IN their 60 years as independent states, India and Pakistan have often snatched wars and near-wars from the jaws of peace. The trillion-dollar question is: how long will this go on? Is there any sustainable solution to the now nuclearised conflict over Kashmir?

It would clearly be outlandish to claim that there is a magic bullet for it. In fact, sceptics would claim that we seem as far away from a mutually acceptable permanent solution as we were in 1947-48. But it is far less imprudent to engage in a counterfactual thought experiment: would a democratic Pakistan be (or have been) less hostile towards a democratic India and vice versa?

The democratic peace theory tells us the answer is yes. Democracies are no more or less belligerent than dictatorships. In fact, they may even frequently attack non-democracies. But here is the crux: they rarely ever fight each other. The idea of this separate peace between democracies comes from the Enlightenment era German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

In Perpetual Peace (1795), Kant argued that ‘republican’ states would form peaceful unions in which they would trade war for profitable commerce. The evidence supporting the mutually pacifying power of democracy is strong and virtually irrefutable. Since 1815, no two democracies have engaged in a war against one another (war is defined here, in accordance with standard practice in security studies, as an interstate conflict that involves a total of 1,000 annual battle-related military deaths).

How does democratic peace work? For one, democracy rests on the liberal belief that individuals are sovereign. Since they are also self-regarding, war and destruction is unsuited to their pursuit of prosperity. And since elected governments reflect the will of the voter, democracies tend to resolve their conflicts peacefully.

Second, elected leaders cannot afford reckless foreign policy behaviour for fear of punishment at the ballot. Third, democracies are also home to the ‘marketplace of ideas’ in which the relatively free flow of information makes it possible for citizens to air their views and express opposition to costly conflicts. Policy ideas compete for relevance and traction in this marketplace which helps filter good ones from bad.

But all good things do not go together. And even if these conditions are more or less present in mature democracies, they are unlikely in a transitional one like Pakistan.

In fact, according to a modified version of the theory, transitional countries are more likely to be unstable, war-prone and hostile towards other states because of their institutional weaknesses which allow elites to exploit and inflate threats to cause war. But this transitional democracy as warrior thesis does not entirely refute the predictive power of the theory when applied to Pakistan.

For the few years they have been in power, elected civilians have not caused any major war with India. In fact, the decision to fight has never been taken under a government vulnerable to the loss of power through free and fair elections based on universal franchise.

Let us look at the four Indo-Pak wars of 1948, 1965, 1971 and Kargil. In 1948, Pakistan (and even India) was a ‘viceregal’ state, not a democracy, ruled as it was under an amended version of the Government of India Act, 1935. The then parliament was elected in 1946 in an election held under colonial rule with restricted franchise. The 1965 and 1971 wars were both waged when the military was directly in control of the state.

In the case of the 1965 war, it can be argued that Ayub used it to drum up nationalist sentiments and divert public attention from his political troubles at home. Remember though, Pakistan was a military dictatorship not a country in transition to democracy. The only exception appears to be the Kargil war as it occurred when the elected PML-N government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was in office. But even in that case, civilians were not the principal architects of the conflict.

In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the elected prime minister was not even totally privy to the full scope of the operation which was kept under tight wraps by the then army chief General Pervez Musharraf. Intuitively too, it did not make sense for Sharif to have stabbed the Indians in the back when he was engaged in a substantive dialogue with the then BJP government of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.

Still, the Kargil example does lend credence to the idea that transitional democracies can be more susceptible to irresponsible foreign policy actions than consolidated ones. But even if we accept that argument, it points to the need for more not less democracy in Pakistan.

At the end of the day, a democratic Pakistan will be a more reliable peacemaker in the region than any dictatorship. Unlike dictators inherently devoid of domestic legitimacy, a democratically elected Pakistani government backed by the popular will can not only credibly negotiate with India but do so on an equal footing.

It is hard to blame India if it is still wary of talking to a civilian government. After all, the bilateral peace process which culminated in the Lahore declaration between the Sharif and Vajpayee governments was abruptly buried by Musharraf in Kargil.

The Indian premier Manmohan Singh’s reported decision to delay his trip to Pakistan is hopefully an indication that New Delhi is willing to look beyond Musharraf as their main interlocutor in Islamabad. There is no doubt that India-Pakistan relations have improved considerably under his regime. But a peace process cannot be sustained on the goodwill of a military dictator turned peacemaker mainly under external pressure.

