Democratization What difference can a path make ...

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Democratization

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What difference can a path make? Regional democracy promotion regimes in the Americas and Africa Thomas Legler a;Thomas Kwasi Tieku b a Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico b University of Toronto, Canada Online publication date: 11 May 2010

To cite this Article Legler, Thomas andTieku, Thomas Kwasi(2010) 'What difference can a path make? Regional

democracy promotion regimes in the Americas and Africa', Democratization, 17: 3, 465 — 491 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13510341003700337 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13510341003700337

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Democratization Vol. 17, No. 3, June 2010, 465 –491

What difference can a path make? Regional democracy promotion regimes in the Americas and Africa Thomas Leglera∗ and Thomas Kwasi Tiekub a

Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico; bUniversity of Toronto, Canada (Received 7 July 2009; final version received 12 December 2009)

Downloaded By: [Legler, Thomas] At: 17:36 11 May 2010

Regional multilateral regimes have become important instruments for promoting and defending democracy around the world. The novel nature of these regional instruments has generated a cottage industry in social science scholarship. Yet, none of these works compare the democracy promotion and defence regimes of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the African Union (AU). This article is designed to fill this gap. We argue that the unique constellation of actors that are members of each respective organization have reinforced two distinct democracy promotion and defence paths. The state-driven regime evolution characteristic of the Americas contrasts with Africa’s expert-driven process of regime construction. The state-centric process of the OAS regime has bolstered a narrow interstate multilateralism that upholds traditional sovereign state prerogatives and minimizes the role for non-state actors in the promotion and defence of democracy in the Americas. The expert-driven process of AU’s regime construction has fostered a legalistic approach to democratic promotion and defence in Africa and opened up space for non-state actors to play a central role in the development of regional democracy promotion and defence norms. Keywords: democracy promotion; path dependence; Organization of American States; African Union; international regimes; democracy charter; international norms

Introduction Multilateral instruments appear to be the trendy way to promote and defend democracy around the world. Major regional organizations such as the European Union (EU), the Organization of American States (OAS), the Caribbean Community, and the African Union (AU) have adopted multilateral frameworks to strengthen democracy and human rights norms and practices in their member states. The Amsterdam Treaty which entered into force in May 1999 provided a strong legal ∗

Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1351-0347 print/ISSN 1743-890X online # 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13510341003700337 http://www.informaworld.com


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instrument for European Union institutions to promote democracy in Europe and the global south. Even in Asia, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) took an important step toward the construction of a new regional multilateral democracy promotion regime with the signing of a new ASEAN Charter that included the creation of a new ASEAN Human Rights Body on 20 November 2007.1 The Organization of American States and the African Union have taken the multilateral approach to democracy promotion to a new level by forging historic democratic charters. The OAS adopted the Inter-American Democratic Charter (IADC) on 11 September 2001.2 The IADC is distinctive in recognizing a ‘democratic entitlement’ for the peoples of the Americas as well as providing provisions not just for crisis response but also preventive diplomacy. On 30 January 2007, the African Union created the African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance (the African Democratic Charter).3 The African Democractic Charter provides ambitious benchmarks and legal principles for promoting democratic ethos and peer review mechanisms for measuring democratic performance in 52 states in Africa and the Western Sahara. Both Charters offer unprecedented detailed definitions of democracy, elaborate and in some cases innovative instruments for responding to coups d’e´tat as well as authoritarian backsliding, and provisions for international election monitoring. What explains the ‘democratic charter trend’ and the construction of regional multilateral democracy promotion regimes in the Americas and Africa, which share overlapping ideas and practices while at the same time confront their own idiosyncratic problems and challenges? The existing literature suggests four possible explanations: the lock-in mechanism; the global diffusion of democracy and human rights norms; the democratic density argument; and institutional permeability. Although each of these approaches contributes a piece to the puzzle, the works that have examined these regional regimes have tended to ignore how the actors and processes that created them in the first place have shaped their operations and future challenges. The neglect is surprising given that mounting evidence in social science scholarship suggests that the way institutions are created has a strong impact on their performance.4 In this article, we examine the democracy promotion regimes of the OAS and the AU with a view to fill in this gap. We argue that the unique constellations of actors that are members of each respective organization and champion democracy promotion have reinforced two distinct regime paths. These unique paths help account for the particular type of limits that each respective regional governance organization confronts in advancing democracy. The state-driven regime evolution characteristic of the Americas contrasts with Africa’s expert-driven process of regime construction. In the Inter-American system, the combination of the US – Latin American membership cleavage and the championing of the collective defence of democracy (CDD) by small and medium powers have bolstered a narrower interstate multilateralism that upholds traditional sovereign state prerogatives and minimizes the role for non-state


