No Democracy Has Ever Experienced A Famine: Part II
Dean
I am often amused at many of the negative reactions people have when the fact that no democracy has ever gone to war with another democracy, and that no democracy has ever experienced a famine, are brought up. The recent reactions to the facts on famine I got an especially big kick out of, since lots of people objected but not a single person could name even one exception. The closest anyone came was the example of Bihar in India, which almost had a famine in 1966. Almost had one, except that one of India's sister democracies rushed in to help them.
People also kept bringing up irrelevant data like Ireland under the potato famine (not a democracy at the time) or India in world war II (also not a democracy at the time). Some also claimed that "the rule of law" was more important than democracy, which ignores the fact that many authoritarian regimes have quite intentionally starved, tortured, and enslaved people--indeed, sometimes the rule of law has been used explicitely to torture, starve, and enslave people by the millions.
Here's the most puzzling thing: why do these unassailable facts--that democracies never go to war with each other, and never allow famines to occur--bother some people so much?
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I think democracy without guaranteed freedoms leads to tyranny of the majority, and rule of law without democracy and freedom leads to unjust laws.
Still, that is an impressive statistic. I'm surprised I haven't seen it before. Makes a very strong humanitarian argument in favor of encouraging democratization.
It bothers them because it undermines their world view - namely, that America is Evil and that Democracy is bad.
I blame it on the collapse of Socialism which only remains in isolated areas of the planet like Cuba, Soho, and Berkeley. Under Communism, everyone was equal but some were more equal than others, and the Liberal Elite likes to consider themselves the latter. They abhor populism - especially after the American public elected Bush twice (had the Supreme Court not decided the election in '00, Congress would have elected Bush anyway).
Couple this with anti-Semitism and blind anti-Americanism fostered by such "thinkers" as Noam Chomsky, and your answer becomes quite clear.
Chomsky after all believes that North Korea is a paradise, although strangely, he chooses to live in Northern Massachussettes instead...
The only reason I brought that up was because I thought it was true. And I admitted that I didn't know for sure. All I know is that Wikipedia states that the Parliament of Ireland merged with the UK. I had no idea that Ireland was under a dictatorship at the time. I did not know that "merged" meant "to be ruled under the authoritarian fist of." Now I do. I apologize for that.
I just put some information out there that I thought was right. Didn't bother me at all. It seems that my bringing it up did bother you though.
I'm uncomfortable enough with absolutes, though, to resist drawing the conclusion that it *can't* happen just because it never has.
So yeah, now I agree wholeheartedly: no democracy has ever experienced a famine.
"I still like freedom as the most important concept, followed closely by democracy (freedom to choose leaders), and last rule of law.
I think democracy without guaranteed freedoms leads to tyranny of the majority, and rule of law without democracy and freedom leads to unjust laws."
I agree with that completely. Freedom, the protection of individual rights (freedom of religion, property, etc.), is far more important to me than allowing the majority to vote. But, as long as those freedoms are protected, then let the majority vote as they will within a Constitutional system of checks and balances, which is what we historically have meant by the "Rule of Law".
"Rule of Law" refers to a fixed and overarching law, binding upon all, ruled and rulers alike, as opposed to decrees which can be issued or revoked at will by a despot or a mob, "rule by laws" rather than "rule by men" as our Founding Fathers often put it.
But if had to choose only one, forskaing the other two, it would have to be freedom.
In his book, "The Great North Korean Famine," Andrew Natsios (now Adm. of USAID) says that in 1997, North Korea decided to "triage" the Northeastern provinces out of their food supply, reserving what they had for the party elite and the Western provinces, where more politically-favored people lived. That's not unlike what Stalin did to the Ukraine, when he decided to starve seven million of its people to death in 1932-33.
I certainly don't know of any democracy using food as a weapon.
"....and then all these things shall be added unto you...."
Regarding the famines in North Korea, that brings up the flip side: most famines in the last 100 years have been intentionally engineered by tyrannical governments. A few were due to incompetence, most were intentionally inflicted.
