Kant, Mazzini, and the Origins of the Argument that Democracies do not Fight Each Other.

In this paper I show that the hypothesis of a "separate" or dyadic peace among democracies was first developed by Giuseppe Mazzini, and not by Immanuel Kant, as present-day international relations theorists commonly assume. Giuseppe Mazzini, the inspirational leader of the Italian struggle for national independence, ranked among the most influential European public figures of the mid-19th century. He also made a seminal contribution to the development of modern liberal internationalist thought. Yet he has largely fallen into oblivion today among international relations scholars and political theorists. A systematic reappraisal of Mazzini's international political thought should allow for some fresh insights on the causes of peace among democracies: unlike other liberal thinkers, Mazzini did not believe that democracies are inherently peaceful. He simply thought that Europe's vulnerable democracies would be natural allies in the struggle against despots and other enemies of liberty. Europe's new democracies, Mazzini argued, would thus establish a "collective defense pact" among themselves. This would lead to increased inter-democratic cooperation, trust, and a gradual overcoming of the security dilemma among democracies.The essence of Mazzini's causal argument can explain the emergence of a "separate peace" among liberal democracies since the end of WWII: the western democracies initially created a defensive security alliance under American leadership, to protect their freedom from what they perceived as an expansionist communist threat. The institutionalization of this western alliance promoted increasingly close contacts and exchanges among the western democracies, with a concomitant progressive reduction of the security dilemma among them. Mazzini's causal explanation is logically coherent and more consistent with the historical evidence than alternative explanations, based on democratic institutional constraints or on the "externalization" of democratic norms in foreign affairs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]