Democracy and war

Conor Cruise O'Brien on the allegedly pacific character of democratic states (from On the Eve of the Millenium, 1994):

It is said that democracies are necessarily peace-loving because ordinary people love peace, whereas arbitrary princes and dictators use war and the threat of war as an instrument of policy. As a historical generalization, this has some flaws. Britain was already a full democracy at the end of the nineteenth century, under the forms of a constitutional monarchy. But the Boer War was immensely popular with the British public at its beginning in 1899, and remained so for most of its course . . . . CONTINUE