Charleston Voice: LIBERTARIANISM AND INTERNATIONAL VIOLENCE - As the American People Lose their Liberties its Government Commits Genocide

From 1917 to 1987, The Soviet government, really the Communist Party, murdered about 62,000,000 people, near 55,000,000 of them Soviet citizens. There are virtually no photos of this on the internet. Here is one exception. In the photo the bodies of seven Germans hang in the Smolensk city square after they were convicted in Smolensk district court for perpetrating "crimes against the Soviet people," a very general classification covering any reason for which officials wanted to dispose of a person. The American NDAA equivalent.

By R.J. Rummel

ABSTRACT
Based on theory and previous results, three hypotheses are posed:

Libertarian states have no violence between themselves.

The more libertarian two states, the less their mutual violence.

The more libertarian a state, the less its foreign violence.

These hypotheses are statistically tested against scaled data on all reported international conflict for 1976 to 1980; and where appropriate, against a list of wars from 1816 to 1974, and of threats and use of force from 1945 to 1965. The three hypotheses are found highly significant. Tests were also made for contiguity as an intervening variable and were negative. Finally, two definitions of "libertarian" are tested, one involving civil liberties plus political rights, the other adding in economic freedom. Both are highly positive, but economic freedom is also found to make a significant added reduction in the level of violence for a state overall or between particular states.

In Understanding Conflict and War (Rummel, 1975-1981) I concluded that libertarianism is causally related to foreign violence: The more freedom that individuals have in a state, the less the state engages in foreign violence. This conclusion was based on social field theory and associated evidence, and on the test of related propositions against the empirical literature.^1a
My purpose here is to test this conclusion directly against the occurrence of conflict and violence for all states for the five years, from 1976 to 1980, and for all interstate wars since 1816.

THEORY AND PRIOR EVIDENCE

Put simply, the theory is that in libertarian states (those emphasizing individual freedom and civil liberties and the rights associated with a competitive and open election of leaders--what we also call liberal democracies) exist multiple, often conflicting, elites, whose interests are divergent and segmented, checked and balanced. Although perhaps formally centralized, as in Great Britain and France, in practice political power is relatively decentralized and diffuse.

Moreover, political elites are dependent on the support of a public unwilling to bear the cost in taxes, property, and blood of foreign adventures and intervention unless they are aroused by an emotionally unifying issue. Even then the public cannot be trusted to pay the price of foreign violence for long and may turn on those responsible even in the midst of war. Of course, an emotional and patriotically aroused people can itself be a force for war. But this is to underline that the essential diversity of interests and values of free people must be overcome, a sufficiently unifying national stake or value must be at issue, before elites can risk foreign violence. This is not true for states whose political elites are unrestrained by a free press and contending centers of power and that are unaccountable through free elections. For these reasons, the freer the people of a state, the more nonviolent its elite's expectations and perceptions, and the less likely they are to commit official violence against other states. This is not to deny such violence does occur (witness the Vietnam War and the Falkland Islands conflict, among others), but only that free states are least prone to international violence and war.

At a more basic theoretical level, libertarian states comprise social fields in which the actions of groups and individuals respond to many divergent and opposing social and psychological forces. These forces spontaneously resolve into interlocking and nested balances of powers and associated structures of expectations. These define the social order. Such systems (like the free market) tend to be self-regulating and to isolate and inhibit conflicts and violence when they occur. They tend to encourage exchange, rather than coercive and violent solutions, in conflict between groups and individuals.

Libertarian states are by theory not only less violence prone, but when foreign relations includes the perception of other libertarian states, this inhibition becomes a mutual barrier to violence. Their mutual domestic diversity and pluralism, their free and competitive press, their people-to-people and elite-to-elite bonds and relationships, and their mutual identification and sympathy will foreclose on any expectation or occurrence of war between them; violence may occur only in the most extraordinary and unusual circumstances, or at the margins of what it means to be libertarian.

In sum, there are two propositions implied, one relating to interstate violence, the other to the overall violence of a state (operational statement in parentheses):

Joint Freedom Proposition: Libertarian systems mutually preclude violence (violence will occur between states only if at least one is nonlibertarian (Rummel, 1979: Joint Freedom).
Freedom Proposition: Freedom inhibits violence (the more libertarian a state, the less it tends to be involved in violence (Rummel, 1979: Freedom).

As to systematic evidence for the first Proposition, a survey of the literature uncovered fourteen relevant empirical studies. Ten support (three strongly) it and three are negative.¹ And two of these negative ones are based on indirect inferences from complex statistical manipulations of many variables, themselves indirectly measuring the relevant concepts.

There are five important (in the scope and relevance of the data and analyses) studies, all of which support the proposition (two strongly; Babst, 1972; Rummel, 1979: Appendix I, Project 48; Barringer, 1972; Vincent, 1977a, 1977b, 1979; and Small and Singer, 1979). It is fair to say, therefore, that in general the evidence supports the idea that violence will not occur between libertarian states.

