhona Leibel, Yair Magen, John Mearsheimer, Andy Moravcsik, Dick Price, Diana Richards, Bruce Russett, Marc Trachtenberg, Stephen Van Evera, Bill Wohlforth, Amy Zegart, two anonymous referees, and especially Raymond Duvall and James Farr. Ethan Cherin and Luigi Cocci extended excellent research assistance.
1. William Clinton, Confronting the Challenges of a Broader World (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, 1993).
2. President Clinton's State of the Union Message, January 1994, quoted in John M. Owen, "How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace," International Security, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 1994), p. 87.
3. For example, the motto of chapter 1 in Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), is excerpted from Wilson's 1917 war message to Congress.
4. Key studies include: Michael Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics," American Political Science Review, Vol. 80, No. 4 (December 1986), pp. 1151-1169; Zeev Maoz and Nasrin Abdulali, "Regime Types and International Conflict, 1815-1976," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 33, No. 1 (March 1989), pp. 3-35; T. Clifton Morgan and Valerie L. Schwebach, "Take Two Democracies and Call Me in the Morning: A Prescription for Peace?" International Interactions, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1992), pp. 305-320; William Dixon, "Democracy and the Settlement of International Conflict," American Political
Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 1 (March 1994), pp. 14-32; Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, "Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946-1986," American Political Science Review, Vol. 87, No. 3 (September 1993), pp. 624-638; and Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace. The recent studies by Russett and his collaborators are indicative of the high methodological sophistication attained by the literature. The technical quality of the statistical studies is not challenged here.
5. These features are central to Ted Robert Gurr's coding scheme, which is the most widely used in studies of the democratic peace. See Ted R. Gurr (Principal Investigator), Polity II: Political Structures and Regime Change, 1800-1986 (Codebook) (Ann Arbor: ICPSR No. 9263, 1990). Gurr's data are used, for example, by Dixon, Maoz and Abdulali, and Maoz and Russett (see fn. 4). Other researchers employ coding schemes that assign greater weight to indicators of civic, political, and economic freedom (e.g., Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics," p. 1164). But despite the lack of definitional uniformity, the assignment of countries to the democratic/liberal or to the autocratic/illiberal ends of the continuum must be consistent across the various studies or else the consensus on the robustness of the democratic peace finding would not have been as strong as it is.
6. See, e.g., Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics"; Dixon, "Democracy and the Settlement of International Conflict;" Maoz and Russett, "Normative and Structural Causes of the Democratic Peace." For a helpful review of the theoretical debate see T. Clifton Morgan, "Democracy and War: Reflections on the Literature," International Interactions, Vol. 18, No. 3 (1993), pp. 197-203.
7. See, e.g., Morgan and Schwebach, "Take Two Democracies and Call Me in the Morning." Much of the work on the structural-institutional explanation of the democratic peace is formal-deductive, most notably: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman, War and Reason: Domestic and International Imperatives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), chap. 5; David Lake, "Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War," American Political Science Review, Vol. 86, No. 1 (March 1992), pp. 24-37. These formal studies are imaginative, and their normative content - residing in the axiomatic assumptions - is less opaque than in the verbal explanations. Still, to verify their implications the formal studies rely on the same data used by the purely statistical studies.
8. For example, Gurr's Polity data are employed both by Morgan and Schwebach, "Take Two Democracies and Call Me in the Morning," and by Maoz and Russett, "Normative and Structural Causes of the Democratic Peace," proponents of the structural-institutional and of the normative arguments respectively.
9. In Gurr's Polity II data set, for example, the United States receives a perfect score on the democracy scale and the lowest score on the autocracy scale. See Gurr, Polity II. Interestingly, on an alternative scale of democracy constructed by a Finnish author (not used in democratic peace studies), it is Finland that scores the highest, far higher than the United States. See Tatu Vanhanen, The Process of Democratization: A Comparative Study of 147 States (New York: Crane Russak, 1990). I thank Chris Lindborg for calling my attention to the book.