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actors. In contrast, the AU collective democracy promotion and defence regime came out of the work of transnational knowledge networks in Africa. The knowledge networks whose activist work led to the creation of the regime were made up of policy think tanks in South Africa, and bureaucrats of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), now the AU. They share a ‘common frame’ that African governments have collective responsibility for the development of a liberal ethos, such as representative democracy, good governance, and human rights in every African state.5 They teamed up to develop the instruments to bind member governments of the AU, including the illiberal ones, to a common set of liberal democratic and good governance principles thereby compelling them to defend and promote democracy in every African state. The expert-driven process of the AU’s regime construction has fostered a legalistic approach to democratic promotion and defence in Africa. We demonstrate these insights in three sections. In the first section, we review the four main interpretations for the rise and differential performance of regional multilateral democracy promotion regimes. Second, the article outlines the key elements of the OAS and AU regimes. Finally, in the third section we apply our actor-oriented approach in an examination of the performance of the two regimes. Contending explanations for regional multilateral democracy promotion The existing literature suggests four possible explanations for the rise and distinct challenges of regional multilateral democracy promotion regimes. First, following Moravcsik’s analysis of the evolution of human rights regimes,6 democracy promotion regimes could be considered the product of the efforts of new democracies acting in self-interest to construct regional defence-of-democracy mechanisms to prevent future dictators from undermining their still fragile democratic orders.7 Certainly in the Latin American regional context, we can find instances of such states, for example Argentina, Chile, and Peru. Nonetheless, as the African context highlights, Moravcsik’s thesis precludes the possibility that non-state actors can be the main drivers of democracy promotion and defence projects. While it might help us explain in part the origins of these regimes, it does not help us to explain the distinct nature of the problems encountered in promoting and defending democracy multilaterally in each region. Second, some scholars suggest that this trend is an offshoot of a profound, historic diffusion of democracy and human rights norms across the globe.8 Nonetheless, it is inaccurate to assume that Inter-American and African pro-democracy multilateralism are simply offshoots of ‘localized’ international norms that originated in established Western democracies.9 While democracy may have been spread across the planet in a series of historic waves,10 the evolution of multilateral democracy promotion in the EU, the OAS, and the AU has been more a concurrent than a sequential phenomenon. Even though the AU originally sought some crossfertilization and inspiration from the OAS IADC,11 the African and Inter-American regimes are both homegrown projects that have yielded normative innovations to


