Property and Freedom Society, Bodrum 2025
Hans-Hermann Hoppe on “Democratic Peace and Re-Education: The German Experience”
Reported by Sebastian Wang

This was the most tightly packed lectures of the conference. Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe spoke at a pace that made note-taking a trial, each sentence heavy with implication, and his argument compressed into a structure that resisted simple summary. What I offer here is not a verbatim record but an extended attempt to convey what he said, and what it meant. The topic was “Democratic Peace and Re-Education: The German Experience,” and it drew from a longer paper prepared for the Mises Institute’s Revisionist History of War conference earlier this year.

Hoppe began with the premise that all states are born in war. As Franz Oppenheimer once argued, and as libertarians have long stressed, the state is not the product of consent but of conquest. It originates in subjugation and exists by force. But to say that all states come from war is not to say that all wars are the same. Here Hoppe laid down a sharp distinction, one that runs through the whole lecture: the difference between monarchical and democratic wars.

In the monarchical era, he argued, wars were typically limited. They arose from dynastic quarrels  or the inheritance of lands and titles. Monarchs treated their states as their private property. They financed wars from their own purses, or from carefully raised taxes, and they fought them with professional armies hired at considerable expense. They were cautious of wasting what they owned. For them, the state was an estate to be preserved and handed down to their heirs. War was costly, peace preferable when costs ran too high. Ordinary people did not see these conflicts as their own. At most they paid taxes or volunteered for adventure, but they were not conscripted en masse.

Here Hoppe quoted Michael Howard’s War in European History to describe eighteenth-century conditions: “Trade, travel, and intellectual life went on regardless of the campaigns of professional armies. Wars were fought between rulers, not peoples, and their aims were limited.” Even during campaigns, Howard observed, commerce across enemy lines could continue. There was no thought of re-educating the enemy population, no attempt to alter their beliefs. One sovereign fought another, and when terms were reached, life resumed.

The contrast with democratic war could not be more stark. When sovereignty was redefined as residing in the nation, war ceased to be the business of rulers and became the business of peoples. If the people are sovereign, then the people themselves are guilty, and war becomes not dynastic but national. Conscription follows. Propaganda saturates every sphere of life. Economic resources are mobilised in total. The line between soldier and civilian dissolves. And because democracies are legitimised by ideas—liberty, equality, nationality—war becomes ideological. To compromise is to betray the cause.

Hoppe again leaned on Howard, who wrote that “as soon as the state ceased to be regarded as the property of its rulers, and became instead the instrument of abstract principles, the wars it waged were no longer limited.” J.F.C. Fuller put the point more vividly: “The French Revolution turned wars of kings into wars of peoples. When men fought for ideas, no price was too high to pay.” For Hoppe, the French Revolution was the turning point. With its levée en masse, its armies of citizens, and its crusading rhetoric, it announced the birth of democratic war. Napoleon exported this model across Europe. From then on, the old game of limited campaigns was gone.

He explained the logic in property terms. The monarch, owning his domain, treats it carefully. He seeks to preserve its value. The democratic politician is a caretaker, a tenant of an office. He owns nothing, but enjoys temporary control. He can exhaust resources and mobilise men, without thinking of long-term consequences. What is consumed will not be his to replenish. His time horizon is short. His incentives are reckless. Hence democracies, contrary to the usual myth, are not peace-loving but war-prone, and the wars they fight are total and unbounded.

Hoppe then turned to Germany, which for him is the great case study of democratic war and democratic peace. Germany’s unification under Bismarck in 1871 was still within the monarchical framework. Prussia fought three wars—against Denmark, Austria, and France—carefully staged and carefully limited. The Danish war of 1864 was short. The Austro-Prussian war of 1866 was decisive but restrained: Austria lost influence in Germany but remained a great power. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71 was harsher—Bismarck manipulated the Ems Dispatch to provoke French outrage—but when victory came, the settlement was recognisably monarchical. France lost Alsace-Lorraine and paid an indemnity. It was humiliating, but survivable. France remained France. Life went on.

Compare this, Hoppe said, with the First World War. By 1914, Germany had become a constitutional monarchy with democratic features. Universal male suffrage for the Reichstag meant that the people were politically implicated. The war itself bore the marks of democracy: conscription, propaganda, mobilisation of industry, ideological slogans. By 1917, with the United States entering the conflict, the war was openly framed as a struggle for democracy itself. When Germany surrendered in 1918, it was not treated as a defeated state among others but as a guilty nation.

The Treaty of Versailles exemplified what Hoppe meant by democratic peace. It was not peace at all but punishment. Germany lost its colonies and parts of its home territory. It was saddled with crushing reparations. Its army was capped at 100,000 men. The famous Article 231 declared Germany guilty of the war, a clause of collective moral condemnation. Unlike the settlements of Utrecht or Vienna, Versailles offered no way back to dignity. It imposed guilt and humiliation on an entire people.

