Democratic Peace Theory

[12th Doctor]

I figured I would do my part to once again try to elevate the level of debate on the forum.

The short hand of Democratic Peace Theory is this:  Democratic states don't go to war with other democratic states.  This is often extended to mean that if all states in the world were democratic, then there would cease to be any wars.

This is a longer explanation of the theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory

My opinion:

Several exceptions to Democratic Peace Theory have often been suggested.  Here is a list of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_exceptions_to_the_democratic_peace_theory

The refutations that proponents of the theory come up with to these possible exceptions show the weaknesses in the theory itself.  The standards they set for what constitute "democracy" in their mind ("liberal democracy" as it is often called) are so exclusive as to be unreasonable.  Furthermore, they seem to represent modern European based ideals (read "cultural bias) of what a democratic government should be. 

And why wouldn't they?  It's a theory that developed out of the traumatic aftermath and supposed post-WWI calm of the drawing rooms of European (meaning also American) intellectuals.  It was based off the notion that Germany, as a "big bad oligarchical power" was solely to blame for the the war.  If Germany had been a Democracy like the other "civilized" powers, then there would have been no war.  This theory is further bolstered by the erroneous and anachronistic notions that people have about WWI Germany due to WWII Germany (one might also take this moment to point at the Hitler was, in fact, democratically elected).

The unreasonable standards set to define a "democracy" make the basic theory non-universal and not representative of cultural realities and thus unworkable.  The fact that political realities are constantly shifting make it unreasoanble.

[12th Doctor]

The reasoning in the 2nd wiki page is kind of circular, of course a country that randomly starts a war for no reason is a poorly functioning democracy. The Democratic Peace Theory is a load of crap, unless most countries that are considered democracies, such as the United States, are ruled out.

The definition of "democracy" laid out in the theory is a state that has full civil and voting rights and is 100% stable... basically a state that is non-existent.  Anytime an exception is brought up, they nit-pick a way around it.

[Gabu]

The definition of "democracy" laid out in the theory is a state that has full civil and voting rights and is 100% stable

And therein lies the problem: the moment a state is in a situation where it feels that war is a route it ought to take, it is almost assuredly not 100% stable.  This is practically saying "countries in a situation that makes them not apt to wage war will not go to war with each other".  Like, duh.

[12th Doctor]

The definition of "democracy" laid out in the theory is a state that has full civil and voting rights and is 100% stable

And therein lies the problem: the moment a state is in a situation where it feels that war is a route it ought to take, it is almost assuredly not 100% stable.  This is practically saying "countries in a situation that makes them not apt to wage war will not go to war with each other".  Like, duh.

Even the criteria they low-ball to help out their theory help to discredit it from the other side.  Their definition of a "well developed" democracy as being older than three years is laughable.  The key to a developed democracy is democratic institutions which take decades to develop.  And those institutions often develop independently of the "regime" no matter how long it has been in power.  The institutions that were being defended in the American War for Independence had existed long before the Declaration of Independence, which specifically enumerated the offenses against those institutions... and yet they say it doesn't qualify, because the regime was less than three years old (and on top of that, they had slaves which apparently makes a difference).  But all that doesn't matter anyway, because, according to them, England wasn't democratic anyway until the Representation of the People Act, which is what they use to discredit the Boer War.

Elsewhere, they are guilty of excessively anachronistic (that's my new favorite word for the night, apparently) thinking in how they regard both Rome (which though a Republic can't count because not everyone could vote) and Carthage (which had an elected leader, but he was an oligarch) and their view on the Native American Tribes is just rich... the Huron and Iroquois who were constantly at war don't count, because they weren't states, but rather kinship groups... but they were nations in every sense of the word.

On top of that, they disqualify a whole slew on conflicts because there were fewer than a 1000 deaths (an arbitrary number if ever I have heard of one) and thus they don't qualify as "wars".  Tell that to the fewer than 1,000 people who died.