10. In Doyle's data set the United States (north of the Mason-Dixon line) is one of only two countries that are classified as "liberal regimes" continuously from the eighteenth century (the other is Switzerland). In Gurr's Polity II data set the United States is the only great power that consistently receives perfect democracy scores for the pre-World War I period. See Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics," p. 1164; Gurr, Polity II.
11. Terrence Ball, James Farr, and Russell Hanson, eds., Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The essays in that volume document how both the empirical meanings and the moral signs attached to concepts such as democracy, the state, and representation have changed in time.
12. I fully share John Owen's belief that we must examine how actors "coded" each other at the time. Such historical awareness makes his analysis richer and more nuanced than the statistical ones. But my critique is more radical than Owen's in emphasizing the historical change of the actors' perception of themselves (which Owen assumes constant). See Owen, "How Liberalism Produces a Democratic Peace."
13. Russell Hanson, "Democracy," in Ball, Farr, and Hanson, Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, pp. 68-89; Charles S. Maier, "Democracy Since the French Revolution," in John Dunn, Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 508 BC to AD 1993 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 125-154; James Farr, "From Modern Republic to Administrative State: American Political Science in the Nineteenth Century," in David Easton, John Gunnell, and Michael Stein, Regime and Discipline: Democracy and the Development of Political Science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 131-168. A similar sentiment was expressed earlier by the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose legacy is currently invoked by proponents of the democratic peace: "Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ" See Kant, Perpetual Peace (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 15. Emphasis original.
14. Charles Maier, "Democracy Since the French Revolution," pp. 126 and 140.
15. See Ithiel de Sola Pool with Harold D. Lasswell and Daniel Lerner, Symbols of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1952), p. 27.
16. See Hanson, "Democracy," pp. 83-84.
17. See Maier, "Democracy Since the French Revolution," p. 147. For a forceful articulation of this critique see Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Interestingly, the "Asian tigers" appear to be Olson's normative model in that book. For an indication of Olson's influence outside academia see Peter Passell, "Democracy's Hardened Arteries and Washington's Problems," New York Times, June 2, 1994, p. C2. The term "demosclerosis" is from the latter article.
18. On the search for America's Aryan and Teutonic heritage by nineteenth century intellectuals, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chap. 3.
19. Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics," p. 1164.
20. See Manfred Jonas, The United States and Germany: A Diplomatic History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).
21. In the prewar years the stellar reputation of German scholarship began sagging, and anti-German books began to supplant the more sympathetic literature of years past. See Konrad H. Jarausch, "Huns, Krauts, or Good Germans? The German Image in America, 1880-1980," in James F. Harris, German-American Interrelations: Heritage and Challenge (Tubingen: Tubingen University Press, 1985), pp. 146-149; Frank Trommler, "Inventing the Enemy: German-American Cultural Relations, 1900-17," in Hans-Jurgen Schroder, Confrontation and Cooperation: Germany and the United States in the Era of World War I 1900-1924 (Providence: Berg Publishers, 1993), pp. 99-126.
22. David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 53-59; quotation, p. 58. The "War Issues" courses evolved after the war into the "Contemporary Civilization" curricula. See "Columbia to Celebrate 75 Years of Great Books," New York Times, November 16, 1994, p. B9. For a contemporary condemnation of the hysterical "coalescence of the intellectual classes in support of the military programme" see Randolph Bourne, "The War and the Intellectuals," The Seven Arts, Vol. 2 (1917), pp. 133-136, reprinted in David F. Trask, World War I at Home (New York: Wiley 1970), pp. 73-80.
23. For example, University of Chicago political scientist Charles Merriam served as chief American "publicist" in Italy. See Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, p. 454. On the role of leading historians in the propaganda effort at home and abroad, see George T. Blakey, Historians on the Homefront: American Propagandists For the Great War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970). See also Jarausch, "Huns, Krauts, or Good Germans?" p. 150.