All of them under non-democratic governments of course.
War Between Democracies
This guy appears to have built a gigantic collection of straw men just so he can knock them down.
"Ensuring that all are fed is a hard thing. It shouldn't be taken for granted."
Quite true. Everything good, from freedom to food, requires a continuing uphill struggle. Even air and water can get polluted. Thomas Sowell observed that the "constrained" (i.e., realistic) view does not ask what are the "causes" of poverty, war, crime, tyranny, etc., as these are the default state of man, but instead asks what are the causes of wealth, peace, order, freedom, etc., and how might we work to increase or preserve these.
Even within the communist world you had famines in the USSR and China, but not in the eastern European communist countries.
As for someone's point about democracies not making war on other democracies, what about the war of 1812? And I believe Mexico was a democracy of sorts at the time of the Mexican-American War, although they soon reverted to dictatorship. Oddly enough you could include the American Civil War where both sides -- while racist -- were certainly democratic.
I'm certainly not arguing against the importance of democracy - I pray at that altar every day. But cause and effect are a bit mixed up here. I think famine disappeared in Western Europe and then democracy appeared, not the reverse. Famine never really was much of a problem in South America, but only recently had democracy begun to take hold.
On the flip side it may be that one reason we see so little democracy in Africa is that we see so much famine. Starving people having very little free time to attend caucuses. And we're treating all famine as equal. Some famine is a result of sheer, bloody-minded governmental incompetence. But some of it is deliberately induced as a means of subjugating a population. American Indians were frequently starved into submission by our own democratic government.
Today though we don't see much famine except in small pockets of Africa, and then, given the availability of international aid, as a result of deliberate genocidal intent.
My suggestion is to ask instead whether people who could vote starved. In Ireland, the answer is "no". Those who starved couldn't vote. Those who could vote didn't starve.
Great Britain in 1812 was NOT a democracy (less than 3% of adults could vote), although I doubt the war would have been prevented if it was.
the problem with saying democracies have NEVER fought each other is that there are too many debates over what counts as a democracy. It's better to ask people for an example of democracies fighting each other, and let them realize how hard it is to come up with one.
I think the larger problem is that there are simply too few democracies for the original proposition to mean very much. Throughout the long stretch of human history I doubt democracies have amounted to a tenth of one percent of governments.
Even throughout the 19th and 20th centuries when democracy became somewhat more popular there were very few. Those few were predominantly anglo-saxon nations -- US, Britain, Australia, Canada, NZ -- that shared a culture and were (with the exception of the US and Canada) located far from each other.
For the most part wars are fought between geographical neighbors. Not always, obviously, but most often. And given the tiny number of democracies the odds that they would abut another democratic nation are minuscule. So, basically, the opportunity for one democracy to fight another simply did not exist. Take the whole of all opportunities in recorded history for a democracy to fight another democracy and it is disappearingly small as a percentage. Even in the 20th century, there were few such opportunities.
A different question is whether democracies make war at all. Or whether they make aggressive war. Ask the Native Americans, the Canadians (US invaded during 1812 war), the Mexicans and the Spaniards whether democratic America, as the prime example, makes aggressive war.
Democracy can be defined, and has been by political scientists like Rummel. So too can war; Rummel defines it as armed conflicts in which at least a thousand people die.
Note also, by the way, that no one ever said democracies don't go to war. They do go to war and when they do they tend to be particularly good at it, and to win more often when they lose.
By the way, Spain wasn't a democracy at the time of the Spanish-American war.
I didn't claim that Spain was a democracy. I said it was a seperate question whether democracies made aggressive war.
And I never denied that democracy could be defined.
And if my research is faulty, I'd be happy to have my error pointed out. In fact, I said pretty much what you said: that democracy did not become particularly popular unto the 19th and 20th centuries. Democracies didn't become thick on the ground until the last few decades, so my point remains that while it may be true that democracies have not yet made war on other democracies, the opportunities for them to do so are historically limited, and we may, as opportunities grow, see more cases.