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Anyway, getting back to what Gabu said, yes, with all the criteria they have established, there is simply no possible way to disprove this.

Eitherway, I was hoping to have a serious discussion about the more indepth merits of the theory, if anyone is whiling to step up to the plate.  I'm not that concerned with little details, I actually do want to have a serious discussion about the idea.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Oh, here's a conflict that the wiki article doesn't mention. The Greece/Turkey conflict in Cyprus.

[Silent Hunter]

Matthew White has an interesting little article on this:

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/demowar.htm

He concludes that 6 of the 39 international wars (ergo, not counting civil conflicts) between WW2 and the year 2000 might have been between democracies. However, due to the fact that democracies have been historically rare and wars fairly rare (in probability terms), the sample- which produces 6 inter-democracy wars instead of the expected- is too small to draw accurate conclusions from.

[John Dibble]

Democracies tend to be less likely to go to war with eachother for many reasons, but there will always be exceptions.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I figured I would do my part to once again try to elevate the level of debate on the forum.

Good idea (to risk understatement actually). Will make some comments on the theory later, but for now some random remarks about related details:

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What erroneous and anachronistic notions do people have about the German state before 1918? It was certainly undemocratic*, militaristic and expansionist. O/c insisting that Germany was soley (as opposed to mostly) to blame for the War would be both erroneous and anachronistic, but how many people think that these days?

*There were, of course, elections, but they were to a legislative body that was (in my opinion anyway) halfway between a sham and a talking shop. Neither the U.K nor France were especially democratic as far as I'm concerned (women didn't have the vote in either country (didn't get it in France until, IIRC, after the Second World War) and neither did a very large proportion of working class men in Britain; not sure about France on that point. Various property-linked idiocy as well), but both were vastly more democratic than Germany at the time (I accept that I might be accidentally exaggerating how democratic the Third Republic was; I'm not as familiar with the details as I'd like to be).

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Not so. Came to power via constitutional means though.

[2952-0-0]

I think the McDonalds peace theory is of greater relevance in today's world (that is, no two countries with McDonalds will ever go to war with each other), since many authoritarian states (like China or Russia) have large urban middle classes that are able to exert their opinions on the government directly or indirectly. It also indicates that the ruling elite is more likely to be educated and civilian (as opposed to stereotypical tinpot military dictators), and therefore more likely to understand the consequences of war and less likely to use force to resolve disputes. They are also more concerned with the economic consequences of war, as it would disrupt trade and the nation's stability, which would in turn cause the educated middle class to rebel. So the Democratic Peace Theory could definitely be expanded to include non-democracies with large middle classes that can sustain McDonalds franchises.

[12th Doctor]

What erroneous and anachronistic notions do people have about the German state before 1918? It was certainly undemocratic*, militaristic and expansionist. O/c insisting that Germany was soley (as opposed to mostly) to blame for the War would be both erroneous and anachronistic, but how many people think that these days?

In terms of civil liberties, Germans were at least as free as the French and English citizens.  Moreover, being militaristic and expansionistic doesn't exclude a country from being democratic.

As I said before, the standard for what they use to classify a democracy is so narrow a pipe cleaner would have a tight fit.  Its so narrow that its inaccurate.  Democratic institutions are more important than 100% universal suffrage, or complete freedom of speech or any of that stuff, because the institutions are the foundations of the house, the other stuff is just for show.  Germany had all the Democratic institutions that the other European countries had.  The courts were fair, the people were treated as though they had rights (even if they weren't "official"), the press was largely free.  Might I remind you that until recently, people in your country didn't officially have "rights".  If having constitutional rights makes a place "democratic" then Britain became a democracy about 8 seconds ago.

Germany was not even mostly responsible for the war... to claim as much abdicates the responsability that all the other powers had in the war.  Germany was being noble in honoring their treaty commitments, and since the French were allied with the most autocratic of the major European powers, it was hardly a war of ideologies.  Eitherway, it is undeniable that DPT emerged from the fault that people threw at Germany's feet after the war.

