Reinventing the Kantean Peace: The Emerging Mass Basis of Global Security

Ronald Inglehart (), Christian Welzel () and Bi Puranen ()
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Ronald Inglehart: Higher School of Economics
Christian Welzel: Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University, Scharnhorststr.
Bi Puranen: Institute of Future Studies (Stockholm).

HSE Working papers from National Research University Higher School of Economics

Abstract: This article demonstrates that inter-state peace is underpinned by an increasingly solid mass basis: representative survey data from around the world evidence a massive decline in people’s willingness to sacrifice their lives in war. To explain this finding, we test and confirm Welzel’s Evolutionary Emancipation Theory (EET). When improving existential conditions in a society turn most people’s lives from a source of threats to suffer into a source of opportunities to thrive, people adopt ‘emancipative values’: to allow themselves and others to take advantage of life’s widened opportunities, people increasingly support and tolerate universal freedoms. This emancipatory trend is most significant in a field in which the fixation of traditional survival norms on high fertility erected the strongest resistance against emancipation: reproductive freedoms. As a direct consequence of the emancipatory trend, people’s willingness to sacrifice their own and other people’s lives in war has dramatically declined. Hence, the emancipatory trend is a pacifist force that makes it increasingly difficult for government—especially in democracies—to find public support for waging wars

Keywords: Evolutionary Emancipation Theory; World Values Survey; war and peace (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe
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Published in WP BRP Series: Sociology / SOC, December 2013, pages 1-35

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