№ 1 - 2000
Kulagin V.M.
The World in the 21st Century: a Multipolar Balance of Forces or Global Pax Democratica? (The «Democratic Peace» Hypothesis in the Context of World Development Alternatives)

The world development alternatives brought to the forefront of political life and po-litical thought by vast and impetuous material, social, spiritual changes, are nowadays growing, as they do each time at moments of similar historical situations, into the ever same historiosophical alternative: does new quality of world development emerge? Does new epoch (epochs) of world history ever come? Or does all in the long run in-variably resume its movement in circles? The invariable recurrence, reproducibility of this historiosophical alternative is visualized by the example of the end of the “com-munist experiment”, which example, on closer examination, proves ambivalent. On the one hand, it seems to corroborate, once more, Ecclesiastes’ postulate, demon-strating history’s return to the channel of centuries-old development. But on the other hand, the implications of the well known result of the “communist experiment”, with all the reasons, circumstances and consequences of this result, are inseparably linked with the current historical processes of globalization and democratization, that may be looked upon as portents of a new epoch in history of, in particular, international rela-tions. In the above context, a hypothesis hitherto not so widely discussed, affirming that “democracies do not make war on one another”, comes to the forefront and proves significant and intriguing — hypothesis, of which thorough historiographical description and conceptual analysis and interpretation constitute the main content of the article by a professor of the Institute of International Relations.