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The Reichstag fire came after Hitler became Chancellor, and after that, the people voted for a Nazi majority fully knowing that it would hand Hitler the ability to declare emergency powers.  Eitherway, the majority of Germans, or their representatives, or what have you, used democratic means give power to Hitler.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In terms of civil liberties, Germans were at least as free as the French and English citizens.

Again I have to be a little hesitant as far as the Third Republic goes (this settles it; must get round to buying myself a decent book on the subject), but I don't think that's true. Civil liberties aren't really my area o/c.
Should note that only concrete(ish?) fact that I've got is the fact that it was possible in pre-war Germany to ban large political parties and to impose draconian new restrictions on religious minorities.

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I never said that it did. But those are two key notions that people have of the German Empire.

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Obviously I disagree, and very strongly so, here.
I believe that the Soviet Union sometimes had a parliament of sorts (I forget the name; not that it matters as it was just a talking listening shop), but I don't think it's possible to seriously argue that it was a democratic institution.

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Pre-war Germany didn't have any democratic institutions. You had the Reichstag o/c, but that was worse than powerless. Aristocratic and oligarchic institutions were much more powerful so, I think, were (some?) state Parliaments. Which certainly weren't democratic, you know what the Dreiklassenwahlrecht was, right?

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Also not true. But then again, the courts weren't fair anywhere else in Europe.

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That depends what you mean by "officially". Not that it really matters; I'm certainly not arguing that the U.K in 1914 was a model state or anything like that (quite the opposite actually). But I do think that it, and France, was more democratic than Germany at the time. Not that that's hard.

Btw, you seem to be operating under the assumption that I'm anti-German. I'm not; quite the reverse actually.

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An unwritten constitution is still a constitution.

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That depends how you look at it. The German government was, in my opinion anyway, largely responsible for turning a small regional dispute into one of the worst wars in human history. And largely for expansionist delusions mentioned earlier. And, of course, Germany was a key player in all the idiotic-to-evil-to-suicidal-and-back-again buildup in the years (decades...) before the war, but was hardly alone here. You can't have an arms race with just one country playing.

O/c this could all be taken back to the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war and so on and so forth, but those arguments are exceedingly tedious.

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Don't be silly. None of those bloody treaties (yes, the pun was intentional. I'll go and hang my head in shame now...) was even slightly honourable and the honouring of them wasn't noble, but an excuse (and not a very good one; but that hardly mattered) for war.

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I've never claimed it was a war of ideologies.

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There were some ideas along the same general lines before 1918 IIRC. Became more mainstream after then though.

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I didn't mention the Reichstag fire and didn't intend to. My point was different; German democracy was already dead by the time Hitler took over (the villain here, and, according to some, in other respects, was Brüning) and he didn't take power as a result of an election (in fact the NSDAP lost ground in the last free elections in Germany before the War; some maps of that election can be found here: https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;id=2 </blatant plug>) but after a backroom carve-up with Papen and other ultra-conservative idiots. Which was constitutional, but not democratic.

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You mean the elections of 1933? Not free, not fair. And, despite that, the NSDAP still didn't win a majority (though was able, by merging the remains of the DNVP into it and by preventing the Communists from taking their seats, to get one after those "elections").

[opebo]

This is a bit beside the point of your discussion, but not entirely - the recent naked agression by the US against Iraq was a case of unprovoked attack of a 'dictatorship' by an ostensible democracy.  Food for thought.

Empires like ours, or the British one which preceded it often have a few elements of democracy, but this does nothing to reduce their habit of slaughtering and enslaving brownp eople.

[Eraserhead]

This is a bit beside the point of your discussion, but not entirely - the recent naked agression by the US against Iraq was a case of unprovoked attack of a 'dictatorship' by an ostensible democracy.  Food for thought.