Yours,
Wince, aka Tom Hawkson
I think Dean's point is that there have been an awful lot of democracies in the past 100 years, yet no wars between them, even though there have been quite a few wars in the past 100 years.
I agree that this principle is not very useful for analyzing history before 1900, because of the lack (in both quantity and quality) of democracy back then.
I agree with you in general. But the 100 years figure is somewhat misleading. In 1905 there were a bare sprinkling of democracies -- the anglo-saxons, the French, the Scandanavians, and not much else.
The two largest conflicts since then -- WW's 1 and 2 -- were a mix of democratic and non-democratic allies on the one hand, against non-democratic states on the other. We didn't really see a lot of democracies until after WW2, and then a second great wave after the fall of the USSR, roughly 60 and less than 20 years ago, respectively.
I absolutely agree that democracy is the best, indeed the only legitimate form of government. I just don't know that a relatively small number of democracies living in peace with others of their persuasion for a period of a few decades tells us much over the long haul.
Imagine that all the giovernments of the world were democracies. Would we assume that war was then a thing of the past? I don't know. Not enough data. But humans being what they are, I suspect there would be some killing.
A: the Congo (scroll down to 17 June - the anniversary of the Watergate break in!).
Strategy Page is a great resource.
Yours,
Wince
What counts as an "aggressive" war vs. a non-aggressive war I don't know.
Speaking strictly in terms of political science, I believe the definition of a democracy is one in which a plurality of citizens can vote. It becomes a liberal democracy when the vast majority of the adult populace can vote and when free speech and free press are guaranteed.
As for whether we have a large enough historical sample: I suggest you spend some time exploring Rudy Rummel's Power Kills web site. Rummel is a political scientist who has dedicated his life to the study of this subject, and as I have mentioned in the past was a finalist for a Nobel prize for it. Simply read his materials, which are copiously and abundantly documented.
We DO have a large enough sample. It is probably the case that democracies will occasionally shoot at each other and given enough time two of them may really declare war on each other. But so far it's never happened, despite abundant opportunities for it to happen. Clearly it's rare, and there's a clear reason: free people as a rule simply do not enjoy war and will usually not support it.
Yours,
Wince
I'd call that a repeated experiment by a very independant source who verified the results - but maybe Rummel and Dunnigan are more closely connected than I know.
Yours,
Wince, aka Tom Hawkson
Since we're including govt. created scarcity in our definition of famine (which is of course proper, as you'll note at Merriam-Webster the cause of the food shortage is indeed not part of the word's definition), why don't you count the food shortages in the Great Depression?
WTF is so noble about armed men burning food while hungry people look on, all so the farmers would have more hard cash?
Yes, there was a large difference between the mess in the Ukraine under Stalin and the mess here under FDR and friends, but people here DID starve then, sometimes after watching good food burned, and I find it merely one of degree and not in kind, at least on the axis of 'was there a famine?'
Or have you never heard of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933??
Or maybe the sourced, cited words of Hoover referring to the post-WWI situation as a famine will change your mind?
Or do I have to dig through the entire freakin' loc.gov Great Depression photo archive of over 160,000 pictures to find burning crops for you?
What, were your grandparents rich then and didn't tell you? How many have to die before it's a 'famine'?
Second: Could you please provide me with evidence that those people starved to death? Your links don't show that at all. And I can assure you that if my grandparents and great-grandparents had known people who starved to death, I would likely have heard about it.
It is difficult for me to qualify less than 200 deaths in a country of tens of millions; such a death rate is probably comparable to death due to heat exhaustion or cold in the winter (in fact in those days it was probably less). Typically, famines kill in the hundreds of thousands if not millions; Rummel estimates 87,000,000 individuals died in famines in the 20th century under fascist, communist, and other authoritarian regimes.