STOCKHOLM: Two hundred years ago in his essay “Perpetual Peace” Immanuel Kant imagined a future “union of liberal republics.” In 1795, however, liberal republics were abstract ideas. Yet Kant imagined our present reality of flourishing liberal democracies. Moreover, Kant’s idea of perpetual peace seems even less far-fetched because no democracy has ever made war on another. Indeed, “No War Between Democracies” is as close as we are likely to get to an immutable diplomatic law.

Scholars have demonstrated the truth of this. Professor R J Rummel of the University of Hawaii investigated 353 pairs of combatants between 1816 and 1991. Democracy fought non-democracy in 155 cases. Dictatorship fought dictatorship in 198 cases. He found no examples of democracies at war with each other. Some pedants quibble, claiming that exceptions exist. Study the details, however, and you find that the conflict in question was either some type of civil war or in which one participant was not a real democracy (Germany in 1914), or that the number of people killed was too low to call the conflict a war at all.

This is no mere statistical error or lucky coincidence. In a democracy it would be almost impossible to secure sufficient public support for a military confrontation with another democracy. Democratic peoples know and trust each other. Democratic governments find it natural to negotiate with one another.

The costs humanity has paid in waiting for Kant’s vision to near reality is horrific and was exacted in places other than the battlefield. Between 1900 and 1987 about 170 million people were killed for political reasons not involving war. Totalitarian states murdered 138 million out of those 170 million. Authoritarian countries killed another 28 million. Democracies killed about 2 million people, primarily through intentional bombing of civilian targets. No matter how controversial examples of democratic excess are, however, they do not change the overall picture.

Most of this slaughter was triggered by Marxism/Leninism’s fusion of absolutist ideology with absolute power. To paraphrase Lord Acton’s dictum: power kills and absolute power kills absolutely.

Many people reached other conclusions. When Marxists were strong and liberalism weak, writers, politicians, political parties, and newspapers often told us: democracy is unimportant for the Third World. Freedom in such countries is a “formality.” Far more urgent is not going hungry. So, we were lectured: liberalism is no solution for developing countries.

“Don’t measure others by our yardsticks,” a leading Swedish playright/novelist wrote as Pol Pot’s regime exterminated a quarter of Cambodia’s population. What he meant was that the mass murder of Cambodians was not deplorable in the same way as the mass murder of Europeans is. This is inverted racism: you pretend to respect other peoples when, in fact, you despise them.

Indeed, those in the West who praised Mao, Castro or Honecker seldom wanted to import their terror. Try introducing the slightest limitation on free speech in any Western country and you will meet storms of protest from those who seldom champion it in Third World nations. Oppression is only acceptable for others.

Hypocrisy, of course, is not confined to the West. When leaders in, say, Singapore, Malaysia and mainland China talk about “Asian values” to romanticize their regimes, they, too, challenge the values of democracy. But Taiwan’s former President Lee Teng-hui thinks these arguments thin alibis for anti-democratic policies. When it comes to human rights, says Mr. Lee, there are no special Asian values. Freedom is a universal value.

Despite communism’s collapse, assaults on liberalism remain. Amartya Sen, a Nobel Laureate in economics, demonstrated empirically that no famine - mass starvation leading to mass death - ever occurred in a democratically governed country. During the Bengal famine of 1943, two to three million people died from hunger. That happened under British rule. Since India became independent in 1947 with a multiparty democratic system, the country has never suffered such a disaster. Undernourishment, malnutrition, crop failures, and food scarcities have occurred, but there have been no famines.

Compare that with Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” of 1958-1961 when 30 million Chinese died of hunger. That’s ten times the number of Indians who died in the gigantic starvation of British India less than twenty years before.

Sen also examined various African countries that experienced crop failures and food shortages. Governments under democratic pressures usually act forcefully and decently on such occasions; people under dictatorial regimes are often hit by government-induced and manipulated famines.

Where political opposition and a free press are active, governments cannot neglect thousands of people starving to death. When opposition is silenced and mass media voices only the dictator’s propaganda, millions of people dying from famine can be kept secret and/or ignored.

Elie Wiesel, survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and a Nobel Peace Laureate, once said: “Let us remember the heroes of Warsaw, the martyrs of Treblinka, the children of Auschwitz. They fought alone, they suffered alone, they lived alone, but they did not die alone, for something in all of us died with them”. What died with them? My answer is this: the idea that there are limits to human cruelty. Now we recognize that there are no limits. Knowing empirically the benefits in terms of peace and human welfare which democracy delivers, we must reaffirm our commitment to, and the necessity of, spreading Kant’s vision.