One of the most easily made arguments in favor of the view that World War I could have been avoided if all belligerents were democracies is the historical record: It was not, and they were not, and those facts help explain why the war came about. This was a period in which democracy had not exactly won the war of ideas among Europe's rulers or the institutions of European governance. It has also been said that communism, the antidemocratic ideology that supplanted absolute monarchy in Europe where constitutional democracies did not and that survived the Great War for most of the 20th century, nevertheless itself eventually fell to "the superior strength of a rival body of ideas, free-market democracy, which was powerful enough to hold together the 16 countries of the West's alliance through all the alarms and rigours of the cold war" ("Nation-State" 15).
The constitutional monarchy of Britain might be characterized as the closest thing to a democracy in that period, compared to the states of Continental Europe, and its defensive aid to France and Belgium could be characterized as a bulwark against Austro-Hungarian and German imperialism. But the fact that Britain came into the war against the Austro-Hungarian empire, which undoubtedly pressed its imperial designs on neighboring European states and statelets before and after 1914, must be set beside its being tied to Serbia, site of the provocatively anarchic assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Ferdinand, and to Russia, an absolute monarchy and a massive empire in its own right (Tuchman 78-9; 91; 116). It is also difficult to ignore Britain's own antidemocratic status, though its overt imperial ambitions were outside Europe--India, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. On the other hand, Sagan cites the failure of Britain to unequivocally state that it would come to France's aid if Germany attacked as a contributing (though not necessarily decisive) factor to continental instabilit...