Who maintains the democratic peace, is it leaders or institutions? The scholarly tension between the structure and agency has been in the center of the sociology of international relations. State-and-societal level theories emphasize the role of domestic institutions in shaping states’ behavior at the system level. This essay will broadly investigate the bureaucratic and organizational level theories. It is essential to break down the levels of analysis to individual and institutional realms in order to investigate on the conditions of democratic peace. It first will conceptualize the demoratic peace paradigm. By focusing on Putin’s Russia, I argue that authoritarian leaders’ irrational foreign policy-making can be threat to the world peace in the event that their ideas lead to a consensus-building in bureaucratic setting.
Some political scientists observe that democracies rarely –if ever– go to war in each other, thanks to the norms and structures in the political institutions of the countries. The philosophical underpinnings of democratic peace go back to Kant’s vision of republican peace. Democracies share liberal norms for peaceful conflict resolution; if the civil constitution of every state becomes republican, the possibility for a conflict between states will be minimized (Kant, 3). The reason is that democracies theoretically cannot initiate conflict without the consent of the public audience. Democratic publics can be less tolerant of their governments that engage in conflict. Yet, Kant and other democratic peace scholars make over-simplified assumptions about the decision-making mechanisms in states. Perpetual peace among states depends on, in their account, the codification of liberal values, as well as democratic participation in the making of social contracts. This perspective simplistically associates the stability in the international system with liberal democratic values. It makes no justice in explaining the nuances in diplomatic decision-making, since the government is treated as a unitary actor.
Diversionary theory goes one step beyond the democratic peace paradigm to look inside the state to explain the onset of conflict. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrates, the rise of populist authoritarianism poses a grave danger to democratic peace. Diversionary theory suggests that governments may initiate conflict in cases of domestic turmoil in order to generate domestic support. Broadly referred to as Rally- ‘Round-the-Flag Effects, these incentives to galvanize domestic support manifest differently in democratic and authoritarian regimes. I believe that non-rational (behavioral) factors should be examined in the way Putin established his authority as a populist leader. One needs to reflect on the factors that influence a leader’s understanding of events in world affairs and how leaders respond to those events.
In the State-and-Societal level theories, organizational and bureaucratic politics models go beyond the assumption that decision-makers (leaders) are rational utility maximizers (Levy and Thompson). The bureaucratic politics model suggests that a state’s foreign policy is the outcome of internal politics: Actors within the government can exert greater or lesser influence on a state’s foreign policy depending on its relative power within the government. On the other hand, the organizational model suggests that a state’s foreign policy is the product of domestic actors’ routines. Actors within the government follow routines in responding to a foreign problem.
Although realists prefer to focus on the state as the unit of analysis Mearsheimer looks to individual leaders and their ideologies in explaining the Russia vs. Ukraine war. He describes Putin as "a first-class strategist" who is armed with the correct analytic framework. By introducing leaders and their ideas into his analysis, Mearsheimer argues that different statesmen guided by different ideologies might produce different foreign policies. One could extrapolate Mearsheimer’s framework to argue about the buracuratic/organizational influences on foreign policy decision-making. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated that “This is President Putin’s war, one he has chosen, planned, and is waging against a peaceful country,” (Erlanger and Jakes). Bureaucratic politics model posits that foreign policy is the outcome of an internal “process of conflict, bargaining, and consensus building.” (Levy, 165) Vladimir Putin managed to, without any doubt, effectively influence foreign-policy and military actors, given Russia’s war stil, continues without NATO’s military intervention.
Works Cited
Michael McFaul; Stephen Sestanovich; John J. Mearsheimer, “Faulty Powers: Who Started the Ukraine Crisis?” Foreign Affairs, Nov./Dec. 2014.
Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson, “The State and Societal Level” and “Decision-Making: The Organizational Level,” chapters 4 6 (pp. 162-185) in Causes of War (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” Section II.
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