The Lessons of the Long Confucian Peace

MICHAEL J. GIGANTE is a Ph.D. candidate at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. JOSHUA STONE is Professor of International Relations at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. DANIEL DRUCKMAN is Emeritus Professor at George Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government. He is also Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland and Macquarie University. MING WAN is Professor and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. Michael J. Gigante, Joshua Stone, Daniel Druckman, and Ming Wan For decades, scholars and politicians have marveled at the fact that democracies do not fight one another. “The absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations,” wrote the political scientist Jack Levy in 1988. “Democracies don't attack each other. They make better trading partners and partners in diplomacy,” U.S. President Bill Clinton declared in 1994. “There are no clear-cut cases of one democracy going to war against another,” the political scientist Michael Doyle wrote in 2024, “nor do any seem forthcoming.” The lack of war among the world’s many democracies is, indeed, impressive. But it is not the first time a group of like-minded countries have been at peace for an extended time period. From 1598 to 1894, most of East Asia—China, Japan, Korea, the Ryukyu Kingdom (now part of Japan), and Vietnam—was largely devoid of internal fighting. According to research we recently published in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, these states fought one another only 22 times over this 300-year era—or just four percent of the nearly 200 wars and conflicts they engaged in over the course of that period. And the key to this peace, we argue, was a shared ideology: Confucianism. China, Japan, Korea, Ryukyu, and Vietnam were all Confucian states, and so they had a joint political philosophy that emphasized harmony and made it easy for them to engage in diplomacy. They established an interconnected system of regional governance centered on China, the most powerful state, that helped ensure security and prosperity. They also traded frequently. The democratic peace has much in common with the Confucian peace. The world’s liberal states speak a shared political language that emphasizes cooperation, making diplomacy easier. They have institutions that bring them together and manage conflict, centered, again, on a single country (in this case, the United States). Like the Confucian states, democratic states have strong trade linkages. The era of democratic peace might be reaching its terminus. Public faith in the value of the liberal international order and democratic ideals appears to be waning. The United States is squabbling with its partners to an extent not seen in at least a century. But the fact that both Confucianism and democracy yielded eras of stability is, ultimately, good news for humanity. It suggests that multiple kinds of ideologies can produce harmony and counteract a temptation to rely on a realpolitik approach. If today’s great powers can find a new shared ethic, they might be able to overcome their substantial differences and keep the peace. Confucianism may be relatively unknown to most modern Americans and Europeans. But it is an old and influential philosophy. Named for Confucius, a Chinese scholar who lived from 551 to 479 BC, it argues that societies should have a hierarchical social order with a ruler-subject relationship that mirrors the dynamic between fathers and sons. Politicians schooled in Confucian thought over the ensuing centuries were thus told that they had the right to govern their people. Subjects, in turn, were told to exhibit respect, obedience, and care for their leaders. But Confucius also demanded that leaders be virtuous and promote harmony or risk losing the mandate of heaven—the divine right to rule. His followers thus emphasized benevolence (ren) and virtue (de) over self-interest and aggression. As a result, the spread of Confucian thinking from China to Japan, Korea, the Ryukyu Kingdom, and Vietnam helped produce an era of peace. Elites across these countries were educated in Confucian classics, read and wrote the same language, and conversed with one another across borders. Importantly, they were all recognized as Confucian by their peers. This mutual recognition granted them membership in a wider regional order. Qing China, Joseon Korea, and Tokugawa Japan, for example, all shared a Confucian moral universe in which war between culturally kindred states carried a particular stigma. Each of these courts saw conflict among them as not merely destructive but as a moral and governing failure. The Confucian commitment to hierarchy also fostered stability. Rather than ruthlessly compete to lead the region, Korea, the Ryukyu Kingdom, Vietnam, and even Japan embraced the centrality of China. Beijing was the richest and most powe

The Lessons of the Long Confucian Peace

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