Democracy Promotion as a Security Strategy: The Case of the European Union

In Common Sense, Thomas Paine (1776: 95) suggested that republics (democracies) tended to be peaceful and that peace among states results from the democratic tendency to negotiate “mistakes” rather than resort to war. In Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant (1795: 100) made a similar claim. Although the two theorists took fundamentally opposite positions on the issue of intervention as a means to democratize third countries, their claims over the peaceful nature of democratic regimes and their positive impact on international security have constituted the basis of the “democratic peace theory” (Doyle 1997), which has exercised considerable influence over security studies.