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address distinct regional problems. It is equally important to distinguish between democracy norms and democracy promotion norms. The African and Inter-American regimes draw insights from established democracies in the case of the former but the development of the latter type of norms is a homegrown effort.12 Third, Pevehouse’s ‘supply-side’ argument asserts that democracy promotion is strongest in regions where ‘democratic density’, that is, the number of members in a regional organization that are democratic, is greatest.13 Based on this logic, one would expect that the OAS, with a greater number of democratic states, would have stronger and more established instruments for promoting democracy. As we will show below, however, and indeed counter-intuitively, meaningful democracy promotion activity can occur despite democratic deficits. The African Union, in spite of a sizeable number of authoritarian regimes, has developed some of its own innovative and unique mechanisms for promoting and defending democracy. Moreover, Pevehouse’s analysis can tell us less about how these regimes originated. His analysis of regional democracy promotion is also on the whole state-centric, largely leaving non-state actors out of the equation. Hawkins’ analysis by comparison does make an important contribution in bringing civil society actors into the equation.14 Comparing OAS and Council of Europe (CE) democracy protection, he argues that ‘institutional permeability’ helps explain why the CE has enjoyed a more robust defence of democracy. By institutional permeability, he means the extent to which these organizations are accessible to non-state or civil society actors. Nonetheless, behind his argument is a fundamentally essentialist notion about these actors: that they are democratizing agents. While no doubt this is often the case, civil society access in and of itself is no automatic guarantee that organizations will strengthen their commitment to promote and defend democracy. A useful illustration of this point is the case of the Venezuelan non-governmental organization (NGO) Su´mate.15 In 2005, the US government proposed that the OAS create a new mechanism for monitoring member states’ compliance with the Democratic Charter. It envisioned the participation of organizations such as Su´mate. This prompted an instantaneously negative rejection by Latin American and Caribbean states, who saw clearly through this thinly veiled attempt by the United States to use civil society actors as part of a pretext of democracy protection to attack and discredit its enemies in the region, in this instance, the Cha´vez government. The Cha´vez government and various media sources had previously placed Su´mate leader Marıá Corina Machado in the presidential palace during the illfated coup d’e´tat against Cha´vez in April 2002. In addition, Hawkins’ institutional permeability is not necessarily always an indication of an organization’s dynamism. In the African Union case, the significant input of non-state actors reflects rather the absence of state leadership and norm entrepreneurship beyond a small group of African states, in the context of organizational membership wherein a sizeable number of states are still authoritarian or semi-authoritarian. While a network of state, non-state, and intergovernmental actors has been formed in the African context to push for increased regional

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multilateral democracy promotion activity, institutional permeability is not an automatic guarantee of greater success. In what follows, we do incorporate some elements of these approaches. Nonetheless, our own perspective underscores how unique sets of actors and political processes led to the creation of two distinct regional paths to democracy promotion, and that the unique origins of each path help us to explain the different regime successes and challenges in each region. The OAS and AU regimes The OAS and AU democratic regimes are constructed on four key pillars.16 First, they make democracy promotion and defence an explicit purpose of the organizations. The Protocol of Cartagena de Indias amended the OAS Charter in 1985 to make the promotion and consolidation of representative democracy an explicit purpose of the organization. The language of democracy promotion was introduced into African multilateralism by the African Charter for Popular Participation in Development which was adopted by African leaders during the OAU summit in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia in July 1990. The then secretary-general of the OAU, Salim Ahmed Salim, who developed the charter, felt that OAU promotion of democracy ‘would ensure the involvement of all including in particular women and youth in the development efforts’ of African states.17 It was reinforced by Decision CM/Dec.357 (LXVI) which African leaders adopted during the Council of Ministers meeting in Harare in Zimbabwe on 28 May 1997. Decision CM/Dec.357 (LXVI) committed African governments to concrete steps to ‘work towards the establishment and consolidation of effective democratic systems, ensure respect for human rights and fight impunity’ in Africa.18 The Constitutive Act of the AU, which replaced the OAU Charter, built on these instruments by enjoining African governments to develop democratic institutions and culture, and to ensure good governance and the rule of law.19 Second, the democratic regimes of the two organizations are grounded in a strong anti-coup norm. In 1991, Resolution 1080 created an automatic and rapid response mechanism for the OAS in the event of a coup d’e´tat against a member state. The resolution also stipulated that the OAS could adopt any measures it deemed necessary to combat unconstitutional seizures of power. Resolution 1080 was put quickly to use in Haiti (1991), Peru (1992), Guatemala (1993), and Paraguay (1996). The institutionalization of an anti-coup norm did not start in Africa until 1998. In response to a military overthrow of Ahmed Tejan Kabbah’s civilian government in Sierra Leone on 25 May 1997, Salim introduced to the OAU Council of Ministers meeting in Harare in Zimbabwe on 28 May 1997 specific measures designed to restore constitutional order in Sierra Leone. The measures included a request to ‘all African countries, and the International Community at large, to refrain from recognizing the new regime and lending support in any form whatsoever to the perpetrators of the coup d’e´tat’.20 As a follow-up, Salim proposed that the OAU leadership


