Jörg Walter

A liberal approach - the only explanati Jörg Walter

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject Politics - International Politics - General and Theories, grade: 1,2, Free University of Berlin (Otto-Suhr-Institut), course: HS Demokratie und Frieden, 10 entries in the bibliography, language: English, comment: Abstract This thesis asks if a liberal approach is today the only way to explain the DPP. As an alternative Hendersons explanation of the DPP - a mix of (neo) realistic and institutional arguments - will be introduced. It will turned out that neither a pure liberal explanation nor a pure realistic one are suitable to explain the DPP nowadays. , abstract: In the early 80s political scientists discovered that they overlooked something. Earlier there was an agreement that democracies act as war prone in their foreign policy as non-democracies. The US was fighting in Vietnam; Great Britain in the Falklands and France was fighting in India and Africa, only to name three examples. It was generally assumed that domestic politics had no influence on the foreign policy of a state. Michael Doyle initiated a dramatic change in this point of view in 1983.1 He suggested that there was a huge and important difference between democracies and non-democracies: democracies do not - or very seldom - fight each other. Since this time uncountable numbers of essays were published, which tried to find an answer for this correlation called the DPP - the Democratic Peace Proposition. Most of them take a liberal approach, and today the liberal approach for explaining the DPP is the leading one. Although there are a lot of scientists working in this field, there are still questions, which cannot be answered with a liberal approach. In the first part of my thesis I will introduce the main arguments and aspects of the liberal explanation of the DPP and show in a separate part where this approach failed. Based on these findings I will introduce the (neo)-realistic approach as an alternative explanation for the DPP - particularly the