The project "Antinomies of democratic arms control in the 1990s" applies the assumptions of democratic peace theory to arms control policy. According to these, democracies are opposed to war, conscious of costs and happy to cooperate. This gives rise to the assumption that arms control and disarmament ought to have priority status in democracies’ security policy, being regarded as instruments for preventing war, working towards reducing arms expenditure, and supplementing self-help with cooperative, largely institutionalized security policy. In the 1990s, however, the behaviour of some democratic countries with regard to international arms control policy has been observed to deviate quite markedly from this assumption.
Using this preliminary finding as a point of departure the project examines in detail the variation between arms control policies in ten democracies in ten areas of arms control policy and attempts to explain this variation with the formulation Antinomies of Democratic Arms Control. This formulation recognizes that the causality mechanisms stated in democratic peace theories correctly indicate the attributes of democracies, but that the given political outcomes do not derive from them as a matter of course but only contingently. The antinomies reveal alternative paths for development. The project interprets anomalies in the light of these alternative paths for development and tries to identify the conditions under which these alternatives bear fruit. The explanatory force of this formulation is compared with that of an alternative hypothesis, derived from Neorealism, which continues to be the dominant theory in international relations. According to this, different policies would result from the variation in positions of power of the countries being studied.

 

The project is funded by the German Research Association (DFG).