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exclude from participating in OAU activities ‘[s]tates whose Governments came to power through unconstitutional means’.21 The proposal was accepted as a declaration during the 34th OAU summit held in Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso in June 1998. A revised version of the proposal which included additional pro-democracy measures was submitted to the 35th summit held in Algiers in Algeria in July 1999.22 The new proposal required that states ‘whose Governments came to power through unconstitutional means after the Harare Summit [i.e. May 1997] restore constitutional legality before the next Summit’. It also mandated the OAU secretary-general to ‘assist in programmes intended to return such countries to constitutional and democratic governments.’ The AU Constitutive Act added these measures to its binding rules. The integration of the principles into the Constitutive Act has imposed a higher level of obligation on member states of the AU. Third, the democratic regimes have strong sanctions against coup makers. In the case of the OAS, the Washington Protocol which was adopted in 1992 and ratified in 1997 provided for the suspension of any member state whose democratic constitutional order had been terminated. The Protocol was later reiterated in the Declaration of Quebec City (2001) and entrenched in Article 21 of the IADC (2001). In a related fashion, the Declaration of Quebec City (2001) and Article 19 of the IADC made it clear that representative democracy is an indispensable precondition for participation within the OAS and the Inter-American system. For the first time, Article 21 of the Democratic Charter was recently unanimously invoked to suspend Honduras following the 28 June 2009 coup. In the African context, the OAU Assembly of Heads of State and Government decided during the 36th OAU summit held in Lome, Togo in July 2000 a fairly comprehensive sanction regime that should be applied by the OAU in cases of unconstitutional changes of governments in African states.23 Unconstitutional changes of governments were defined in the proposal as the replacement of democratically elected governments through a military coup d’e´tat, mercenary intervention, armed rebellion, and the refusal by an incumbent government to relinquish power to the winning party after free, fair, and regular elections. The proposal which was adopted as Declaration AHG/Decl.5 (XXXVI) during the 36th OAU summit held in Lome in Togo in July 2000 conferred on the OAU Chairperson and Secretary-General the responsibility to condemn any military take-over in Africa immediately and demand a speedy return to constitutional order. The country in question, according to Declaration AHG/Decl.5 (XXXVI), would be automatically suspended from participating in the activities of the OAU and given six months to restore constitutional rule.24 The OAU UndersecretaryGeneral for Political Affairs Said Djinnit and the Acting OAU Legal Counselor Ben Kioko integrated the core pro-democracy ideas in Declaration AHG/Decl.5 (XXXVI) into the draft Constitutive Act of the AU. Finally, the two organizations attempted to commit their members to uphold democracy via democratic charters. In the case of the Americas, the Charter was originally conceived as a measure to correct a serious shortcoming in the OAS’s


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existing diplomatic toolkit against threats to democracy: an inability to counter authoritarian backsliding by democratically elected leaders. Following the painful experience of a 10 year slide into dictatorship during the 1990s under President Fujimori that went largely unchallenged by the OAS, the Paniagua transition government originally proposed the IADC to help prevent elected leaders from ever undermining their democratic orders again. Briefly, there were four stages to the negotiation of the Charter. First, Peru constructed a coalition of support, including Argentina, Canada, Costa Rica, and the United States, that presented the IADC project as a key agenda item at the Quebec City Summit of the Americas in April 2001. Second, from there the draft document underwent additional negotiation at the annual OAS General Assembly in San Jose´, Costa Rica in June 2001. In San Jose´, the Democratic Charter project was also introduced to civil society. Third, failing to achieve agreement on the text of the document at San Jose´, the OAS commissioned Colombian Permanent Representative Humberto de la Calle to lead a working group to finalize the text of the IADC and to promote civil society buy-in. Finally, despite persistent objections by Venezuela that the IADC’s conception of representative democracy did not accommodate more participatory visions of democracy, on 11 September 2001, the foreign ministers of the region approved the IADC in a marathon special General Assembly in Lima, Peru.25 The IADC was the culmination of efforts to consolidate the CDD regime. In addition to enshrining earlier advances found in Resolution 1080 and the Washington Protocol, it contained important new innovations. Consistent with an emerging trend in international law, in Article 1 it established a ‘democratic entitlement’ where citizens of the Americas had a right to democracy and their governments an obligation to defend it.26 For the first time, in Articles 3 and 4 it set out the rough equivalent of a definition, the essential ‘elements’ and ‘components’ of representative democracy. In Articles 17 and 18 it contained provisions for preventive diplomacy in order to impede threats to democracy from becoming full-blown crises. Building on the Declaration of Quebec City (April 2001), in Article 19 it introduced an important distinction between unconstitutional interruptions (coups) and alterations (authoritarian backsliding by elected incumbents), recognizing both as serious threats to democracy. In Article 25, the IADC affirmed a new external validation norm for the OAS, that is, the prerogative of the organization to assess whether the conditions for free and fair elections exist when invited to monitor elections in member states. The document also encouraged forward looking democracy promotion activities as well as recognized important links between representative democracy and the alleviation of poverty, inequity, and gender inequality.27 In the case of Africa, the regime tried to move African governments away from the traditional idea that every state in Africa has ‘the right [. . .] to determine [. . .], the system of democracy on the basis of their socio-cultural values’.28 In order to commit the leadership of the OAU to a specific set of democratic principles, Salim forged a partnership with a group of civil society organizations that had started a