24. Charles McLaughlin, A Short History of the Department of Political Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1977). At the University of Minnesota, recording machines were placed in classrooms, and the desks of allegedly unpatriotic professors were rifled at night. See Robert Morlan, "The Reign of Terror in the Middle West," in Arthur S. Link, The Impact of World War I (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 76. On the dismissal and intimidation of professors at Columbia and elsewhere, see "The Case of the Columbia Professors," Nation, October 11, 1917, pp. 388-389, reprinted in Trask, World War I at Home, pp. 159-162.
25. See Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science: From Burgess to Behavioralism (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1967), p. 3.
26. Three classics of American social science, their differences aside, single out Germany as a country whose political and economic development sharply diverged from the Anglo-American "norm": Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1990 [1915]); Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962); Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), esp. chap. 8. In the 1960s and 1970s these social-scientific models influenced the writings of German historians who sought to combat the impulse to downplay German guilt for the horrors of Nazism. See, e.g., Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918 (Dover, N.H.: Berg Publishers, 1985 [1973]). More recently, English historians led by David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley sought to correct what they regarded as the ahistorical quality of the "special path" interpretation of German history. They argued that the emphasis on past German peculiarity is overly colored by hindsight, that Imperial Germany tends to be judged by the standards of idealized images of the Anglo-American past, and that the German past might look more "normal" if compared to the experience of continental Europe rather than to England. The present essay, inasmuch as it shows that past American scholars regarded Imperial Germany as more normal than do present scholars, provides support for this critique. See David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in 19th Century Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); David Blackbourn, Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern German History (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987); Geoff Eley, "Liberalism, Europe, and the Bourgeoisie, 1860-1914," in David Blackbourn and Richard Evans, The German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late 18th to the Early 20th Century (London: Routledge, 1991). For helpful reflections on the debate, see Peter Paret, "Some Comments on the Continuity Debate in German History," in James Harris, German-American Interrelations, pp. 83-88.
27. Gurr, Polity II, pp. 36-37.
28. On this theme, see Stanley Hoffmann, "An American Social Science: International Relations," Daedalus, Vol. 106, No. 3 (1977), pp. 41-60; Ekkehart Krippendorf, "The Dominance of American Approaches in International Relations," Millennium, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer 1987), pp. 207-214.
29. Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, chap. 3. Ross's book provides excellent guidance on the intellectual history of American political science, as does (in a more stylized fashion) Farr, "From Modern Republic to Administrative State."
30. Woodrow Wilson, "Of the Study of Politics," November 25, 1886, in Arthur Link, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 400. (Below, this invaluable comprehensive collection of Wilson's papers is referred to as PWW, followed by volume number.) On the disdain for writing that is unsupported by evidence, which Wilson absorbed as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, see "Editorial Note to 'The Modern Democratic State'," PWW 5, p. 55. On John Burgess's strong belief in modeling the social after the natural sciences, see Somit and Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science, p. 28.
31. What separates the current coders of the democratic peace from their predecessors is the inferential statistical tools that are available to them, more than the very commitment to rigorous empirical science. The common belief that a "scientific revolution" swept political science in the mid-twentieth century unfairly understates the scientific aspirations of earlier generations. See Ido Oren, "Perceptions of Germany in Early American Political Science," paper delivered at the 1994 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York.
32. Somit and Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science, pp. 7-21. See also Wilfred McClay's introduction to the recent re-issue of John Burgess, The Foundations of Political Science (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1994 [1933]); and Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (New York: Basic Books, 1987), pp. 164-168.
33. For a concise factual account of Wilson's academic career see August Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Collier Books, 1991), chaps. 2-3. Henry W. Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1967), if somewhat dated, remains an excellent biographical source on Wilson's pre-political career.
