1.In the past few years, the number of democratic states in the world has increased substantially. What effect will this have on the incidence of war? The answer is positive, if one follows the general line of Kant's reasoning that has been an aspect of U.S. foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson, i.e., that democratically-elected governments that respect the rights of citizens will not make war against other democracies (Waltz 162-163; Hoffman 39). Poised against that positivist stance is the principle of "state sovereignty" as chartered in the United Nations. State sovereignty involves concepts of territorial integrity between nations that have little to do with internal state democracy - indeed, may be fanned by populist "democratic" movements that substitute chauvinism for nationalism (Hoffman 38). It matters little whether a state is democratic; instead, factors such as economy, international trade, and internal political stability figure prominently in decisions about war.
In Cold War era thought on foreign policy, the democratization of nations takes secondary place to the issue of "polarities" (Mearsheimer 35). During the Cold War, there was a "bipolar" division of power between the U.S.-led Western democracies and the U.S.S.R.-dominated communist states. International foreign policy was predicated on the belief that this bipolar situation was inherently more "stable" than the alternative configuration: a "multi-polar" contention among several powers. The key example pointed to when warning against multi-polarity was the situation pre-World War I, when the balance-of-power among several relatively equal world powers was proved to be fragile and easily-destabilized (Mearsheimer 35-37).
Today the breakdown of the Soviet Union - and its subsequent creation of dozens of new "democracies" - has fractured the bipolar stability of the Cold War, replacing it with a multipolar, constantly-shifting diplomatic situation. In ...