In evaluating this evidence, including that to be presented here, keep in mind the unusual nature of this proposition. It is not a statement of correlation, association, or relationship. It is an absolute (or "point') assertion: There will be no violence between libertarian states. One clear case of violence or war unqualified by very unusual or mitigating circumstances falsifies the proposition.²

As for the Freedom Proposition, the evidence in the literature described in Rummel (Vol. 4: War, Power, Peace) is mixed but tends to support it. Of 25 relevant studies, 13 favor (4 strongly) the proposition and 10 are opposed (6 strongly). However, when only directly relevant studies are considered, those in favor number the same, while those that oppose the proposition drop to 8 (with 5 strongly negative). Finally, if only important studies (covering large historical periods, large samples, or many variables) are counted, 6 are positive (4 strongly), while only 3 are opposed (one strongly). The result is that the more directly relevant and important the published study, the more likely its findings will support the proposition.

DEFINITIONS AND DATA SOURCES

By theory, libertarian will have two meanings, one a limited version of the other. The first is political freedom, involving civil liberties and political rights--what we usually mean by a democratic, open system. Second, there is freedom in a more expansive sense, which includes not only political freedom, but also the freedom of groups and individuals to pursue their socioeconomic interests free from government coercion. The latter reflects the classical-liberal idea of limited and minimal government. While political freedom is consistent with a large, democratic-socialist government, as in Sweden or Denmark, I argue that such centralized, semi-socialist governments introduce a considerable measure of coercion that contributes to foreign violence (see Vol. 2: The Conflict Helix: Part 8, for the associated theory and classification of governments). We should find, therefore, that those states with less freedom, as opposed to less political freedom, should have a greater tendency toward violence.

Freedom is best measured by the degree to which governmental power is decentralized and limited and society is based on exchange. Here it suffices to measure the level of economic freedom (from governmental ownership, control, and regulation). Thus the two definitions are:

Political freedom = civil liberties + political rights
Freedom = political freedom + economic freedom

The Freedom House publication Freedom at Issue presents annually a 7-point scale of all states on their political rights and civil liberties.³ To paraphrase Freedom at Issue (1981: 6), political rights are defined by an open, competitive electoral process through which leaders are clearly elected. States rated 1 have these characteristics; those rated 7 have none--those at the top believe they have the right to govern without challenge and are not constrained by public opinion or tradition. Civil liberties comprise the freedom of the press and the independence of the major media from government dictation; the protection of the individual by the courts; the freedom to express individual opinions without fear of imprisonment; the respect for private rights and desires in religion, occupation, residence, education, and the like; and the individual's ability to engage in rational political activities without fear for his or her life. States rated 1 have all these civil liberties; those rated 7 have complete censorship; political prisoners; no right of assembly; restricted travel, residence, and occupation; pervading fear tied in to a police-state environment; and swift and sure execution. I will operationalize political freedom, then, as the sum of these two scales,⁴ where the higher the combined scale value, the less the political freedom. Thus for 1980 the United States is 1 + 1 = 2; Indonesia is 5 + 5 = 10; Kuwait is 6 + 4 = 10, and Vietnam is 7 + 7 = 14.

Freedom at Issue also classifies states by their economic and political systems (see Wright, 1982, for a useful refinement of the economic classification). According to my estimate of the economic freedom under each subclassification, I distributed scale values 1 through 14 in the following manner:

Scale Value = Type of Economic System (all examples for 1977): 1 = industrial and preindustrial capitalist, decentralized (e.g., the United States, Botswana, Cyprus); 2 = all other preindustrial capitalist (e.g., Fiji, Gambia, Honduras); 3 = all other industrial capitalist (e.g., Costa Rica, France, Surinam); 5 = preindustrial capitalist-statist (e.g., Rhodesia, Iran, Zaire); 6 = industrial capitalist-statist (e.g., Malta, Taiwan, Ghana); 8 = preindustrial capitalist-socialist (e.g., Burma, Sudan, Peru); 9 = industrial capitalist-socialist (e.g., Austria, Egypt, Yugoslavia); 11 = preindustrial socialist (e.g., Angola, Laos, Tanzania); 12 = industrial socialist, non-Communist (Algeria only); 14 = industrial socialist, Communist (e.g., Albania, Czechoslovakia, USSR)

Freedom is then measured as the scale values for political freedom plus those for economic freedom, which gives equal weight to political and economic freedom. Thus freedom for Belgium in 1977 equals 2 + 1 = 3; for Sweden 2 + 9 = 11; for Senegal 8 + 9 = 17; for Poland 11 + 9 = 20; and for East Germany 14 + 14 = 28.

I need also to group states and dyads by their degree of libertarianism and to keep distinct the two definitions of a libertarian state. The most objective way of doing this is to divide the political freedom and freedom scales into the types listed in Table 1. These scales and types are now the basic data on libertarianism for testing the propositions.