ABSTRACT
The following paper discusses the relationship between technology, arms control and democracy in the perspective of Democratic Peace theory. It argues that this relationship is fundamentally ambivalent due to the ambiguities of liberal ideology, notably its framing of the democracy/non-democracy relation. These ambiguities find expression in more pacifist or more militarist variants of liberal political culture, and they impact upon the way enemy images are constructed in democracies. This in turn influences the attitudes towards nuclear weapons as well as cooperative security concepts such as arms control and disarmament in general, and it also guides the way in which democracies deal with technological advance.1
