Democratic Peace Theory and Spread of Democratization

Table of Contents

1 INTRODUCTION 1
2 DEMOCRATIC PEACE THEORY 2
3 DEMOCRATIZATION PROCESS 4
3.1 HOW TO SPREAD DEMOCRACY 4
3.2 SECURITY INTERESTS IN SEEING DEMOCRATIZATION SPREAD 5
3.3 DEMOCRATIZATION PROGRAMS 6
4 REASONS FOR NOT SPREADING DEMOCRACY 8
4.1 INTRODUCTION 8
4.2 POLITICAL ASPECTS 8
4.3 ECONOMIC ASPECTS 10
4.3.1 CHINA 10
4.3.2 MIDDLE EAST 11
5 CONCLUSION 12
      REFERENCE   LIST 13



1 Introduction

In the last century the number of democracies in the world increased significantly (Smith & Hadfield & Dunne, 2008: 53). In 1900 just 14 countries could be described as democratic whereas 103 states have been liberated in 2000 (Smith, et al., 2008: 53). The liberal democratic peace theory claims that liberated countries never go to war against each other (Sørensen, 1993: 93). Therefore, it could be assumed that as more countries in the world change into democracies the more peaceful the world would become .By making this deduction all liberal countries in the world should have a strong security interest in spreading democracy to all authoritarian countries.   However summits like the recent one between US-President Barack Obama and Chinas President Hu Jintao, where Obama just made small efforts to criticise the democratic deficits of China (Wolf & Hall, 2011), suggest the assumption that democratic states hardly interfere in the internal affairs of authoritarian countries.

The reason for the just small interventions could be that democratic states prioritise other topics in foreign affairs like economic reasons or the fight against terroristic groups.

This assignment will describe and scrutinize the theses mentioned above. Therefore,   the first part will describe the democratic peace theory, put this into relation with the scholarship of liberalism and look for evidence for this thesis. The second part of the assignment discusses the peace theory and why or why not liberal countries should espouse democratization processes in...