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not that there were two great powers but what they concretely were.
Democracies do go to war, but not with one another. In the twentieth cen–
tury, no fully functioning democracies have gone to war with one another.
This has been the case because democracies share both values and
social and political transparency. They pride themselves on openness, and
this openness "builds confidence," to use a much overused term. The exis–
tence of dictatorship in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, far from being
a source of postwar stability, has been the primary source of tension in Eu–
rope. The "peace" movements of the early 1980s in Western Europe
equated both superpowers because of their possession of nuclear weapons,
but these movements neglected the differences in their political regimes.
They separated the issue of peace in Europe from that offreedom in East–
ern Europe. They were wrong on both counts. Democratization of Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union reinforces, rather than undermines, the stability
of peace in Europe. Democracies can never fully trust dictatorships because
the latter make or try to make themselves invulnerable to outside influence,
while seeking to influence democracies, which are open to such pressures.
Regimes that do not respect the human rights of their own citizens, and that
do not have an institutionalized free and open public debate about their for–
eign and defense policies, will always arouse in democracies mistrust that no
arms control agreement can ever fully overcome. Because this
asymmetry of
regimes
is so important, democratization of dictatorships, far £i-om being a
threat to peace, promises to place it on a more secure foundation.
During the American engagement in the war in Vietnam, the Euromis–
sile dispute of the early 1980s, and the recent controversies over Central
America, public debate took place only in the democracies, in the United
States and Western Europe. Neither the North Vietnamese, the Soviet Union
and Warsaw Pact governments, and more recently the Sandinistas, faced
effective pressures from a public debate at home. North Vietnamese
negotiators in Paris, Soviet negotiators in Geneva, and the Sandinistas in
Managua were able to take the political offensive and fight their battles in the
publi c opinion of their democratic adversaries. In each case, the vices of
dictatorship became strategic virtues, while the virtues of democracy became
potential strategic vices.
But it is important not to overstate the case or to underestimate the
powers of democracies. Democratic governments have formidable powers,
powers often underestimated by friends and adversaries. The growth of
democracy and freedom in Eastern Europe has a potentially profound impact
on international politics in Europe. Public debate over foreign policy in the
Soviet Union, in Poland and Hungary is potentially one of the most important
changes in international politics since World War II. The mere existence of a
