The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention Crashes and Burns

Back when I was in college, I briefly toyed with the idea of going into the field of International Relations. One day I interrupted a friend studying for a test in her IR course. Upon asking her what she was studying, she replied she was memorizing the "golden rules" of international relations. What, I asked sceptically, were these rules? The first golden rule, she replied, was that no democracy ever goes to war with another democracy.

It was at that point that I knew IR wasn't really for me. I just knew too much history to be able to buy into these kinds of simplistic, uninformed and ignorant "golden rules". In the laa-laa land of American academic IR theory these self-serving theories may have great traction but in the messy, complex, unsimplified reality revealed by history they serve little purpose but to obfuscate the facts.

But wait a minute, these kinds of theories haven't just stayed in laa-laa land but unfortunately have leaked into the public consciousness through ignorant hacks and bestselling writers such as Thomas Friedman, author of the utterly simplistic and mostly wrong cheering chorus of a book on globalization, "The World is Flat" (and incidentally someone who attended the same college I did, which might explain where he gets some of his ideas).

Take for incidence this passage from one of his articles:

So I’ve had this thesis for a long time and came here to Hamburger University at McDonald’s headquarters to finally test it out. The thesis is this: No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.

The McDonald’s folks confirmed it for me. I feared the exception would be the Falklands war, but Argentina didn’t get its first McDonald’s until 1986, four years after that war with Britain.

Now I don't understand why Thomas Friedman is so popular (in the past few months two different people have enthusiastically recommended his abysmal book to me), but then he's just a mediocre popular writer, who will (hopefully) be forgotten a few years down the line. The thing is its not just him, serious scholars buy into this kind of thing.

At this point one may be prompted to point out that the Kargil War between Pakistan and India happened when both had plenty of McDonald's franchises and democratically elected governments to boot, but one could argue that Pakistan and India don't rate high on the democracy scale, or, if you believe Nawaz Sharrif, that the Pakistani army started the war on its own without taking the democratically elected leader of the country into confidence.

But as various bloggers have pointed out, what about Georgia and Russia?

More on this here and here.