Hoppe stressed the consequences. The Weimar Republic was born under the shadow of this guilt. Its legitimacy was poisoned from the start. Hyperinflation in 1923 destroyed savings. Ordinary Germans who had worked their whole lives found their money reduced to wastepaper. Resentment festered. The democratic peace had not brought stability but collapse. From this chaos, Hitler rose, promising to overturn Versailles and restore pride. In this sense, the democratic peace of 1919 prepared the democratic war of 1939.

Here Hoppe paused to dismantle the so-called democratic peace theory, the Kantian idea that republics do not fight one another because their citizens are wary of war’s costs. He quoted Immanuel Kant’s essay on Perpetual Peace, where Kant argued that “the consent of the citizens… is required to determine whether war shall be declared,” and that this would restrain bellicosity. Modern scholars like Michael Doyle revived this thesis, insisting that democracies are inherently peaceful towards one another. But Hoppe dismissed this as propaganda. The twentieth century disproved it. Britain, France, and the United States—democracies—fought Germany, which, even before Hitler, had democratic institutions. The supposed rule is riddled with exceptions. Worse, the doctrine has become a weapon. It justifies wars of regime change. Democracies claim they must fight non-democracies, not for security but to spread their creed. The theory becomes a licence for intervention.

Germany again illustrates the point. In the Second World War, the Allies did not limit themselves to defeating Hitler. They destroyed German cities with fire and blast. Civilians were incinerated by the tens of thousands. They stripped Germany of a quarter of its 1918 territory. This rump was divided in two main halves. Millions of Germans were brutally expelled for what had been their homelands in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne—names that still evoke horror. In Japan, the democratic Allies dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Democratic war, Hoppe insisted, is war without restraint.

And when it ends, it ends not with treaties but with re-education. After 1945, Germany was not merely disarmed but remade. Its former elite was purged, in some cases hanged. Denazification drove millions from office. Universities were purged, textbooks rewritten, media censored. The Allied Control Council imposed a new constitution. The Basic Law of 1949 was drafted under Allied oversight, with explicit safeguards to prevent any return to nationalism. German children were taught that their history was a burden of guilt. Symbols were banned, traditions ridiculed. The people were told that their only legitimacy lay in permanent repentance.

Hoppe described this as the full logic of democratic peace: the enemy is not just defeated but declared evil, and therefore must be morally reconstructed. What had once been national virtues—disciplined order and loyalty—were redefined as vices. The very idea of German identity was pathologised. Unlike France after 1815 or Austria after 1866, Germany was not allowed to be itself. Its sovereignty was curtailed indefinitely. Its people were trained to see their nation as a danger to humanity. Even today, there is an American armed presence in Germany.

Hoppe’s conclusion was bleak. The “peace” that democracies offer is not peace but cultural liquidation. Germany became wealthy again, yes, but it was wealth under tutelage, prosperity without independence. Its elites echoed the rhetoric of their occupiers, and its people internalised a kind of civic self-hatred. For Hoppe, this was not an unfortunate accident of history but the natural outcome of democratic war. To believe otherwise is to indulge in illusions.

Hoppe did not spare the victors from blame. He reminded his listeners that while Germans were tried at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity, the Soviet Union sat in judgment as a moral equal, despite its own record of terror and mass killing. Stalin’s purges, the gulag system, the deliberate starvation of millions, were politely set aside. The hypocrisy was glaring, but in the democratic framework it was necessary. Once Germany had been defined as the embodiment of evil, its enemies had to be defined as embodiments of good, whatever their actual record. Hence Allied bombing campaigns that incinerated civilians were reclassified as regrettable but necessary, while Soviet atrocities vanished into silence. The democratic peace demands not impartial justice but victors’ justice, coupled with selective amnesia.

What followed in Germany was more than denazification. It was the deliberate creation of a new identity, supervised by foreign powers. Hoppe described how education was restructured, how curricula were purged not only of Nazi content but of anything that might foster national pride. The young were taught to view their own culture with suspicion, to see every tradition as a seed of authoritarianism. They were victims of an “authoritarian personality.” Schools and universities were put under the supervision of pre-war refugees—most importantly members of the revisionist Marxist Frankfurt School. These had spent their time in exile living in luxury in New York and California. They had made deep contacts with the American secret state. Now, they came back to mix revenge with remodelling. They had the schools and universities. They soon spread into the media and publishing.