34. McClay, "Introduction," p. vii.
35. Charles Merriam, A History of American Political Theories (New York: Macmillan, 1903), p. 299. The preoccupation with national cohesion was shared by American elites in general; it was not limited to political scientists alone. See Trommler, "Inventing the Enemy," p. 110.
36. McClay, "Introduction," pp. xiii-xv.
37. During the nineteenth century about 9,000 American students flocked to German universities, most of them after 1870. Berlin, the national Prussian university, was the most popular destination, with American enrollment totalling 1300 for the 1880s. See Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, p. 55; Somit and Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science, pp. 15-16; Jarausch, "Huns, Krauts, or Good Germans," p. 148; Jurgen Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship, 1800-1870 (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972), chap. 1.
38. Somit and Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science, p. 17.
39. Richard Ely instructed Wilson in political economy and George S. Morris in philosophy. See Niels A. Thorsen, The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson: 1875-1910 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), chap. 4; John M. Mulder, Woodrow Wilson: The Years of Preparation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 75, 83.
40. Somit and Tanenhaus, The Development of American Social Science, pp. 34-38.
41. Wilson, for example, characterized German scholarship as exceptionally "diligent" and "learned." See "A Book Review," April 17, 1887, PWW 5, p. 494.
42. McClay, "Introduction," p. xvi.
43. In later years Burgess prepared an abridged version of the book, but a contract to publish it was rescinded during World War I because of the author's pro-German sympathy. That version was published only in 1933, posthumously, as The Foundations of Political Science. My discussion below draws on the 1994 re-issue of the latter book, which I refer to as Foundations.
44. Foundations, p. 3.
45. Foundations, pp. 31-38. On the popularity and legitimacy of racialist ideas in the intellectual discourse of late nineteenth-century America, see Rogers M. Smith, "Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America," American Political Science Review, Vol. 87, No. 3 (September 1993), pp. 558-560; John Higham, Strangers In the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), chap. 6.
46. Foundations, p. 20.
47. Foundations, p. 16.
48. Foundations, p. 66.
49. Foundations, chap. 5.
50. Foundations, p. 70.
51. Foundations, pp. 85-86.
52. The analogy between the German and American experience is most evident in John Burgess, "Laband's Public Law of the German Empire," Political Science Quarterly, No. 1 (March 1888), esp. pp. 124-126.
53. John Burgess, "Tenure and Powers of the German Emperor," Political Science Quarterly, No. 2 (June 1888), p. 335.
54. Foundations, p. 106.
55. Foundations, pp. 106, 108, 109 respectively. Italy and Greece in the late nineteenth century are listed as liberal countries by Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics," p. 1164.
56. Foundations, pp. 75-76.
57. Foundations, p. 114 (both quotations).
58. Foundations, pp. 121-122.
59. See Burgess, "Tenure and Power of the German Emperor," p. 337.
60. Foundations, p. 124.
61. See pp. 334, 335, 347.
62. Burgess, "Tenure and Powers of the German Emperor," p. 349.
63. Foundations, pp. 127-128.
64. Burgess, "Tenure and Powers of the German Emperor," pp. 345-347.
65. Ibid., p. 357.
66. John Burgess, Germany and The United States (New York: The Germanistic Society of America, 1908).
67. Burgess, The European War of 1914: Its Causes, Purposes, and Probable Results (Chicago: A.C. McClury, 1915).
68. Ibid., pp. 92-94.
69. Upon entering Princeton College, Wilson identified himself as a supporter of Southern secessionism. The reason for the subsequent alteration in his view had more to do with nationalism than with concern for racial justice. See Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years, pp. 11-12, 21.
70. On the shift in the focus of late nineteenth-century political science from the issue of "nation" to that of "state," see Farr, "From Modern Republic to Administrative State."
71. "Editorial Note: Wilson's First Treatise on Democratic Government," PWW 5, p. 58. Wilson, The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1889). Perusing Wilson's papers from his academic years, one is struck by the thoroughness of his course notes. They read more like preliminary book drafts than skeletal lecture outlines, and thus they provide an invaluable insight into Wilson's thought.
