POST-CONFLICT TRANSITIONS WORKING PAPER NO. 15 Democratic Jihad? Military Intervention and Democracy1

Abstract: Democracies rarely if ever fight one another, but they participate in wars as frequently as autocra-cies. They tend to win the wars in which they participate. Democracies frequently build large alliances in war-time, but not only with other democracies. From time to time democracies intervene militarily in on-going conflicts. The democratic peace may contribute to a normative justification for such interventions, for the pur-pose of promoting democracy and eventually for the promotion of peace. This is reinforced by an emerging norm of humanitarian intervention. Democracies may have a motivation to intervene in non-democracies, even in the absence of on-going conflict, for the purpose of regime change. The Iraq War may be interpreted in this perspective. A strong version of this type of foreign policy may be interpreted as a democratic crusade. The paper examines the normative and theoretical foundations of democratic interventionism. An empirical inves-tigation of interventions in the period 1960–96 indicates that democracies intervene quite frequently, but rarely against other democracies. In the short term, democratic intervention appears to be successfully pro-moting democratization, but the target states tend to end up among the unstable semi-democracies. The most widely publicized recent interventions are targeted on poor or resource-dependent countries in non-democratic neighborhoods. Previous research has found these characteristics to reduce the prospects for stable democ-racy. Thus, forced democratization is unpredictable with regard to achieving long-term democracy and poten-tially harmful with regard to securing peace. However, short-term military successes may stimulate more interventions until the negative consequences become more visible