As an aside, Hoppe turned to his own experience of the Frankfurt School. Men like Adorno and Horkheimer were political radicals, but strong cultural conservatives. They were shocked and even outraged when female students arrived at their lectures with bare breasts. But, whatever their own personal tastes, the disintegration of German respectability was part of the Frankfurt School’s agenda.

The effect was cumulative. Generations grew up believing that their past was not a resource but a curse. “Re-education” was not a temporary measure but a permanent condition. The Federal Republic of Germany defined itself not positively but negatively: as not-Nazi, not-nationalist, not-sovereign. In Hoppe’s phrase, it became “a ward of the American empire,” prosperous but dependent, admired for its efficiency but despised for its subservience.

The only mitigation of this vindictive remodelling was the logic of the Cold War. West Germany could not be demilitarised, because its men were needed for the new crusade against Soviet Russia. Germany could not be deindustrialised, because its manufactures were needed for the crusade. Germany could not be fully denazified, because its most able men, though former Nazis, and if still alive, were needed to help in the crusade. Even the more anti-Soviet propagandists from before the War were given a free pass for the crusade. But there was to be no independent Germany.

So Germany has passed eighty years as a leftist and American satellite state. This is now disturbed by the fact of mass-immigration from the third world. This has been welcomed by the brainwashed elite. It is most opposed by those who had lived in East Germany. Ironically, the Soviet remodelling of their part of Germany, though brutal, was superficial. People were made to parrot lies, but there was no attempt to steal their souls.

This was the point at which Hoppe ended his lecture. What follows is a summary of his longer paper. I feel this is needed into order to pull together things touched on in his lecture but not developed.

Hoppe is scathing about the notion of a “democratic peace.” The record of the twentieth century shows it to be false. Democracies have fought wars against states with democratic features, and they have inflicted destruction on civilian populations without restraint. To uphold the doctrine requires constant redefinition of who counts as democratic and who does not. Germany in 1914, with its parliament and suffrage, must be reclassified as non-democratic, so that its war with Britain and France does not falsify the theory. This is circular reasoning, a way of protecting ideology from facts.

He asks what alternative exists. Here his proposals are characteristically radical. The solution is not to reform democracy but to transcend it. The idea of liberal democracy as the end of history must be rejected. In its place he proposed radical decentralisation, secession, and the creation of voluntary communities. Large states, democratic or otherwise, are inherently prone to war. Small polities, bound by property rights and voluntary association, are less likely to mobilise populations for destruction. Hoppe invoked the example of medieval Europe, with its patchwork of principalities and free cities, where diversity of order limited the scope of war. It was only when centralised states arose, claiming to represent nations, that war became total.

Re-education, in Hoppe’s sense, must also be rethought. Instead of state-controlled schools that inculcate submission, education should be private, rooted in family and community. Children should learn about property, responsibility, and tradition, not about guilt and ideological slogans. The aim should be to produce men and women capable of independence, not citizens moulded for obedience. Public schooling, he said, is the seedbed of statism. To end war, one must end state education.

Hoppe’s extended conclusion is blunt. The German experience is not a curiosity of history but a warning of the future. If democratic states wage total wars and impose vindictive peace, then every nation risks Germany’s fate. The myth of democratic peace must be exposed for what it is: an ideology of conquest disguised as humanitarianism. Only by dismantling the structures of democracy itself, and replacing them with smaller, voluntary orders, can genuine peace be imagined.

Listening to this in Bodrum was unsettling—still more unsettle to hear what he said, then to turn to the longer discussion. Hoppe speaks and writes with the calm of someone who has long abandoned any hope of mainstream approval. He is unsparing in his judgments, and his categories are absolute. One may object that not every monarchical war was limited—think of the Thirty Years’ War, or of Napoleon’s devastation—or that not every democratic peace has been as vindictive as Versailles or Potsdam. Yet the broad lines of his analysis are hard to escape. Versailles did sow resentment that led to Hitler. Denazification did amount to cultural remoulding. Allied bombing was indiscriminate. The Basic Law was drafted under foreign supervision. These are facts, not interpretations. Hoppe’s merit is to force them into the open, without apology.

The reflections that followed in my own mind were not comfortable. It is easy to dismiss his radical decentralism as impractical. Who today believes that the United States could be broken into small voluntary communities, or that Germany could escape its self-imposed penance? Yet it is harder to dismiss his diagnosis of democracy’s pathologies. If persuasion is always bent into propaganda, if consent is always fictitious, if war is always total, then what legitimacy remains? The democratic peace is not peace but an order in which the victors re-educate the vanquished, permanently. To see Germany in this light is to glimpse a possible future for others.

Hoppe’s truth is simple indeed: democracy breeds total war, and its peace is humiliation. The difficulty lies in admitting it, and in imagining a future not enslaved to it.