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campaign to make the OAU focus on humanitarian issues and to demand certain ‘standards of behaviour . . . from every government [in Africa] in the interest of common humanity’.29 Salim together with civil society groups pushed OAU leadership to bind their states in July 1999 to a decision that defined democracy as representative and stable government and indicated that ‘the principles of good governance, transparency and human rights are essential elements for building’ such a government.30 In response to criticisms by civil society groups that the OAU stand and principles on democracy were vague, the OAU bureaucrats developed ‘a set of principles on democratic governance to be adhered to by all Member States of the OAU.’31 The principles were adopted as Declaration AHG/Decl.5 (XXXVI) during the 36th OAU summit held in Lome, Togo in July 2000. The principles encouraged OAU members to adopt a ‘Democratic Constitution’ whose ‘preparation, content and method of revision [. . .] conform with generally acceptable principles of democracy’ and which guarantees and promotes human rights. In addition, Declaration AHG/Decl.5 (XXXVI) required that OAU member-states respect their constitutions, the provisions of the law and other legislation adopted by the Parliament of their states. Also, member governments would be required to adhere to the principle of separation of powers, respect for the independence of the judiciary, respect for the role of opposition and the principle of democratic change in addition to requiring OAU member states to promote political pluralism through the organization of free and regular elections, respect for freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and respect for fundamental rights and freedoms. Finally, Declaration AHG/Decl.5 (XXXVI) appealed to African governments to ensure gender balance and involvement of African civil society in the political process. The African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance, which was adopted (but not ratified) in January 2007, seeks to bind African states to this conventional understanding of democracy. It stipulates that parties to the Charter would adhere to ‘universal values and principles of democracy’ which include respect for human rights, representative government, the rule of law, supremacy of constitutions and constitutional orders, free and fair elections, independence of the judiciary, among others.32 It is significant that the African Democratic Charter provides a common frame of reference for democracy, though its definition is part of the aspirational principles, that is, they are not enforceable under international law.33 The common frame of reference is likely to minimize the potential for conflicts over the meaning of democracy in the African context, and more important, it undercuts African governments’ tendencies to adopt context-specific interpretations of democracy. An important element of the African Democratic Charter is the elaborate rules it provides for democracy activists and promoters to defend existing democracies in Africa. Chapter eight provides useful legal instruments to promote both vertical and horizontal accountability. Four out of the five clauses of Article 23 seek to strengthen vertical accountability by stipulating a series of sanctions for illegal


