Introduction

‘Commerce is the grand panacea’, so argued Richard Cobden (1835), by which he meant the pacific and civilizing effects of international trade and its role in assuaging tensions between nations. In contemporary political science the term liberal peace is employed to explain the absence of fatal conflict between democratic nations that are also economically interdependent. The expression, liberal peace, therefore, has an economic dimension, as well as an element based on a common polity and sets of values. Ultimately, these two strands of the liberal peace are inseparably linked; the literature on the liberal peace, however, may be dichotomized into ideal and economic tendencies. The ideal theory is traceable to Immanuel Kant's notions of foedus pacificum (league of peace) in his essay on the Perpetual Peace (1795) where the simultaneous adoption of a republican constitution generates a cosmopolitan peace. Its modern counterpart is to be found in the contemporary philosopher, John Rawls’ (1999), thought. Economic theories of the liberal peace probably originate in some of Montesquieu's ideas (1748) about the pacific benefits of commerce between peoples; a review of contemporary thinking can be found in Gartzke (2007), where it is labelled the ‘capitalist’ peace. Gleditsch (2008) has outlined a liberal ‘tripod’ where common democratic values, joint membership of international organizations and economic inter-dependence together buttress the ‘liberal’ peace. The term ‘liberal’ internationalist should be underscored in this regard, to distinguish this school of thought from ‘realist’ strands in political science and international relations, or for that matter neo-conservative thinking which also stresses the joint merits of market capitalism and democracy.

While it is an empirical fact that advanced industrialized democracies do not go to war with another, this does not mean that democracies do not engage in wars. For example, according to the Human Security Report (2005), the UK has been involved in the greatest number of inter-state wars (21) during the 1946‒2003 period ahead of France (19) and the USA (16). The Human Security Report also reports the total incidence of (internal as well as inter-state) conflict in different countries.