Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another.

Spencer C. Weart Yale University Press, $35,432 pp. Jean Bethke Elshtain 

Spencer R. Weart, director of the Center for Physics at the American Institute of Physics, here turns historian - I assume he is by training a physicist - in order to breathe new life into an old claim, for some a rock-ribbed truth: Democracies don't go to war against one another. As soon as the gauntlet is thrown down, the realpolitiker in this reader comes back: "Oh yeah? What about postrevolutionary France going on a rampage against every European country in sight?" And the response from the defender of the Weartean thesis would likely be: "Yes, but none of the attacked countries or regimes was democratic." The point is not that democracies do not make war but, rather, "that well-established democracies are inhibited by their fundamental nature from warring on one another." Weart indicates that he could not find a single "plain counterfactual to this rule, even in remote historic locales."

Of course, this is much too tidy. In defense of his thesis, Weart divides regimes into so many categories and variants on categories you need a scoreboard to keep it all straight. He builds his case by layering on definitions and categories, defending this approach by noting that he offers an exhaustively chronicled history that puts paid to the traditional balance-of-power and raison d'etat propositions. At the same time, he is no Kantian. He acknowledges that free peoples do not lose a hankering for conflict. "Democratic bellicosity" remains a problem.

But what sort of problem and how do democracies sort it out? A first task is to determine what modes of political and social organization fall into the category "democracy." Weart defines "republic" as a "more general concept," meaning that democracy is but one of a very long list of variants on republic. In a republic, "political decisions are made by a body of citizens who hold equal rights." A republic becomes a democracy "if the body of citizens with political rights includes at least two-thirds of the adult males," and Weart argues that even republican oligarchies rarely come into conflict. But into this category, somewhat astonishingly, he slots both the Soviet Union and the old Czechoslovakia under Soviet domination as offering one of the pitifully few exceptions to the rule that "approximately republican regimes of the same kind" never come into conflict. The exceptional occasion: the crushing of Prague Spring, 1968.

Clearly something is askew. This analysis shoves into one category an authoritarian, oppressive empire and one of its client states upon which an analogous state apparatus was forced. Weart goes on to tag the Soviet Union and the Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia not only "republican" but "approximately" the same kind of order!

Weart's definition of war is no more enlightening. One "satisfactory definition of war is violence organized by political units against one another across their boundaries." But Weart prefers "any conflict involving at least two-hundred deaths in organized combat." This opens the door to hundreds and hundreds of conflicts and Weart covers a staggering number. But what does it all add up to? First, "well-established democracies have never made war on one another." Keep in mind here his definition of democracy as a sub-set of republic and the fact that he has appended the qualifier: well-established.

As Weart sets out to see if this first finding holds up, he finds a second. "Well-established oligarchic republics (the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia in 1968, remember) "have scarcely ever made war on one another." The posing and pursuit of caveats and clarifiers goes on for pages. But a "key hypothesis" is now added, namely, that "leaders will tend to act toward their foreign counterparts in the way they are accustomed to act toward rival domestic political leaders." Machiavellian at home; Machiavellian abroad. Moderate compromiser at home; ditto. Whatever the merits of this case - and they are considerable - it is not made effectively here.

The bulk of Never at War is devoted to case studies, all pointing in the direction of Weart's general claims, from ancient Greece to contemporary Yugoslav successor-state horrors. My hunch is that knowledgeable historians and social scientists will find wanting the particular ways Weart parses a "case." At times, Weart seems to be trying to keep his vessel from springing leaks and his preferred way of staving off swamping and sinking is to further refine already narrowly parsed definitions.

I've mentioned the case of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Weart's one comment on this strange coupling is that it might indeed seem "odd to give the respectable name of republicans to these overseers of an empire and prison camps." But the key question for Weart is not how cruelly the oligarchy treats its subjects, "but whether they treat one another as equals," a sort of honor-among-thieves claim. The problem with this notion is that the Soviets and Czechs were not coequal thieves. The "incident" of Prague, 1968, comes off in this book as dry as dust. A few pages describe the negotiation between Brezhnev and his henchmen and Dubcek "and his colleagues," without any sense of the popular uprising (stones against tanks in Wenceslas square), the radical disparity of forces, the West's outrage and inaction. To Weart, the case is simply the exception that proves the rule that oligarchic republics do not attack their own kind.

The final message of the book is also its first: that well-established democracies are "inhibited by their fundamental nature from warring on one another." Weart insists that there is a sturdy and growing zone of democratic peace. That may well be true. Weart's hopes for universal democracy are worthy enough. But too much that is critical to history and human life drops out of Weart's scenario. Dauntingly complex issues are settled in a manner that is too arbitrary to be finally compelling.

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago.