The affirmative case can be summarized as follows:

1. There is a growing disparity between those nations that have democratic institutions and relatively free economies and those nations that do not.

2. Historically, those nations that reject capitalism and democracy are the nations mostly likely to become breeding grounds for civil war, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, and other hostile behavior.

3. The problems these nations produce do not only affect the host country; they also have negative spillover effects for other countries.

4. During the past fifty years, UN peacekeeping operations have focused on the short-term goals of mediation and maintaining order, while ignoring the need to strengthen local institutions. This is why peacekeeping so often fails.

5. In order to be successful, the UN must develop a peacekeeping strategy that pursues as its primary goal, not merely the maintenance of order in distant hot-spots as they emerge, but the establishment of local political and economic infrastructures that will make future peacekeeping unnecessary.

Contention I: Harms1

A. There is a growing disparity between those nations that have democratic institutions and relatively free economies and those nations that do not.

Of the 192 countries in the world today, 120 are democracies. Among those, all but two also have free economies.2 Among the 72 countries that are non-democracies, none have free economies. In fact, a recent study from Canada’s Fraser Institute shows that the freer a country’s economy is, the freer its political system is likely to be – and vice versa.3 According to the report, people who live in countries that are economically and politically free tend to enjoy a high standard of living. Not surprisingly, the reverse is also true: people who live in countries that are not free tend to have a low standard of living.

1. People in the least economically free countries suffer financially:

• Between 1993 and 2000, national income (GDP) declined 0.5 percent per year in the least free countries, but grew an average of 2.4 percent in the world’s freest countries.

• As a result, people in the poorest countries are getting poorer, while everyone else in the world is getting richer. Of the world’s least developed countries, 70 are poorer today than they were in 1980, and 43 are poorer than they were in 1970.4

• Between 1980 and 2000, the amount of foreign direct investment per worker in the world’s least free countries was 45 times less than in the world’s freest countries.The investment these countries are not getting is capital that could have been used to create jobs and raise wages and standards of living.

• Even the poorest people do better in free economies: Average per capita income for the poorest tenth of the people in least-free countries in 2002 was about $823, while the poorest tenth of the people in free countries earned about $6,877.

2. People in the least free countries suffer physically:

• Average life expectancy is 54 years in the least free countries, compared to 76 years in countries with economic freedom.

• The infant mortality rate is nine times lower in the freest fifth of countries than in the least free group.

B. Nations that reject capitalism and democracy are most likely to become breeding grounds for war, ethnic cleansing and terrorism.

There have been 250 wars in the past 50 years.5 A recent study by Italian researchers found that more than 90 percent of these occurred between or within countries that are economically underdeveloped and politically undemocratic.6 In fact, since World War II, there has not been a single war between wealthy first world countries, and there has never in history been a war between two democracies.7 To take the past decade as an example, of the 44 wars that occurred in the 1990s, all 44 were in countries that had rejected capitalism and democracy:

• In Africa, there were wars in Rwanda, Algeria, Liberia, Burundi, Congo, Sudan and Ivory Coast – all of which were ruled by dictatorships.

• In Asia, there were wars in two non-democracies: Tajikstan and Sri Lanka.

• In Europe, there were civil wars in Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo and Montenegro – all of which have closed economies and none of which have democratic governments.

In these and other cases, the countries that proved most susceptible to internal strife were the ones where political and economic institutions were weakest.

Contention II: Significance8

The warfare that occurs in the world’s least free countries harms the people who live there and hurts people in other countries as well.

A. Millions of people suffer and die.

• Millions are killed in war: Since 1945, wars in third world countries have resulted in the deaths of 27 million people.9 In the 1990s alone, more than 5 million were killed, 2 million of whom were children.

• Millions suffer from the by-products of war: Since 1945, wars in third world countries have produced 50 million refugees – two-thirds of whom were in the Middle East and Africa.10
• For example, there are currently four million refugees in Sudan, three million in the Congo and 1.2 million in Uganda.

• Untold additional millions suffer other side effects of war, such as famine and disease.

B. Millions of people are adversely affected outside the host country:

1. Neighboring countries are affected by population displacements.

When people flee warfare in their home country, they tend to seek refuge in the nearest conflict-free zone, which is usually a neighboring country. This in turn places a heavy burden on the neighbors, forcing the local population to relocate further inland and creating food shortages. In this way, failed states have a tendency to “export” their instability. For example:

• During the 1998 Kosovo War, a quarter of a million Albanian refugees fled the war zone into neighboring Macedonia.11

• This influx added more than 10 percent to the tiny nation's already poor population and created severe shortages of food, water and medicine.

• The presence of the refugees generated resentment among Macedonia’s non-Albanian citizens and nearly led to a civil war.

• To help ease the crisis, the Macedonian government began busing refugees to Albania, where there were already half a million living in tent cities.

• By the end of the war, 20 countries had accepted Albanian refugees.

In addition to their neighbors, warring nations also impose burdens on other countries further abroad. In recent years, refugees have flooded into the West from war-torn third world countries, including thousands of East Timorese and Afghans into Australia, Africans into Great Britain, and Haitians into the U.S.

2. The international community bears the costs of state failure.

In addition to refugees, conflicts in the third world also impose other costs on the outside world. Some of these are impossible to calculate, such as the lost trade that results from 72 countries being disconnected from the world economy. But others are more obvious:

• Foreign Aid : Since World War II, the U.S. and Western Europe have poured $1 trillion in foreign aid into third world countries.12

• Peacekeeping : In financial terms, UN peacekeeping missions have cost $30 billion -- 32 percent of which came from U.S. taxpayers.1 In human terms, they have resulted in the deaths of 2,000 peacekeepers -- 60 of whom were Americans.14

Contention III: Inherency15

Past UN peacekeeping operations have focused on the short-term goal of maintaining order, while ignoring the long-term goal of strengthening local institutions. This is why peacekeeping so often fails.

In the past 56 years, the United Nations has conducted 56 peacekeeping operations in 32 countries. In each of these instances, the UN’s goal has been to maintain regional order. In pursuit of this goal, it has focused on mediating between warring groups and deliberately passed up opportunities for addressing the political culture or economic infrastructure of the host country. This emphasis on the short-term has had two bad results:

• It leads to repeated peacekeeping missions to the same venue. For example, the UN has conducted three separate missions to Angola since 1989, but has failed to prevent the deaths of 500,000 civilians.

• It leads to the permanent stationing of peacekeepers in conflict zones. The best example of this is the Indian province of Kashmir, where peacekeepers have been present ever since the UN’s creation in 1948, but have failed to prevent two full-scale wars and a regional insurgency that has cost more than 75,000 lives.

Contention IV: Solvency16

In order to be successful, the UN must develop a strategy that not only pursues the maintenance of order, but also seeks to establish the political and economic institutions that will make future peacekeeping operations unnecessary.

Scholars have known for decades that democracies do not fight one another or persecute their own people. And recent research like that of the Fraser Institute demonstrates that countries with healthy market economies are more prosperous and therefore less likely to require the presence of peacekeeping forces. With these facts in mind, it comes as a surprise that the UN does not pursue as its primary goal the introduction of democracy and free markets to war-torn regions. Doing so offers the surest way to address the roots of state failure. The alternative – waiting to send in troops once the conflict has already broken out – addresses the symptoms of the problem but does nothing to rebuild these states or prevent them from collapsing in the future.

Experience shows that a peacekeeping strategy of this kind would work, even in the world’s most troubled regions. For example, in Africa, the two countries that have required the least UN involvement over the last few decades – Botswana and Mauritius – are those with the most transparent governments and the freest economies.17 The people in these countries are generally much better off than the citizens of most other African nations, with annual per capita GDP of about $11,000 for Mauritius and $9,000 for Botswana, compared to an average of $2,000 for the rest of Africa.18 Because of their greater wealth, the people in Mauritius and Botswana have a personal stake in promoting stable government and public order. Rather than recipients of peacekeeping assistance, these countries have instead become large contributors of peacekeeping forces to help stabilize their neighbors.

In future peacekeeping operations, the UN’s goal should be to replicate the Botswana/Mauritius experience in other third world countries. Each new case of UN military intervention should be treated as an opportunity to lay the groundwork for democratic political institutions and open markets – through persuasion if possible and coercion if necessary. Such an agenda would offer substantial benefits to everyone involved. For the UN, it would allow member states to get the most bang for their buck and avoid the two equally undesirable alternatives of maintaining a permanent troop presence in conflict zones and conducting frequent deployments to the same locales over and over. For the U.S., it would represent the most efficient use of the country’s large contribution to the peacekeeping budget and help address the root causes of terrorism. Most importantly of all, it would benefit the people in those countries where peacekeepers are deployed by closing the gap that separates them from the rest of the world and giving them access to the basic rights, freedoms, and prosperity deserved by all.

• 1 Harms = What is harmful about the status quo?
• 2 This number includes Singapore, a country with relatively low political freedom but a parliamentary democracy nevertheless.
• 3 James Gwartney and Robert Lawson, “Ten Consequences of Economic Freedom,” NCPA Policy Report No. 268, July 2004.
• 4 Doug Bandow, "Foreign Aid: Part of the Problem," Investor's Business Daily, January 6, 1997
• 5 “War” refers to any armed conflict with more than 1,000 dead.
• 6 F. Strazzari and G. Giacomello.
• 7 Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another.
• 8 Significance = Are the harms significant enough to warrant attention?
• 9 Wars, Massacres and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century.
• 10 The ten leading sources of refugees are: Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Yugoslavia, Angola, Croatia and Eritrea.
• 11 Overburdened, Macedonia Buses Refugees to Albania.
• 12 Joseph Kahn and Tim Weiner, "World Leaders Rethinking Strategy on Aid to Poor," New York Times, March 18, 2002.
• 13 $30 billion is the figure given for the official UN peacekeeping budget. However, the total costs of all peacekeeping missions are much higher. In the period 1996-2001 alone, the U.S. gave $24 billion in indirect contributions to peacekeeping missions over and above the $3.5 billion in direct contributions. See Nile Gardiner and Baker Spring, “Reform the United Nations,” Heritage Foundation, October 27, 2003, p. 4.
• 14 UN Peacekeeping Statistics, “ Fatalities by Nationality and Mission as of 31 May 2004,” (http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/fatalities/totals.htm).
• 15 Inherency = What is stopping the current system from solving for the harms or preventing the plan from being put into action?
• 16 Solvency = Does the Affirmative plan rectify the harms presented? How?
• 17 The CIA World Factbook classifies Mauritius as a parliamentary democracy and Botswana as a parliamentary republic.
• 18 Gwartney and Lawson, “Ten Consequences of Economic Freedom,” p. 4.