BY JR NYQUIST
It is the
season of “Peace on earth, good will to men,” though wars continue to occur and
peace is far from established. While mankind should prefer peace we have
nonetheless chosen war again and again. Excepting the Pax Romana from 27 BC to
180 AD, ancient history presents us with one war after another. If we read the
Roman historian Tacitus, even the
Pax Romana appears to have been a series of military operations. All the tribes
of the earth make war, or prepare for war. It is therefore of special interest
when a scholar shows that the free market may have already reduced the number
of wars that otherwise would have been fought. Professor Patrick J. McDonald
has offered exactly such a thesis in a book titled The
Invisible Hand of Peace: Capitalism, the War Machine, and International
Relations Theory.
Under the
rule of law, with private property and “competitive market structures,”
modernity has arguably found a greater incentive to peace than to war. As
McDonald explains in his book, “states that possess liberal political and
economic institutions do not go to war with each other….” What does liberalism
signify in this context? According to Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, “The
essential teaching of liberalism is that social cooperation and the division of
labor can be achieved only in a system of private ownership of the means of
production, i.e., within a market society, or capitalism.” Mises and McDonald
would both argue that economic freedom, and the institutions which make this
freedom possible, tend to promote peace. McDonald offers a caveat, however. He
warns that democracy is not the guarantor of peace some have asserted it to be.
The free
market and free trade are much stronger guarantors of peace. In the case of
China today, McDonald argues that an autocratic Chinese regime has adopted a
policy of peace for the sake of economic development. “Because conflict or even
the threat of it tends to disrupt normal trading patterns, potentially large
economic costs will deter dependent states from using military force to solve
their political conflicts.” McDonald also noted: “As commerce grows, the
incentives for plunder or conquest decrease simply because it is a more costly
means of generating economic growth.” Not only does free market cooperation
bring wealth to all the parties involved, it displaces national loyalties and
state rivalries.
Of course,
McDonald is well aware that free trade and free markets can be overridden by
democratic ideological imperatives. Simply put, if economic liberalism signifies
the disutility of war,democratic liberalism does no such thing. According to
McDonald, “Even democratic leaders can exploit domestic institutional
instability and public fears of insecurity to construct broad swaths of public
support for war.” It is not the
ballot box that assures peace, says McDonald. It is private property and free
trade which binds nations and peoples to the cause of peace, despite cultural
and political differences.
The
controversial German revisionist, Udo Walendy, summed up democracy’s readiness
to start a global war when he wrote, “On September 3, 1939, England and France
declared war on Germany. In so doing they transformed a limited territorial
dispute between Poland and Germany into a world war over the city of Danzig, a
matter that could easily have been resolved through negotiation.” Patrick
Buchanan offered a similar judgment in his book Churchill,
Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost
the World. Arguably, in both world wars the
democracies fought when they didn’t have to. About this idea George Kennan
wrote: “When you total up the score of two [world] wars, in terms of their
ostensible objective, you find that if there has been any gain at all, it is
pretty hard to discern.”
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