72. During 1888-95 Wilson also returned to Johns Hopkins annually to teach administration, thus maintaining a vital connection with a graduate research environment. See Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson, chaps. 8-10.
73. The State was a textbook that made available in English vast amounts of knowledge that were formerly accessible only to advanced scholars. It was very successful, and was revised in 1898 and 1910. The first part of the book is historical, while the second part consists of comparative "country chapters." In writing the comparative chapters Wilson relied heavily on "the great" Handbuch des Oeffentlichen Rechts der Gegenwart, an encyclopedic comparative survey of the theoretical principles and practice of politics and administration. See "Editorial Note: Wilson's 'The State'," PWW 6, p. 245. The State was translated into several foreign languages one of which, ironically, was German. See Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson, pp. 173-178. The opinion that the book was "probably Wilson's greatest scholarly achievement" is due to his biographer Arthur Link, quoted in Mulder, Woodrow Wilson, p. 103.
74. Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson, chap. 1.
75. See especially Congressional Government, which was published in 1885 as a successful book and was later accepted as Wilson's dissertation. The book is fully reproduced in PWW 4, pp. 13-179.
76. "Prince Bismarck," November 1877, PWW 1, p. 313. See also "Congressional Government," PWW 4, pp. 42-43, for a description of Gladstone's status in Parliament as similar to Bismarck's status in the Reichstag.
77. September 4, 1879, PWW 1, pp. 515-538. Page numbers in the text refer to this essay.
78. In later years Wilson adopted Burke as his chief mentor; see Mulder, Woodrow Wilson, pp. 126-127.
79. French democracy is described as a "quick intoxicant or a slow poison" in "The Modern Democratic State," December 1885, PWW 5, p. 63. "Intoxication" is also attributed to France in "Democracy and Efficiency," October 1900, PWW 12, p. 6. For reference to "unstable" constitutionalism" in France see "An Outline of the Preface to 'The Philosophy of Politics'," January 12, 1891, PWW 7, p. 98. In the same outline Wilson also refers to French political development as "mechanically homogenous" (p. 101) and "impetuous" (p. 102). Both terms carry a negative connotation from the perspective of Wilson's notion of "normal" organic political development.
80. On Wilson's struggle with the German language see "WW to Edwin R.A. Seligman," April 19, 1886, PWW 5, p. 163. That he won the struggle and read widely in German Staatswissenschaft, philosophy, and political economy is most evident from Wilson's "Working Bibliography, 1883-90," PWW 6, pp. 562-611. Wilson's writings and lecture notes are loaded with citations of leading German scholars.
81. Wilson, The State, p. 2. The Aryan theme is from the British scholars Sir Henry Maine and William Hearn, while the Darwinian theme is from Herbert Spencer; see bibliography in The State, p. 15. All references below to The State are to the 1889 (first) edition, unless noted otherwise.
82. The State, pp. 4-5.
83. The State, p. 154.
84. The State, p. 580.
85. The State, p. 577.
86. Wilson thoroughly rejected the social contract theory of the state. See The State, pp. 11-15.
87. "Notes for Lectures at the Johns Hopkins," 1891-94, PWW 7, p. 124.
88. "Notes for Lectures on Public Law," 1894-95, PWW 9, p. 12.
89. "Report of a Lecture at the New York Law School," March 11, 1892, PWW 7, p. 477.
90. "Notes for Lectures on Public Law," PWW 9, p. 13. See also "Report of a Lecture at the New York Law School," PWW 7, pp. 477-479.
91. Ibid., p. 474.
92. All quotations are from "WW to Daniel Coit Gilman," April 13, 1889, PWW 6, pp. 169-172.
93. "Minutes of the Johns Hopkins Seminary of Historical and Political Science," March 15, 1889, PWW 6, p. 153.