Normalising bilateral relations is an obviously urgent task that cannot wait for democracy to consolidate in Pakistan. But it is in the interest of both sides that the nascent democratic process in Pakistan is not disrupted. Democracy may or may not translate into regional peace anytime soon. But democracy is necessary for ensuring that any peace process is more than just froth floating on the surface of a simmering conflict. n

The writer, a PhD candidate in political science at Columbia University, is conducting his doctoral research in Pakistan.

as2552@columbia.edu

JOURNALISTIC values are often revealed by attitude to foreign news. American television, for example, generally covers few events outside the states, and is even wary of giving airtime to wars fought by America overseas.

And, as a rough rule, broadsheet papers will have four or five foreign pages, while red-top tabloids allocate one or fewer.

Unusually, though, this week’s front pages of the UK tabloid daily the Sun have alternated between two foreign stories: the Burmese cyclone and the Austrian cellar scandal. Similar news judgment has been shown by most media organisations in Britain and even in the United States, where the apprehension about events not directly involving Americans has been suspended, although perhaps more for the Austrian family than the dead in Burma.

Because the most common critique of national media is parochialism, this expansiveness of interest could be seen as an occasion for celebration.

Traditionally, populist newspapers and broadcasters have applied a version of their attitude to the employment market and immigration to stories from far-flung parts: home stories for our readers. In contrast, the more expensive end of the news stand has implied a moral duty to be globally aware: no reader is an island.

Underlying both these approaches, however, is a judgment of relevance to the consumer several time-zones away. Mass-market outlets have favoured tales that have a direct effect on their consumers (prices, strikes, bombs, celebrities), while niche media prefer stories which, while directly irrelevant to their audience, are argued to make us better people for knowing about them.

Widespread coverage of the 2008 American election, for instance, can be defended by either measure, as the participants are famous and the winner may preside over a recession or invasion that will significantly shape the lives of almost everyone in a single-superpower world.

But by no imaginable checklist, other than gruesome prurience, is there any need for us to know so many details of what happened in Herr Fritzl’s underground dungeon.

Marshall McLuhan — the Canadian academic who prophesied the idea of the “global village”, but died two decades before the web and 24-hour news proved his remarkable prescience — hoped that the collapse of boundaries would create a kind of universal human concern, in which, while looking at everyone else, we would also look out for them. But when an Austrian family tragedy becomes home news in other countries, it can seem that the interchange of information has created not worldwide concern but global voyeurism.

The point of journalism is not just to show, but to tell: to explain what is going on. And yet the cellar story — and even the cyclone — are most likely to induce a feeling of impotent bewilderment in viewers. These are stories that cannot be accommodated by any theory of god or government.

In both cases, I have felt guilty about tuning in to such despairing data. The Austrian material made me wonder if a cinema-style system of age certification may soon have to be introduced for news.

At least the Burmese coverage has an effect beyond a lethal peepshow in the appeals for western charitable cash that are already appearing amid the coverage. This arrangement feels right: a sort of licence-fee for having witnessed this pain in a place that it usually ignored.

The risk is that Austria and Burma — or future nations struck by flood or a psychopathic paterfamilias — become of interest simply because of the horrible fascination of their narratives, becoming genres in a schedule of entertainment: real-life horror and disaster movies.

At worst, the media may become a version of British high street cuisine over the last 40 years, in which burgers and fish and chips have given way to a UN of food.

And so readers of newspapers or viewers of TV news become internationalist snackers, feeding their morbid hunger with Chinese one day, Burmese the next, even occasionally prepared to give Austrian a go if it’s really spicy stuff.

And concern for these countries is unlikely to become a habit as common as curry or chow mein.

In the last few decades, Austria has appeared in the international media only with regard to men hiding young women in cellars and the possibility that certain of its politicians might be Nazis, with the two sorts of stories now linked by commentators who argue that the forms of Austrian notoriety are linked, with some of the country’s men acting out a kink planted by the use of underground bunkers by both the Nazis and those hiding from them.

This line of thought is clearly tempting, although most Britons would be unhappy if they switched on the television in Vienna to see a pundit using a British sex murderer as an exemplar of the national attitude to family and sex.

McLuhan used the image of the world becoming a village because he wanted a metaphor for a community in which everyone knows each other’s business. But, even in such a place, it’s possible to get a reputation as a busybody or gossip.

As long as we’re rattling the charity tins, staring over the fence at drowned Burmese is fine. But, when it comes to the Austrian monster, sometimes, in the global village, we should mind our own business.

—The Guardian, London