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HILJ Symposium: A Response to Ozan Varol

[David Landau is an Assistant Professor and Associate Dean for International Programs at Florida State University.] This post is part of the Harvard International Law Journal Volume 53(2) symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Professor Varol’s article “The Democratic Coup d’Etat” is an important piece of work and a key contribution to the newest wave of literature on democratic transitions. In addition, the piece is nicely crafted and carefully researched -- both Professor Varol’s theoretical foundation and his case studies are persuasive. Professor Varol rightly points out that the role of the military during democratic transitions is not uniformly negative, but in fact is complex, and uses a simple assumption, which is that the military will generally try to increase or entrench its own power during transitions, to explain military behavior during transitions. Finally, he presents a series of case studies across both time and place which would otherwise appear to have little in common (Turkey in 1960, Portugal in 1974, and Egypt today) to show that his assumption about military behavior seems to hold broadly. My comments here are not a critique of his central thesis, which I basically share, but rather build off of two of the major points in the piece. A first key finding is that “coups” are hard events to classify – contrary to conventional usage, they do not always have antidemocratic intent or effects. As Professor Varol shows, sometimes militaries engage in “coups” precisely in order to put in place or restore a democratic order. This raises a broader point: our vocabulary about democratic transitions remains pretty crude. Revolutions, as Richard Albert has argued in recent work, are not uniform events, but often have little in common; the same seems true of events we call “coups.” At the same time, these are loaded terms: to call something a coup is universally to condemn it. The term does not get thrown around in a neutral way, but is used by opponents to classify an event to which they are hostile. Meanwhile, supporters avoid the label like the plague. This is particularly true in regions, like Latin America, with long and largely (but not entirely) negative experiences with military involvement in politics. A recent example occurred in Honduras, where both sides following the removal of President Zelaya in 2010, as well as international institutions like the OAS, were obsessed with a fight over how to classify the event, even though there was agreement about most of the relevant facts. Supporters of Zelaya argued that the event was a classic coup because the military had taken Zelaya away, flying him to Costa Rica, without any legal authority. The proponents of the removal, in contrast, argued that it was a congressionally ratified action against a dangerous, undemocratic president. The sheer amount of energy put into the label suggests that it is obscuring rather than illuminating important questions. And I am uncertain whether adding the label “democratic coup” to the vocabulary does much to clarify things. Opponents of Zelaya would characterize the removal as a “democratic coup,” if a coup at all, because it had the effect of ousting a president who they argue was on a path to dictatorship and replacing him with another civilian regime that did not have such aims. Supporters of course would argue that it was undemocratic because it removed a democratically-elected president who was governing according to the popular will.

HILJ Symposium: Can There Be a Democratic Coup d’Etat?

[Joel Colón-Ríos, Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, Faculty of Law, responds to Ozan Varol, The Democratic Coup d'Etat.] This post is part of the Harvard International Law Journal Volume 53(2) symposium. Other posts from this series can be found in the related posts below. Ozan Varol has written an important article. In arguing that some military coups may not only have democratic features but that they may also result in the adoption of democratic constitutions, Varol invites us to reconsider two of the most persisting questions in contemporary constitutional theory. First, what makes a legal revolution (understood in Kelsenian terms, that is, as the creation of a new constitution in violation of the rules of change of a previous constitutional order [see Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State 116-118 (1949)]) democratic? Second, what makes a constitution democratic? Even though mostly engaging in a discussion about legal revolutions, about military coups that result in important structural changes (i.e. the transformation of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes into democratic ones), Varol seems to be examining only the latter of these questions. In fact, he suggests that he is not interested in looking at the “process by which the coup takes place” (the legal revolution), but at the democratic character of the “resulting change” (the constitution it produces) (p. 298). For the purposes of his article, Varol operates under Samuel Huntington’s definition of democracy: “a regime in which political leaders are selected through free and fair elections”. (p. 305). Varol does not engage in an open defence of this (low-intensity) conception of democracy, but uses it to determine whether a military coup can be categorized as democratic. Briefly put, if a military, with the support of the population, topples an authoritarian or totalitarian regime, facilitates free and fair elections within a short span of time, and transfers power to the democratically elected leaders, we have a democratic coup. (p. 300). In this short note, I would like to look at ‘democratic coups’ from a strong conception of democracy. In so doing, my aim is not to put forward a different conception of ‘democratic coups’, but to show that the questions posed above are interrelated in important ways; they are, put shortly, questions about the democratic legitimacy of a constitutional regime. If we look at these two questions together, we still might be able to talk about ‘democratic coups’, but in a much more restricted way that Varol’s approach suggests.

HILJ Symposium: The Democratic Coup d’Etat

[Ozan Varol is Assistant Professor of Law at Lewis & Clark Law School.] This post is part of the Harvard International Law Journal Volume 53(2) symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. This article examines the typical characteristics and constitutional consequences of a largely neglected phenomenon that I call the “democratic coup d’état.” To date,...