CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

Scholars have identified a number of reasons for the general amity of
democracies. They point out that elected legislatures and other democratic
structures often limit the ability of leaders to mobilize societies for war, that the
norms of peaceful conflict resolution that democracies develop at home carry
over into foreign dealings, and that democratic institutions generate more honest
and reliable information about government intentions than nondemocracies do.
And because democracies are built on shared social purposes and a congruence
of interests, these scholars add, such societies generally limit the rise of conflicts
strong enough to lead to war 162
According to the thesis a democratic government must, then, choose its conflicts with
great care. In a democracy it is not just success or failure that will determine support for
a war; electorates will need to back the cause and this is likely to come down to
essential – and obvious – national defence, or evident righteousness. There will always
be some opposition. The UK saw domestic opposition to the Falkland Islands conflict,
to the 1991 Gulf War, and to Kosovo. Such opposition, though, was muted (less so in
the case of Kosovo) and made by so small a minority that it could be easily disregarded
by the Government. Indeed both the Falklands conflict and the 1991 Gulf War were
widely held to have boosted the electoral prospects of the sitting government 163 . The
reason has to be the widespread acceptance that the conflicts were necessary, in the
national interest and ‘right’ (again, opinion was much more divided about Kosovo but
the campaign was relatively short and almost free from casualties to British forces – an
issue that will always galvanise opinion). When the cause is not widely accepted then a
war is likely to damage the governing party. The 2003 Iraq war provides plenty of
illustration of this.
Perhaps the most obvious ‘casualty’ of this issue was the Spanish Government of Jose-
Maria Aznar, a staunch supporter of the war and the first of the allies to face an election
afterwards. The war had been deeply unpopular with the Spanish electorate – some
polls suggested as great as 90% of the population opposed the war 164 – and was also,
naturally, held as the primary reason that Spain had become a target for Al Qaeda
terrorism. The Spanish general election was held in March 2004, a year after the war
and just days after a devastating terrorist attack in Madrid. Aznar’s ruling Popular Party
(PP) government lost heavily to the socialist PSOE party (43% to 38% of the votes cast,
with a 75% turnout) 165 . The PSOE had been firmly opposed to the war and made the
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