The democratic peace theory is now one of great controversies in political science and one of the main challenges to realism in international relations. More than a hundred different researchers have published multiple articles in this field according to an incomplete bibliography. Some critics argue that there have been exceptions to the democratic peace. Rummel discusses some claimed exceptions in his FAQ and he has referred to books by other scholars such as
Never at War. There are also various other criticisms as discussed in the democratic peace theory article.
Rummel's first work on democratic peace received little attention. His results were incorporated in a "gigantic philosophical scheme" of 33 propositions in a 5 volume work, whose "immoderate pretensions", together with Rummel's "unrelenting" economic liberalism and "extreme" views on defense policy, may have distracted readers from his more conventionally acceptable propositions. (Quotations from Nils Petter Gleditsch: "Democracy and Peace" (1995), a paper that warmly defends the existence of democratic peace, and asserts that it, and the difficulty distant states have in waging war against each other, fully account for the phenomena.)
His version of the democratic peace theory has some distinctive features disputed by some other researchers who support the existence and explanatory power of the democratic peace:
- Rummel's early research found that democracies are less warlike, even against non-democracies. Many other researchers hold only that democracies are far less warlike with one another. Some recent studies have supported Rummel's position.
- Rummel holds that democracies (properly defined) never go to war with each other; and this is an "absolute or (point) claim". Some other researchers find that, whether there have actually been a couple exceptions yet, or not, this is a chance, or stochastic, matter; Bremer 1992; Rummel is deterministic. [1] Many other researchers have also stated no wars.
Rummel does not always use his definition of democracy; nor does he always take pains to indicate when he is not. The opening paragraphs of an appendix from his book
Power Kills [2] adopt Michael Doyle's lists of liberal democracies for 1776—1800 and 1800-1850. [3] Doyle uses a much looser definition: The secret ballot was first adopted, by Tasmania, in 1856, and Belgium had barely 10% adult male suffrage before 1894.
Most estimates of democide are uncertain and scholars often give widely different estimates. Rummel's counted exactly 61,911,000 deaths due to democide during Stalin's regime inside and outside the Soviet Union, rounding to the nearest thousand. This is much higher than an often quoted figure of 20 million. Rummel has responded that this is based on a figure from Robert Conquest's book
The Great Terror from 1968 and that Conquest's qualifier "almost certainly too low" is usually forgotten. According to Rummel, Conquest's calculations excluded camp deaths after 1950, and before 1936; executions 1939-53; the vast deportation of the people of captive nations into the camps, and their deaths 1939-1953; the massive deportation within the Soviet Union of minorities 1941-1944; and their deaths; and those the Soviet Red Army and secret police executed throughout Eastern Europe after their conquest during 1944-1945. Moreover, the Holodomor that killed 5 million in 1932-1934 (according to Rummel) is not included.[4]
Rummel used to publicly claim that he was a finalist for the Nobel Prize for Peace, based on an AP report, reprinted in his local paper, about an alleged Nobel short list of 117 names. He has retracted the claim, although it still appeared in one of his books. Per Ahlmark, Swedish writer and the former Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, pledged in 1999 to nominate Rummel for a decade. Nobel nominations are inherently impossible to verify, since the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation expressly prohibit both nominators [5] and the foundation itself from disclosing information about nominations and deliberations for a period of fifty years. Accordingly, there is no independent means of confirming that the nomination was actually made, nor is there any way to know whether such a public nomination was taken seriously by the committee. Rummel has further stated: "What is evident in communication on this is that the Northern Europeans with whom I am in contact seem to have a nonchalant attitude toward the Nobel Peace Nomination. Americans do not. Of whatever I've achieved, this is the one thing that people center on, and that gives my research on the democratic peace and its promotion the most credibility for Americans."
Rummel wrote a blog post titled " Censor the Media". This caused some controversy and Rummel in his next blog post stated that he only argued for censorship of military secrets.