Empires like ours, or the British one which preceded it often have a few elements of democracy, but this does nothing to reduce their habit of slaughtering and enslaving brownp eople.

Very true.

[Silent Hunter]

"The Golden Arches Peace Theory" (the McDonalds One) got discredited with Kosovo. It was also false when it came to Panama and the Kargil War (the 1999 India-Pakistan one). The article I linked to commented on that.

Vis WWI, Germany didn't start the war, that's true. They certainly, however, made things a lot, lot worse by invading Belgium. They also did some rather nasty things in the process (burning the Louvian library for a start).

I'd advise you to read The Guns of August, which covers that subject pretty well (it was, incidentally, what JFK read just before the Cuban Missiles Crisis and it influenced his thinking).

[Ban my account ffs!]

I guess this doesn't belong here, really, but I take strong exception to WWII being on the "list of exceptions".

Wikipedia claims that Adolf Hitler was democratically elected into office, which is not at all true.

The party he led was elected to power.  The Nazis then formed a coalition with the German National Peoples' Party and then he was APPOINTED chancellorship by the president of Germany.  He then created a disaster and used the panic that resulted to exploit a loophole in the constitution that allowed him to consolidate power and gave him and his cabinet legislative powers.  At that point, well before WWII began, Hitler was a dictator and Germany's democracy was non-existent.

While it can be argued that Hitler consolidated power legally, it was no longer a democracy in practice.

While Britain, France, and the U.S. were democracies at the time, they were also allies.  The Democratic nations were fighting a fascist dictatorship.

[minionofmidas]

The theory's basically got it assbackwards. Any army powerful enough, and thus dangerous enough, to lead a country into a war dangerous enough to seriously endanger it will also have made its power, and its willingness to slaughter its country's citizens, felt in other ways before that. That's why democracies don't go to war against their neighbors.

[12th Doctor]

Again I have to be a little hesitant as far as the Third Republic goes (this settles it; must get round to buying myself a decent book on the subject), but I don't think that's true. Civil liberties aren't really my area o/c.
Should note that only concrete(ish?) fact that I've got is the fact that it was possible in pre-war Germany to ban large political parties and to impose draconian new restrictions on religious minorities.

Certainly there were movements in Germany against certain political groups and minorities (the kulturkampf against Catholics is a prime example).  But if your mesaure of democratic government is that no one gets discriminated against, then democracy doesn't exist.  Its the nature of people, and thus governments, to discriminate against someone or something.

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And it is because those are the two key notions that people tend to think that the German Empire was just this terrible regime, and that just wasn't true.  For that matter, if you admit it had nothing to do with your argument, then why bring it up?

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I think you are missing my point.  Any country can have "democratic bodies", the question is, do those rights exist on paper only, or are they real?  The Soveit citizens had plenty of rights, in theory.  But there were no fair courts.  There were no real democratic institutions to speak of.  A parliment isn't of its self a democratic institution, though it is often mistaken for one.  To quote The Patriot an elected legislator can trample a man's rights just as easily as a king.

Voting doesn't secure rights by itself, which is why countries that try to start up democratic governments so often fail.  The United States worked because we already had the systems of democratic government in place, and it was a part of our daily lives.  The American "Revolution" is a misnomer.  Americans weren't fighting to change things per se.  They were fighting to take back the rights they had had before the King took them away.

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Again, you miss the point.  Elections are not an indication of how free a country is.  Mobs have never granted rights to anyone, and they usually take them away.  The reason that the United States and England are such free and stable countries today is because (most) political theorists in those countries were terrified of mobs.  They dreaded the notion that uneducated demagogues should have so much sway over... anything, really.  Compare us with France or Germany, and the contrast becomes rather stark.  Britain and the United States built on thier institutions.  It was a slow, measured, and sometimes painful process, but the result has been better than in other countries where the whims of "The People" have often assured that no one's rights were protected.

