DEMOCRACY AND INTEGRATION - WHY DEMOCRACIES DONT FIGHT EACH OTHER

While a large and growing literature has emerged which investigates th e impact of the expansion of democracy on foreign policy and internati onal politics, much of it has been characterized by insufficient atten tion to theoretical and conceptual clarity. To address such problems, this article is an exercise in concept clarification. It stresses that the democratic peace is a subset of the processes and results of inte gration, that it fits within an integration framework, and that it wor ks according to processes already identified by integration theory whi ch permits the synthesis of a number of 'contending' explanations for the democratic peace. As part of this argument, the article also stres ses the transparent nature of democracy, emphasizing the importance of the mutual perceptions of two democracies, that the other is clearly a democracy. Finally, this article reminds scholars that the focus of the democratic peace proposition is on war. While it is important to e xplore our theories in terms of their extension to other conflictual p henomena, we must be careful in specifying exactly what these relation ships should look like.