Niall Ferguson:
Is the world becoming a more peaceful place? After a week of carnage in Iraq that may seem a rather idiotic question. And yet there is strong evidence that the amount of conflict in the world as a whole is going down.There are significantly fewer wars in the world today than there were 10 years ago. After a peak in around 1990 - when the end of the Cold War seemed to have unleashed a New World Disorder - the number of wars in progress has fallen to just 20. And many of these are rather small-scale affairs.
According to the University of Maryland's Centre for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM), "global warfare has decreased by over 60 per cent since peaking in the mid-1980s, falling… to its lowest level since the late 1950s". In the past three years alone, 11 wars have ended, in countries ranging from Indonesia and Sri Lanka in Asia, to Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Angola and Liberia in sub-Saharan Africa.
The two most striking features of war in our time have been, first, the decline of traditional inter-state warfare and, second, the rise and fall of civil war. Since the end of the Cold War there have been just a handful wars between separate states, and most of these were of very short duration: Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent war to liberate it; the border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and the various American-led interventions to topple "rogue regimes" in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Historians love to ask why wars begin. Umpteen books have titles like The Origins of the … War. Yet we write much less about how and why wars end. Why did the killing - which claimed around 200,000 lives in each case - finally stop in Bosnia and Guatemala? Why does the world as a whole seem to be getting more peaceful?
One deceptively simple explanation for the decline of war - the favourite of American political scientists - is that the world is getting more democratic. Back in 1977, just 35 of the world's 140 independent states were democracies - barely a quarter. Today, democracies account for 55 per cent of the total. Why should this make peace more likely? The reason is that two democracies are less likely to go to war with one another than, say, two dictatorships, or a democracy and a dictatorship. Ergo, the more democracy, the less war. And democracies are also less likely to descend into civil wars.
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President Bush has repeatedly said that he sees America's role as being to spread "freedom" - short-hand for free trade and free elections. Contrary to popular belief, armed intervention is probably the least effective (and least used) American device for achieving this. Trade agreements (in Central America) and financial support for democratic movements (in Eastern Europe) are achieving much more. So the American empire spreads peace by peaceful means. As more and more governments embrace a version of the American model of liberal democracy, so the number of wars declines.
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