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Again, I mean "comparitively".  Certainly, the courts were more fair for the average person in Germany in 1910 than they are in many other "democratic" countries today.  The average person in Germany had a reasonable expectation of recieving a fair trail.  While you might say "reasonable" is not enough, might I remind you that trial by jury in the United States is no gaurantee of a fair trial, and in fact, the case is usually quite the opposite.  I would never want to have to be tried by a jury in this country since they pick the most oblivious, idiotic, easy influenced people they can find.  Personally, I would rather simply have a judge decide, I really would.

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I operate under no assumptions, other than the assumption that you think a place must have a, b, c, d, e and f to be democratic (as do the people who try to explain why this theory seems to fail again and again).

I could personally care less if the rights of the British people were "official" in 1914 or not.  My point is that constitutions and bills (and by extention legislatures) don't grant rights by themselves.  There must be some sense that people are already entitled to those rights.  There has to be a foundation in place.  Otherwise, those rights aren't real in the minds of most people and they are all too likely to be subject to the whims of whoever is in power.

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He we couldn't agree more.  There was an understanding that the British people were intitled to rights, and that, while we might debate the enumeration of those rights, or how they might manifest themselves, only extremeists would deny their existance.  That sense is far more important than a country legally being a democracy, since it is far the case that "democracy" implies the existance of that notion.  Laws mean nothing if the people living under them have no concept of the rule of law.

[12th Doctor]

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My point is that Germany was no more at fault that any of the other countries that were involved in the war... but that was the way it was viewed after the war.  And so this whole mythology was built up that allowed for the creation of this notion of Democratic Peace Theory... because Germany was supposedly at fault for the war against the democratic nations.  A reason for this war needed to be invented.  So the reason was to fight against the "autocratic" powers.

The reality is that all the countries were waiting for a war.  All of them were looking to expand.  All of them jumped on the chance.

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Perhaps I shoudln't have said what Germany did was honorable, but I think we can agree that had Germany not honored their agreements, it would have surely been dishonorable. 

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Didn't say you did.  Refer to my above comments.

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How is a back room deal by the people's representatives any less democratic?  Is the selection of a Speaker of the House in the United States undemocratic?  Speakers usually come to power the same way Hitler did.  The only difference is the authority afforded to Hitler by the Weimar Constitution.

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All correct.  But people had democratically made their decision before the election of 1933.  They decided to vote for people who would create the circumstances that would lead to 1933. Eitherway, the means that brought Hitler to power were democratic, the majority consented to it.

Democracies fail through democratic means.  People usually willingly choose to put dictators in power, in one way or another.  Hence, the process of ending democracy is, in its own way, thouroughly democratic.  To paraphrase from Revenge of the Sith Liberty usually ends with thunderous applause.

Which brings me to my main point... "Liberty" and "Democracy" are often treated as though they are interchangable terms... in fact, due to the limitations of vocabulary, I have often had to use "democratic institutions" in this debate, when what I really mean is institutions that secure liberty.  The point is, it is easy to confuse these two things, because we are so used to them meaning the samething, when the reality is nothing of the sort.

Democracy takes many forms, and the masses are often times more autocratic than any king could ever hope to be.  You can always over-throw a king.  A demogouge who has the support of the masses, on the other hand....

To find out how well the masses respect the rights of other, one need only ask Socrates.  Julius Ceasar was insanely popular as was Napoleon.  Many people in the Soviet Union simply would not believe that Stalin was behind the mass killings and deportations; it had to be the work of others in the government. 

People (like those who support DPT) like to throw these things aside and say "that's not democracy."  Sure it is.  What could be more democratic?  Those people all came to power with the support of the masses, or at least they were propted up by them once they got there.  Now, once the regime falls, people are all too eager to have claimed no part in it (Nazi Germany), but no leader who is so bitterly opposed by the masses will stand for long, esspecially when they needed their support to get there to begin with.  Its like riding a tiger, as Truman once put it.