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access and maintenance of power. Though Article 23 places emphasis on vertical accountability, it does not in anyway erode horizontal accountability as Article 23(5) makes it illegal for incumbent regimes to manipulate national constitutions to prolong their term in office. In addition, it is illegal under the African Democratic Charter for an incumbent regime to refuse to concede defeat after a free and fair election. The AU is given the responsibility to impose sanctions on regimes that would refuse to hand over power following free and fair elections and those who would manipulate their national laws to prolong their stay in office. The great virtue of the African Democratic Charter is that it provides relatively precise rules, imposes strong obligation on parties, and it has a strong third party oversight for dealing with critical African democratic problems such as civil –military relations, authoritarian tendencies of civilian regimes, and human right abuse, among others.34 The Charter was enthusiastically signed by the heads of state and government of the member states of the AU, but in a classic AU member states’ approach to international legal instruments its ratification is moving forward at a snail’s pace. A minimum of 15 states must ratify in order for the Democracy Charter to enter into force. Only Ethiopia, Mauritania, and Sierra Leone, three states with questionable democratic credentials, have so far ratified it. The slow pace of the ratification is not unusual as it normally takes three years on the average for important international and regional legal instruments to be ratified by member states of the OAU and the AU. The only exception is the Constitutive Act of the African Union which was ratified in a record time of 10 months. Indeed, every charter adopted by the OAU and the AU has taken more than three years to come into force. It took 14 years (1976 – 1990) for the Cultural Charter for Africa, 5 years (1981 – 1986) for the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 9 years (1990 – 1999) for the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child and 3 years and some months (2006-2009) for the African Youth Charter to come into force. The ratification of the African Democratic Charter is proceeding relatively well compared with the Charter for African Cultural Renaissance, which was opened for signature a year before the adoption of the African Democratic Charter and where thus far no state has deposited its instrument of ratification. What is perhaps surprising is that democratic African states such as Botswana, Ghana, Mali, and South Africa, key backers of the Charter, have yet to ratify or discuss it in their national parliaments. The three states that have ratified it and obviously those that have not ratified it have yet to integrate the democracy defence and promotion ideas in the Charter into domestic laws. These challenges to the Charter should not in anyway blind any keen observer of African politics from seeing the remarkable multilateral tools developed in the last 20 years to promote and defend democracy in Africa. As indicated throughout the preceding sections, the majority of the instruments such as the anti-coup norm in the Charter have already been adopted as binding legal instruments by the OAU and the AU. The Constitutive Act of the AU, which is the supreme legal document of the African international system and superior to the Charter even when it is

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ratified, has adopted key aspects of the ideas in the Charter. While ratification of the Charter will bring all the instruments together in a single binding document, clarify ambiguities in previous documents, add more teeth to existing instruments, and make it relatively easy to enforce many of the principles, the non-ratification of the Charter does not take away the fact that major progress has been made in the last two decades to promote and defend democracy in Africa via multilateral institutions. The performance of the inter-American and African regimes The regimes have been tested on a number of occasions, the OAS more frequently than its counterparts in Africa. In both regions, democracy promotion and defence has had both successes and setbacks. Interestingly, there are similarities between the two organizations in terms of a better capacity for responding to coups than to authoritarian backsliding by incumbent elected leaders. As we shall see however, the reasons for this are different; they are linked to the different combinations of actors involved in democracy promotion in each region. In the Americas, the major tests have come from a series of threats in Bolivia (2003, 2005), Ecuador (1997, 2000, 2004 – 2005), Haiti (1991, 2004), Honduras (2009), Guatemala (1993), Nicaragua (2005), Paraguay (1996, 1999), Peru (1992, 2000), and Venezuela (1992, 2002 – 2004).35 While the OAS has garnered praise for efforts to defend democracy in Paraguay (1996)36 and Peru (2000),37 overall its record has been decidedly mixed.38 Similarly, the AU has been tested by military coups in the Central African Republic (2003), Guinea-Bissau (2003), Sao Tome and Principe (2003), Mauritania (2005), a self-coup in Togo (2005), the Zimbabwe crisis (2003 – 2005), the post-elections controversy in Kenya and the military takeover in Guinea in 2008. The AU dealt with the coup challenges relatively well. The countries that came under military rule were suspended and pressure was put on the military regimes to return their states to constitutional order. The only major downside to the AU response to the coups was that it established a low standard for states, where coups have occurred, to meet before they were readmitted into the AU. It re-admitted Togo into the Pan-African social club, though the electoral process that led to Togo’s return to constitutional order was criticized by many international observers. It never asked any of the states to make major changes to the judiciary system although the courts and prisons in the affected states needed major reforms to meet international standards. On the positive side, the OAS and the AU have successfully institutionalized a norm condemning coups d’e´tat as an illegitimate form of bringing about political change. In addition to aforementioned defences against illegal seizures or attempted seizures of power in Haiti (1991), Peru (1992), Guatemala (1993), and Paraguay (1996), compelling evidence that the norm had been successfully internalized across the Americas came in April 2002. With the notable exception of the United States, OAS member states almost universally condemned the


