The Democratic Peace as a Limiting Case of the Balance of Power.

Though balance of power and democratic peace theories have long been viewed as adversaries, I argue that the former is most likely to operate optimally, i.e. with fewer overreactions and miscalculations, when the international system is composed of well-functioning liberal democracies.What a liberal democracy is meant to do is to provide an aggregation of preferences filtered through constitutional checks, which best represents the interests of the collectivity as a whole. Existing liberal defenses of the theory are predicated on a normative understanding of the functioning of democracy which ignores its foundation in the classical liberal tradition. The purpose of liberal checks was to ensure that political outcomes were the result not of messianic, “altruistic” excesses of religious and other ideologies, nor of destructive passions of particularism, such as belligerent nationalism. Instead, they were meant to converge on a prudent policy that most affected would be willing to support, given adequate information. This is the kind of policy that defensive realists and neorealists have most consistently proposed: though the theoretical differences with liberal IR are deep, in practice, neorealists and liberals have found themselves on the same policy side where actual war, rather than lower level interventions, has been at issue (Vietnam, Iraq). A democracy that allowed defensive realists to shape policy would be more likely to behave as the theory predicts.To support the point, I construct a more “realist” understanding of the democratic process that has been offered in liberal accounts. Paradoxically, this allows me to show that existing realist critiques of DPT fail on their own terms. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]