BOOK REVIEWS Some Systemic Roots of The Democratic Peace

Whatever happened to systemic analysis in the study of international relations? According to Karen Rasler and William Thompson in Puzzles of the Democratic Peace: Theory, Geopolitics and the Transformation of World Politics, at least part of the answer lies in the deluge of dyadic analyses associated with the rise of democratic peace research in the 1990s. However, the ‘‘abandonment of a systems perspective is premature’’ (p. 177), they contend, and Puzzles of the Democratic Peace is aimed, at least in part, in bringing systemic approaches back to the center in the study of international relations. Rasler and Thompson recognize that they have a tough fight on their hands. The democratic peace observationFthat democracies are less likely to fight each other than other kinds of regimesFis well established, and they concede that there ‘‘must be something going on’’ (p. 37). Observation, however, is not causation, and not one of the many theories of how democracy might cause peace has yielded much meaningful, clear-cut, and nontrivial predictive powerFachievements that lie at the heart of the scientific identification of causality. Nor have scholars paid much attention to the causes of democracy, with many jumping on an ‘‘analytical bandwagon’’ (p. 139) that takes an ‘‘immaculate conception’’ approach to regime type (p. 112). In particular, Rasler and Thompson argue, ‘‘theories are constructed too ahistorically,’’ with little consideration of the timing of democratization (pp. 140–142). As an alternative, Rasler and Thompson offer a systemic model that combines Richard Rosecrance’s (1986) ideas of how trade reduces conflict with some systemic classics, including Long Cycle Theory (Thompson 1983; Modelski 1985). The main starting point is an assumption of path dependency, which asserts that history influences state choices and preferences (such as irredentist ambitions), which, as a result, ‘‘are apt to persist regardless of changes in regime’’ (p. 95). Geography also matters because insecure borders encourage states to construct larger bureaucracies with stronger extraction capabilities. As a result, power and resources become concentrated. Maritime borders, or having neighbors that do not seek regional expansion, reduce these pressures, giving rise instead to greater external trade. States that engage in trade can extract resources with smaller bureaucracies by taxing trade. Thus, global expansion can be done inexpensively, and states that choose global rather than regional expansion face fewer threats in their home regions (p. 63). States that choose global expansion and emerge as system leaders tend to protect other states that choose to trade (p. 23). In this process, timing matters. States that choose trading over regional expansion are able to refrain from