94. "A Lecture on Democracy," December 5, 1891, PWW 7, p. 358.
95. "The Modern Democratic State," December 1, 1885, PWW 5, p. 63.
96. "A Lecture on Democracy," December 5, 1891, PWW 7, p. 358.
97. "The Modern Democratic State," PWW 5, p. 63. Elsewhere Wilson wrote that England was fortunate to be geographically separated from "the fell sweep of European wars and revolutions." But it was not Germany's fate that England was spared from, as much as the "international compulsion which forced France to become a centralized military despotism." Protected by their natural boundaries, the English "were in every way much more German [read: better! than the Franks." See "The English Constitution," 1890-91, PWW 7, pp. 12-14.
98. "A Lecture on Democracy," PWW 7, p. 356. For the argument that meritocracy is a form of democracy, see also "Notes on Administration," 1892-95, PWW 7, pp. 392-393. In later years Wilson used the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages as an example of an "absolutely democratic organization," since its ranks were open to any qualified man, regardless of his class. See "Address at the Inauguration of the President of Franklin and Marshall College," January 7, 1910, PWW 19, p. 743, and class notes taken by Homer Zink, a student in Wilson's course in 1904, at the manuscript library of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson collection, Box 6.
99. "The Modern Democratic State," PWW 5, p. 85.
100. The three-class system is described in The State, p. 285. For an approval of that system in city government see The State, p. 296; see also "Notes for Public Lecture at the Johns Hopkins," March 16, 1888, PWW 5, pp. 713-714.
101. "A Lecture on Democracy," PWW 7, p. 354.
102. "The English Constitution," 1890-91, PWW 7, pp. 36-37. On the lack of popular control of the Foreign Office, see Zara Steiner, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1898-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
103. Zink notes.
104. "The Study of Administration," PWW 5, p. 363.
105. Ibid., pp. 365-366.
106. Ibid., p. 376.
107. Ibid., p. 367.
108. Ibid., p. 378.
109. In the 1887 essay it was described as "not fully" self-government; see ibid., p. 380.
110. "Notes for Lectures on Public Law," 1894-95, PWW 9, p. 24.
111. See "Random Notes for 'The Philosophy of Politics'," January 25, 1895; PWW 9, p. 130.
112. See for example "A Newspaper Report of a Lecture at Brown University," November 12, 1889, PWW 6, pp. 417-423. See also "Marginal Note to 'The Labor Movement in America' by Richard Ely" and "Socialism and Democracy," August 22, 1887, both in PWW 5, pp. 560 and 560-563 respectively.
113. All quotations are from "Notes For Lectures on Public Law," September 1894, PWW 9, pp. 26-27. One must remember that at the time the English crown, held by Victoria, did not appear as lame as it does today, and that the negative image of King/Kaiser Wilhelm was yet to fully crystalize in the future.
114. Ibid., p. 27. Emphasis original.
115. The State, p. 254.
116. "The English Constitution," October 1890, PWW 7, p. 41.
117. "A Newspaper Report of a Lecture on 'Systems of City Government'," April 8, 1890, PWW 6, pp. 612-613.
118. "Notes for a Classroom Lecture," February 14, 1889, PWW 6, p. 91.
119. "Notes for Lectures at the Johns Hopkins," February 1892, PWW 7, pp. 388-391.
120. "A Newspaper Report of a Lecture on Municipal Government," January 19, 1889, PWW 6, p. 53.
121. "Note for a Public Lecture at the Johns Hopkins," March 16, 1888, PWW 5, p. 712.
122. "A Newspaper Report of a Lecture on Municipal Government," January 19, 1889, PWW 6, p. 54.
123. Ibid., pp. 53-54.
124. Foundations, p. 76.
125. E.g., Greece, Chile, Argentina, Italy; see Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics," p. 1164.
126. Edward H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919-1939, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1964 [1946]), esp. chap. 5. Quotations are from pp. 67-68. The influence of Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia is acknowledged in Carr's preface, p. ix.
