Never at War - Definitions

Definitions

The book classifies human societies into four broad groups:

Anocracies are societies where central authority is weak or nonexistent. Kinship bonds extended by personal allegiances to notable leaders are the principal relations. A society may in theory be a state but if the above applies, then Weart classifies it as an anocracy. Examples include tribes, Somalia, and the medieval Italian cities where influential families fought street battles and lived in fortified keeps. Importantly, there is no central authority which can effectively restrain personal violence such as raids which often escalate by involving friends and relatives to vendettas and wars. Some anocratic tribes may have a form of democracy in the extended kinship group but no effective control of personal raids against non-kin groups. Examples include the Iroquois who frequently raided and eventually destroyed most of the Hurons.

Autocracies are states where opposition against the current rulers is suppressed. There may be frequent shifts back and forth between anocracy and autocracy when a leader temporarily gains enough power to suppress all opponents in a territory.

Oligarchies are states where participation in government is restricted to an elite. Voting decides policy and opposition is accepted within the elite. Voting is usually restricted to less than 1/3 of the males. Examples include Sparta and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Democracies are states similar to oligarchies but there is not a sharp and clear distinction between an elite and the rest of the domestic population. Usually, more than 2/3 of the males have the right to vote.

Looking at a borderline case, the Athenian democracy that excluded metics and slaves, Weart argues that it was a democracy since appearance alone could not decide who was a citizen, citizens could become slaves and slaves could become free, citizens could be poorer than slaves, and slaves could work for example as bankers. The metics were even harder to tell from the citizens. Typically the citizens and the non-citizens worked alongside under similar conditions. Thus, the non-citizens were so interwoven through the community that their views were probably represented by the citizens on most issues. Some aspects of the direct democracy practiced in Athens may have been more open and democratic than the representative democracy used today. In contrast, the Confederate States of America was an oligarchy.

In order to help differentiate between oligarchies and democracies, Weart requires that the classification should not differ from how the people at the time viewed the differences, the oligarchic elite should live in constant fear of a rebellion, and for democracies a war should not have been prevented if everyone had the vote. For example, it was the Greeks who first created the concepts of democracy and oligarchy and they classified Athens as a democracy while Sparta was an oligarchy. There is no mention in the historical record of fears of a revolt by the slaves in Athens, but such fears were frequent in Sparta and the Confederate States.

Weart uses a broader definition of war than is usual in research on the democratic peace theory and includes any conflict causing at least 200 deaths in organized battle by political units against one another. He requires that the democracies and the oligarchies should have tolerated dissent for at least 3 years, finding this time necessary for a political culture in a nation to change and be reflected in foreign policy.