The notion espoused by R.J. Rummel, noted below, that democracy will somehow put an end to war is a very old and very discredited idea. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in Human Action (Scholar's Edition, p. 818), this theory was popular in Europe in the late eighteenth century. The theory, as Mises described it, is this: "For the people wars do not pay. The only cause of armed conflict is the greed of autocrats. The substitution of representative government for royal despotism will abolish war altogether. Democracies are peaceful."
Of course, substituting representative govenment for autocracy requires war itself, as Mises noted. But, supposedly, such a war would be "the last war, the war to abolish war forever."
This theory was disproven almost immediately. Once "democracy" was firmly in place in France, and the French revolutionaries repelled Prussia and Austria, "they embarked upon a campaign of aggression. Of course, under the leadership of Napoleon they themselves very soon adopted the most ruthless methods of boundless expansion and annexation . . ." (p. 819).
The real cause of unlimited warfare, wrote Mises, is economic interventionism of all kinds.
"While laissez faire eliminates the causes of international conflict, governemnt interference with business and socialism create conflicts for which no peaceful solution can be found. While under free trade and freedom of migration no individual is concerned about the territorial size of his country, under the protective measures of economic nationalism nearly every citizen has a substantial interest in these territorial issues. . . . What has transformed the limited war between royal armies into total war, the clash between peoples, is . . . the substitution of the welfare state for the laissez-faire state."
