Proposal du Jour: A “Concert of Democracies”

An impressive array of academics (including Anne-Marie Slaughter and John Ikenberry) and think-tank heavyweights (Ivo Daalder among them) are lining up behind the idea of institutionalizing an alliance of true democracies to advance effective and legitimate global governance. It’s a central recommendation of the final report of the Princeton Project on National Security (which includes a draft charter for the entity). The latest edition of The American Interest includes a manifesto by Daalder and James Lindsay, and there’s been a lot of discussion on the subject at America Abroad (several posts linked here).

Backers argue that a Concert of Democracies would improve on the UN, hobbled from resolving today’s global problems by a persistent norm of non-interference. It would also be the prefferred alternative to an old-fashioned concert of great powers, which would suffer a legitimacy deficit insofar as “by definition, the vast majority of states and people would have no role in setting the rules.”

But what of the legitimacy of the Concert of Democracies? This club (unlike the completely undemanding and ineffectual existing Community of Democracies) would include only those countries which hold free and fair elections and which uphold civil and political rights under the rule of law — apparently about 60 states, including most notably Brazil, South Africa, and India in addition the usual suspects. That leaves a lot of states and people out of this loop, too.

Daalder and Lindsay confront the objection (the central question for international law types) with this:

But should international legitimacy rest on universalism, or at least on the widespread support of the international community as a whole? This notion reduces the criterion of legitimacy to a procedural question: The number of states or votes one can marshal in support of a given action will determine that action’s legitimacy. The nature of the action itself—or the nature of the states consenting to it—matters little, if at all.

This is a deeply flawed conception of legitimacy. The rightness or wrongness of a particular course of action ought to reside at least in part in the nature of the action itself. In the case of the use of force, for example, the justness of the cause, the proportionality of the response, the nature of the authority deciding the action and the likelihood of success constitute considerations that are at least as important in determining its legitimacy as the number of states that would support it. . . .

The second problem of equating legitimacy with the number of states that support a given action is that it assumes all states are equal. States may be equal in a procedural sense, but they are not equal in fact. Most states in the world today, including a majority of UN members, do not represent the interests or perspectives of the people they rule. So when it comes to determining international legitimacy, why should states with no legitimacy at home have an equal say as states with such legitimacy? Real legitimacy, like real sovereignty, resides in the people rather than in the states—which is why state decisions to confer international legitimacy must rest in the democratically chosen representatives of the people, not in the personal whims of autocrats or oligarchs.

Fair enough, but still has a whiff of the old civilized/uncivilized divide about it, allowing those on the former side to set rules for everyone else. (One can see the roots of the proposal back in an early article by Slaughter on the Act of State Doctrine, suggesting differential applications to liberal and non-liberal states.) And never mind that being a democracy, even a real one, is unlikely to determine national interests along a sufficiently broad array of issues; the prospect that such a group would form a bloc in the WTO (as suggested by advocates) seems somewhat far-fetched. So count me among those who will (as predicted by Daalder and Lindsay) “argue New Englander-like (sic) that you cannot get there from here,” but this looks like a well-intentioned non-starter.