The peace of Locke's civil societies: An inquiry into the theory of the democratic peace

This work attempts to answer the question, "Do social-contract nations tend to go to war with one another?" The current debate over the "Democratic Peace," the idea that democracies do not go to war with each other, is divided into two camps: Realism and Liberalism. Liberal theories, based on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, assume that there are more opportunities for cooperation between nations in state of anarchy because of shared ideas and the mediating presence of international institutions. Realism, based on the philosophies of Machiavelli and Hobbes, holds that changes in the distribution of power of nations provide conditions necessary for war.;Notably missing from the literature is an approach based on the philosophy of John Locke. Locke argues that civil governments are necessary to establish institutions that allow peaceful communities of individuals to exist without the threat of war. He also notes that governments are in the State of Nature towards one another since there is no common, transnational superior to judge between them.;This work extends Locke's philosophy to the international relations level of analysis and concludes that social-contract nations are not prone to go to war with one another. These nations possess the critical characteristic of institutional protection of property rights and impartial enforcement of contracts. This study is divided into a philosophytheory section, and an empirical test. The new element being added to the test of the Democratic Peace is that of protection of Property rights as measured by Contract Intensive Money. Using a system of equations for a two-stage least squares regression model, a test was made on a sample of conflictual events among nations between 1950 and 1978. The results reveal: (1) institutional credibility does lowers the degree of conflict intensity between two social-contract nations; (2) the degree of conflict intensity rises when the event involves a poorer nation with low institutional credibility; and (3) CIM proves to be a more comprehensive measure of institutional credibility than that used in most research designs. A significant policy implication is that democracy, alone, does not insure the establishment of liberal-democratic regimes.