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3 Eur. Rev. Int'l Stud. 5 (2016)

handle is hein.journals/epnrvwo3 and id is 1 raw text is: Articles THE POWER OF PERCEPTION - DEMOCRATIC PEACE THEORY AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR* Carsten Rauch Peace Research Institute Frankfurt Abstract: The American Civil War is one of the favoured examples of scholars aiming to show the spuriousness of the claim that democracies do not fight each other. While proponents of democratic peace theory (DPT) point to the fact that the theory in its mainstream version does not cover intrastate wars and also question whether the slave-holding Confederate States of America can be classified as a democracy, this article takes a different approach. Using insights from the perceptional interpretation of DPT and interpreting discourses and speeches from the North as well as the South, I will show that a closer look at the case reveals it is very much in line with DPT and underlines rather than undermines the logic of the democratic peace. Keywords: Democratic Peace Theory, American Civil War, Perception, IR Theory INTRODUCTION The democratic peace (DP) has been hailed by some as being as close to anything IR has to offer resembling an empirical law.1 At the same time others still deny that there is anything like a democratic peace theory (DPT), rather talking about a thesis or proposition, and that there is a democratic peace at all. Starting from the most prominent formulation of DPT which holds that democratic states do not wage war against each other critics often point to (alleged) deviant cases that seem to falsify the theory. The usual response by proponents of DPT has been to deny the applicability of democratic peace theory to the specific case and to modify their central hypothesis to democratic states almost never wage war against each other. I believe that both, critics and defenders of DPT, are missing something in their approach: The critics too readily and too conveniently overlook that some of their crown witnesses are hardly fitting cases. For example, to classify imperial *The author would like to thank Annika Elena Poppe, Elvira Rosert, Marco Fey and Konstanze Jangling as well as the two anonymous reviewers of the European Review ofInternational Studies for many helpful comments 1 Jack S. Levy, 'Domestic Politics and War', Journal ofInterdisciplinary History, Vol. 18, No. 4 (1988), pp. 653- 73. Rauch: The Power of Perception, ERIS Vol. 3, Issue 1/2016, pp. 5-30

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