Two Views: Would Widespread Economic and Political Freedom Create Global Peace?

Though I would agree with Sarah Slater’s point that global peace could never be entirely accomplished due to the presence of scarce resources and competing cultural values, it is hard to negate the evidence that democracies – systems in which political freedom is the foundation – rarely go to war against each other. It is also hard to ignore that economies that practice economic freedom and are increasingly dependent on each other also find it difficult to go to war. For these reasons, it seems fair to conclude that the expansion of political and economic freedoms contributes to domestic and global peace, even if they may not resolve the entire issue.

These arguments ultimately rest on cost-benefit analysis. As Immanuel Kant, one of the early writers on global peace, wrote in 1795, wars do not frequently benefit the ordinary people in a country. Often, citizens have to bear the load of war, “having to fight, having to pay the costs of war from their own resources, having painfully to repair the devastation war leaves behind, and, to fill up the measure of evils, load themselves with a heavy national debt that would embitter peace itself and that can never be liquidated on account of constant wars in the future.” In a republic or a democracy where citizens are free to exercise political control, it would make sense that they try to refrain from going to war as much as possible. Political freedoms, then, become safety valves that citizens may exercise against their politicians when conflicts begin to get overheated.

Theoretically, Kant’s proposition makes sense, but how does it play out in recent history?

Political freedom – by which we mean the ability of the public to engage in a political process without being coerced or compelled in any way – is a relatively recent phenomenon in history and the phenomenon only took hold in the past 50 or 60 years. According to scholar Michael Mandelbaum, “In the second half of the twentieth century … democracies consistently preferred butter to guns” due to their political choices which reflected their preferences for social welfare programs than to foreign activity and wars. Even the United States, which has acquired the reputation of bellicosity “was subject to the same popular reservations about and objections to war” in the twentieth century that was present in other countries, albeit at a smaller scale.

Increased globalization and the dependency between economies that practice economic freedom also create situations in which the desire for peace outweighs the desire for conflict. Conflict can interrupt trade between nations, the production of goods, and the transactions between consumers and producers which encourages these economies to refrain from war. Again, this argument rests on a cost-benefit analysis between the costs of war and the benefits of peace. As Sarah Slater noted in the previous article, no European state in the European Union has attacked another – a miracle if we examine Europe’s recent history.

We should look at expanding political and economic freedom as a positive force in expanding the capacity of people to behave nonviolently, but we shouldn’t assume that it is a guarantee that people will take the opportunity of these freedoms. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen wrote concerning democracy in Development as Freedom, “Democracy does not serve as an automatic remedy of ailments as quinine works to remedy malaria. The opportunity it opens has to be positively grabbed in order to achieve the desired effect. This is … a basic feature of freedoms in general – much depends on how freedoms are actually exercised.” While political and economic freedom may indeed contribute to global peace, it still depends on what people make of it.

In conclusion, I do not believe that there is a one-size-fits-all solution to the issue of global peace and that if only we could snap our fingers and declare that all countries were politically and economically free, then the world would be immediately at one. This approach ignores cultural and historical conditions and, as we have seen in the Balkans, the transition from an authoritarian government to a system that promotes political and economic freedom can be a violent one. (The current state of affairs in many Middle Eastern countries today would be other examples.) By the same token, however, the evidence exists that, in the long run, these expansions may indeed increase global peace and contribute to the capacity of people to behave nonviolently.