127. Hoffmann, "An American Social Science," pp. 44-45.
128. See Hans Morgenthau, "The Political Science of E.H. Carr," World Politics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (October 1948), pp. 127-134. I thank Charles Lipson for bringing Carr's pro-appeasement attitude to my attention.
129. Kenneth Waltz, "The Stability of a Bipolar World," Daedalus, Vol. 93, No. 3 (Summer 1964), pp. 881-909; and Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979).
130. Perhaps the most lucid statement of the nature of critical international relations theory, and one which acknowledges Carr's influence, is Robert Cox, "Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory," in Robert Keohane, Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 204-254.
131. E.g., David Spiro, "The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace," International Security, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 1994), pp. 50-86; Christopher Layne, "Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace," ibid., pp. 5-49.
132. To the extent that realists re-adopt Carr's historicist thought, they may find themselves sharing some common ground with critical theorists. Of the variety of critical approaches currently applied to international relations, this essay, in focusing on how an international interaction led to "identity-change," has an affinity with the social construction approach articulated by Alexander Wendt; see Wendt, "Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics," International Organization, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 391-425. My analysis differs from Wendt's approach in two ways, though. First, inasmuch as it centers on the construction of knowledge by a community of scholars, my approach is more faithful to the label "social" (whereas Wendt maintains the assumption that states are unitary actors; ibid., p. 21, note 2). Second, whereas "constructivists" such as Wendt tend to discount the role of material capabilities (relative to social interaction) in the construction of identities, my argument suggests that material power may be very important. At minimum, it is a necessary condition for the interaction process. Had Germany, for example, not possessed the material capability to challenge the U.S. Navy in Manila Bay, and had the United States not possessed the capability to send a massive army to fight Germany across the Atlantic, America's identity would not have been affected by Germany more radically than it has been shaped by, say, Luxembourg. More importantly, it is the very material fact of America's battlefield victory that accounts for the universal appeal of the identity known as "democracy." As noted earlier, had Germany won World War I, American scholars might have been busy searching for peace among countries ruled by selfless professional bureaucracies and autonomous chief executives, rather than among "democracies."
133. Quotations from N. Gordon Levin, Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 42-43. Emphasis added to first quotation.
134. Simon Litman, "Revolutionary Russia," Vol. 12, No. 2 (May 1918), pp. 181-191. Quotations are from p. 187 and 182 respectively.
135. Stalin's first five-year plan was praised even by the conservative New York Times. See Frank A. Warren, Liberals and Communism: The "Red Decade" Revisited, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), chap. 4.
136. Ibid., pp. 109-110.
137. Pitirim Sorokin, Russia and the United States (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1944).
138. Quotations are from pp. 39 and 37 respectively in John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-47 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972).
139. Maier, "Democracy Since the French Revolution," pp. 146-147.
140. Russian diplomats appear to understand this logic better than their Western counterparts. Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev stated recently that "if Russia agrees with the West it is assumed to be a new democracy. If not, it is assumed to be going back to the old days." Quoted in "Foreign Minister Defends Russia's Policies," St. Paul Pioneer Press, April 29, 1995, p. B7.
141. Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, p. 433.
142. On the postwar transformation of Japan's image in America, see Akira Iriye, "War, Peace and U.S.-Japanese Relations," in Akira Iriye and Warren Cohen, The United States and Japan in the Postwar World (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989), pp. 191-208.
143. Karel van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation (New York: Knopf, 1989), p. 22. See also Chalmers Johnson and E.B. Keehn, "A Disaster in the Making: Rational Choice and Asian Studies," The National Interest, No. 36 (Summer 1994), pp. 14-22.
Ido Oren is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. He is currently an SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Fellow on Peace and Security in a Changing World.
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