Anyway, it does no good for people to ignore the problems and potential pitfalls of democratic governments, because then it leads people to the conclusion that democracy on its own is sufficient to secure rights, peace and stablity when nothing could be further from the truth.

[Silent Hunter]

Germany invaded Belgium, for crying out loud. And Luxembourg. It almost certainly made things worse on the Eastern Front. It bears a lot of responsibility for World War One, even if it didn't start it.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Certainly there were movements in Germany against certain political groups and minorities (the kulturkampf against Catholics is a prime example).  But if your mesaure of democratic government is that no one gets discriminated against, then democracy doesn't exist.  Its the nature of people, and thus governments, to discriminate against someone or something.

My point here isn't that discrimination doesn't exist in democracies, more that a system of government in which it is possible to introduce new restrictions on minority groups and, perhaps more importantly, to effectively ban political parties with a mass following (in this case the SPD for a while) is probably not very democratic. And certainly less democratic than the U.K at the time and, I think, France as well.

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Because you mentioned something about people having inaccurate ideas about pre-1918 Germany. That the German state was millitaristic and expansionist is a historical fact. And, I think, knowledge of this fact was important in popularising DPT.

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I thought you were the one that mentioned institutions. I have no problem accepting that many alledged "democratic" institutions are nothing of the sort; which is why I gave the example of the U.S.S.R.

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Must you?

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I never mentioned "freedom". Elections (and the political (as opposed to electoral) results of elections) are a very good indication of how democratic a country is.

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Define "Mob". It's important.

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I don't think that the ruling classes in France and Germany were especially enamoured of their subjects either. If the Anglophone world has seen less bloody revolutions than the norm over the past few centuries it isn't because the rulers of these countries were especially afraid of King Mob; more that they weren't as brutally reactionary as those elsewhere.

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This looks like whiggery to me. Anyways, the ruling classes here would never have allowed the state to become more democratic if their social "inferiors" hadn't spent the better part of a century doing all they could (not much, but, eventually, enough) to change things.

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Sure about this?

Where be the bearded lefty from Frankfurt when you need him?

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Regrettably I don't know enough about the American legal system in order to comment here. Do you have a problem with Jury Nobbling or something?

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I do indeed think that. I also happen to be correct. But I don't actually believe in DPT, at least not in a conventional sense.

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It has to be possible to enforce legislation for it to have any effect, so that's pretty much true.

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Yes, of course. An understanding that the powers that be have No Right To Do That is an essential part of a healthy democracy.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Got to go now. Reply to rest as soon as I get back.

[minionofmidas]

Again, I mean "comparitively".  Certainly, the courts were more fair for the average person in Germany in 1910 than they are in many other "democratic" countries today.  The average person in Germany had a reasonable expectation of recieving a fair trail.

Hardly. It sort of depends on what the trial was about, though. It actually got worse under Weimar - comparing courts' reactions to leftist and rightist political violence during Weimar, you don't know whether to laugh or cry. People basically got hanged for caughing into a policeman's face if they were communists, and fined 5 bucks for murdering four conceived "traitors" in cold blood if they were rightists.
Now, on the other hand, financial litigation between two people of similar class background - yeah, such trials were fair in Kaiserreich Germany.

[minionofmidas]

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My point is that Germany was no more at fault that any of the other countries that were involved in the war... 

That is at least as ridiculous as the Versailles fiction that it was all the Germans' fault alone.

[12th Doctor]

My point here isn't that discrimination doesn't exist in democracies, more that a system of government in which it is possible to introduce new restrictions on minority groups and, perhaps more importantly, to effectively ban political parties with a mass following (in this case the SPD for a while) is probably not very democratic. And certainly less democratic than the U.K at the time and, I think, France as well.

Less democratic does not mean undemocratic, is my point.  When I minority is discriminated against with the approval of the majority, then it is perfectly democratic, in the strictest sense.

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But many of the other main powers were no less so.  Thus to say that Germany was at fault for the war because of its attitude is to exonerate the other powers for the same sins.

