ABSTRACT
Commentators such as Francis Fukuyama, capturing the heady mood during the collapse of the Soviet empire, speculated that the new wave of democratization would bring with it a history-ending reign of liberal peace. The war behavior of newly or partially democratizing states is too important to be relegated to the category of cases that are defined out of the sample of peaceful democracies. A few scholars argue that the absence of war among democracies is spurious, an artifact of a small number of cases driven by the democracies' geopolitical need to unite to resist aggressor states that happened to be authoritarian. In a strategy of partial democratic opening, elites may divide and rule by co-opting some groups to share in the spoils of war and empire while forcing excluded groups to bear the costs. The moderate majority of the ruling oligarchy was lukewarm about the war but felt hemmed in by Palmerston's social imperialism.
