Description
This paper presents a realist framework for democratic peace that, firstly, explains why liberal democracies remain warlike, and, secondly, offers a tentative answer to the question of democratic peace that does not exclude wars against illiberal states. Liberal democracies are warlike because foreign policy remains undemocratic among even the most consolidated democracies. This problem of democratic deficit in foreign policy was a concern to Hans Morgenthau in the Vietnam war. A concern that has largely been neglected in IR disciplinary history. While Morgenthau outlined but did not design the institutions that would democratise US foreign policy, political scientists made progress on this question since his death. Experiments with deliberative polls show that a democratic foreign policy in the manner that Morgenthau envisaged can contribute to peace. This paper therefore draws attention to a link between two sets of scholarship that currently do not engage each other: IR scholarship on democratic peace and political science scholarship on democratic innovations. The link it presents is worth exploring, as it holds a promise for a superior theory of democratic peace than has hitherto been offered by liberal scholars in IR.