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ouster of President Cha´vez in Venezuela and the illegal seizure of power by Pedro Carmona. The OAS condemnation contributed to a swing in international and domestic public opinion that rapidly undermined the legitimacy of the Carmona government as pro-Cha´vez forces on the ground quickly restored Cha´vez to power.39 Moreover, there has been a dramatic decline in the incidence of classic coups in the Americas in recent years.40 The AU has so far suspended all countries where coups have taken place after the adoption of the anti-coup norm and put pressure on the military juntas to return the states in question to civilian rule. In contrast to the relative absence of the diplomatic use of suspension in the inter-American context, that is, until the suspension of Honduras’ OAS membership following the 28 June 2009 coup d’e´tat, the AU suspended Guinea-Bissau and Sao Tome and Principe in 2003, Togo in 2005, Mauritania in 2005 and 2007 and Guinea in 2008 after military take-over. All the states have been forced to return to civilian rule except Guinea. With the exception of Togo and the second coup in Mauritania where the military’s preferred candidates managed to win the elections, the military juntas were not able to turn their regimes into civilian governments. Informed observers of African politics widely believed that the AU has deterred ‘African militaries from plotting and attempting coups’.41 The AU anti-coup norm will have more deterring effect if the Charter, which debars coup plotters from contesting post-coup elections, comes into effect. However, the two organizations have been far less able to deal with authoritarian backsliding: elected officials who undermine their countries’ democratic constitutional orders. Prominent illustrations from the OAS are Fujimori’s Peru during the 1990s and Cha´vez’s Venezuela in recent years. The OAS has also encountered considerable difficulty confronting what have been called nontraditional ‘civil society’ or ‘impeachment’ coups, popular protests acting simultaneously with congressional interests to terminate elected presidencies in Bolivia (2003, 2005) and Ecuador (1997, 2000, and 2005).42 The OAS has invariably found itself limited to ensuring a constitutional line of succession once the presidents resigned.43 The AU has also been less successful in preventing elected officials from abusing their office as the ongoing Zimbabwe crisis reminds us. The AU’s inability to deal with authoritarian backsliding is a major worry as studies suggest that authoritarian tendencies are creeping into the administrations of a number of African states that embraced democracy in the early 1990s.44 The AU has failed to condemn regimes that have manipulated their states’ constitution in order to prolong their term in office. Regimes that have successfully manipulated their national constitutions to extend their stay in office include Blaise Compaore´ of Burkina Faso and Idriss Deby of Chad. Also, the AU has not been able to pressure military rulers such as Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, who were in power prior to May 1997 when the OAU decided not to admit military regimes into the PanAfrican organization, to establish constitutional order in their states. The African Democractic Charter is designed to deal with these challenges.