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Again, my point seems to have been lost in translation.  Any country can be democratic, but in order to be a sustainable Democracy that preserves liberties, you have to have more than just congresses and voting.  If you don't have free courts, centers of learning, free press, etc, then a democratic government is just waiting to turn into a populist dictatorship, and they sometimes go that way despite of all those things.  The base assumption seems to be that democracy necessitates liberty.  Not so.  A government can be perfectly democratic and strip large minorities of its citizens of all liberties.

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My point was about the quote.  I'm sorry that that movie made you guys look like barbarians, but a lot of not-so-nice things were done to us, by you, during that war.

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Again, I'm addressing the confusion that some people seem to have that democracy and liberty are the same thing.

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Almost any mass of people which seeks to make demands by fiat or "take matters into their own hands".  I would add "disorganized" but indeed, many mobs are very well organized.  The SA's for instance.

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Its a combination of both.  Britain learned quite a bit from their civil wars, and sought very hard not to repeat them.  And so there became something inherent in the British condition that seems to have made them particularly opposed to vigilanteism and revolution, as opposed to measured progress.

I'm reminded of the old joke about the British mob:

"What do we want?"

"Measured change in the inadequacies of the status quo."

"When do we want it?"

"In due course."

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So?  My point is that British and American respect for institutions and the understanding that one could operate with in them averted the bloody revolutions and counter-revolutions that occurred in many other countries.  British political inheritance is quite a different animal from that of many other countries around the world.

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Note I said the average person, but my point is about basic justice, not revolutionary show trials.

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I'm not sure what you mean by "Jury Nobbling", but I have a big problem with the selection process used to put a jury together.  They start first by weeding out all the people who have an advanced education and it only gets worse from there.  If it is a trial of any significance, then the members of the jury basically have to be total dolts who have no knowledge of local or national current events to even be on the jury.

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No, you're not correct.  Does a government need to have freedom of speech to be democratic?  No, not so long as the majority oppose it.  Does a country need to have fair elections to be democratic?  No, not so long as 80% of the people vote for Mr. Personality-cult.  Do a population have to be educated for a country to be democratic?  Certainly not.  In fact, a democracy need not grant any personal liberties, so long as the majority of the people don't desire them.

But more to the point, in order for a government to last, it has to be based on the traditions, values and foundations of the society it is in.  Not all places have Western values.  So you suggest that a country can't be democratic unless it is western.  I don't think that's the truth.  Just because a democracy in a Muslim country might not look 100% like a western democracy doesn't mean its not democratic.  Nor does it mean that it is incapable of perserving liberties as that culture understands them.

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That's not what I meant.  What I meant is that there must be some sense that those rights exist in the minds of the people, and in the minds of the leaders, for that matter, or else voting, parliaments and constitutions are all just for show.

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No, the notion that the powers and other citizens have No Right To Do That is an essential part of a liberal (meaning liberty "loving") society.  A Democracy need not be that way, and you admit as much by saying "healthy".

The main contention now seems to be what you need to have a "democracy" and you have fallen behind the classic line that democratic government=liberty.  It doesn't.  Democratic government is what you have when the majority of the people get what they want, no matter how oppressive it is.  Oppression by the masses, which is perfectly democratic is just as bad, if not worse as oppression by the few.

[12th Doctor]

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My point is that Germany was no more at fault that any of the other countries that were involved in the war... 

That is at least as ridiculous as the Versailles fiction that it was all the Germans' fault alone.

Of course I didn't mean Belgium or what have you, but Germany was no more at fault than the French, British, Russians, etc who had fully participated in fostering the environment which led to the war.

France didn't have to get involved, so why say that German involvement was "the key"?  If Germany had declared war, and France stood out, then Russia would have said "I'm sorry, sir." and that would have ended it.  It didn't end with the Germans.  The French bear and much responsibility for escalating it.