‘What We Are Fighting For’: Democracies’ Justifications of Using Armed Force since the End of the Cold War

Abstract

While this volume’s Part IV is devoted to internal and external oppositions to ‘liberal peace’ in the early and mid-twentieth century, Anna Geis and Wolfgang Wagner introduce Part V by turning to paradoxes of democratic warfare and its justification in the last three decades: Democratic warfare has a strong impact on the development of domestic, regional, and international normative orders and has in a number of cases been conducted without the authorization of the UN Security Council. Drawing on insights of the ‘democratic peace’ scholarship, this chapter investigates justifications offered by democratic governments and members of parliaments after 1990 when seeking to legitimate or to reject a participation in military interventions. Such justification patterns have changed over time during the period of liberal hegemony since they always reflect the interplay between changing domestic constellations of interest and power, hegemonic discourse within the state and the surrounding normative order. The chapter presents empirical research on justifications that democratic actors have brought forward in Western parliaments (with regard to the Gulf War, Kosovo, Iraq War, Afghanistan, and the fight against ‘Daesh’ in Iraq and Syria).