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The OAS has also had limited success in putting the IADC’s noble principles and provisions into practice.45 Most references to the historic document have been to the ‘spirit’ of the Democratic Charter, rather than the invocation of specific operative clauses. In Haiti in early 2004, the organization failed entirely to invoke the Charter to defend a democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, from his ouster by an armed and anti-democratic rebellion. Once again, in December 2004, the OAS failed to act on the basis of the IADC when Ecuadorian president Lucio Gutie´rrez dismissed the existing Supreme Court judges and replaced them with his own cronies in a clearly serious anti-democratic act.46 Additionally, despite the impressive diplomatic toolkit at its disposal, including the preventive diplomacy provisions of the IADC, the OAS has been more effective at ‘firefighting’,47 responding to crises in full sway rather than preventing them from occurring in the first place. In Venezuela, despite clear signs of a steady deterioration in the political situation months beforehand, the OAS only arrived on the scene once President Hugo Cha´vez had been ousted in a short-lived coup in April 2002. The AU, in turn, has adopted the ‘firefighting’ approach in dealing with member-states that are clearly undermining the operation of democracy in their states as well. It has remained silent on Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian tendencies, refusing to criticize him for massive violations of human rights. It has even refused to discuss the issue in a meaningful way. In 2004, AU bureaucrats prepared a fairly comprehensive report on Mugabe’s regime which strongly criticized him for violating human rights. The report contains allegations of government complicity in a wide-range of rights abuses, including ‘the torture and arbitrary arrests of opposition members of parliament and human rights lawyers’.48 Though the report was discussed by the AU Permanent Representation Council, and the Peace and Security Council, it was not put on the agenda of the heads of state and government because Zimbabwe’s foreign minister questioned the legality of the right of the AU to discuss the issue. Explaining regime performance The uneven performance of the two regimes begs explanation. As we stressed at the outset, distinct constellations of actors involved in OAS and AU multilateralism shaped the evolutionary paths of the regional democracy promotion and defence in the Americas and Africa. In the following analysis, the contrast between the AU’s more expert-driven democracy promotion and the OAS’s more state-centric pro-democracy multilateralism, and how these actor sets have played out in regime evolution, becomes apparent. As we shall see, the political dynamics among these unique networks of actors affect in differing ways the ability of the AU and the OAS to confront coups and authoritarian backsliding. In the case of the OAS, there has been a striking pattern in terms of who has promoted the creation of a CDD regime. The evolution of the CDD has been overwhelmingly state-driven, in large part by states that recently emerged from


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authoritarian situations themselves. There appear to be two impulses for such pro-democracy activism. On the one hand, numerous new democracies almost naturally desired to project their new found democratic values internationally through their foreign policy. On the other, consistent with the ‘Moravcsik thesis’,49 newly democratic states consciously and willingly promoted some loss of their sovereignty in exchange for the reassurance of helping to ‘lock-in’ their new democratic constitutional orders by creating an international line of defence against the enemies of democracy. One of the earliest advocates of a collective defence of democracy was Venezuela. With democracy recently restored in Venezuela after years of dictatorship, in what came to be called the Betancourt doctrine, in the early 1960s, President Ro´mulo Betancourt promoted the policy that the OAS should deny diplomatic recognition to any government that had come to power through the use of force. Eventually a version of the doctrine would be enshrined in the 1992 Washington Protocol, in no small part thanks to pressure from then Venezuelan President Carlos Andre´s Pe´rez. Following its return to democracy in 1983, Argentina was an important proponent of the Protocol of Cartagena de Indias in 1985 that elevated the promotion of representative democracy to a principle of the OAS Charter.50 Still in the grips of the Pinochet authoritarian legacy, Chile was a key sponsor of Resolution 1080 and the Santiago Declaration in 1991.51 Finally, with the painful Fujimori dictatorship still in people’s collective memory, Peru’s Paniagua transition government came up with the idea to create an Inter-American Democratic Charter. Peru wanted to make sure that nobody would ever again be able to get away with the creeping authoritarianism practiced by the Fujimori government. The state championing of a CDD regime helps explain the relatively successful internalization of a regional anti-coup norm. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, the prospect of authoritarian reversals in the new and still fragile democracies of the Americas was still very real. The ousting of recently elected president JeanBertrand Aristide in Haiti in 1991 or military rumblings early on against the Menem government in Argentina were acute reminders of that distinct possibility. Accordingly, numerous OAS member states perceived it in their national interest to promote a regional norm against unconstitutional seizures of power. In this sense, we see a clear example of norms and state interests in strong alignment. The explanation for the AU’s success in dealing with coups is quite different. In Africa’s experience, the champions of the regional anti-coup norm were OAU bureaucrats with a strong technical and analytical support from Jackie Cilliers, the Executive Director of the South African Institute for Security Studies. The efficacy of the AU’s approach to coups is due to the mechanical and legalistic manner in which the anti-coup sanctions have been applied. Unlike the OAS practice of exhausting all possible non-confrontational diplomatic measures before suspending a member state, in the African context a coup automatically triggers suspension. Additionally, the affected state cannot rejoin the AU club until elections have been organized and constitutional order restored. This mechanical operation


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of the regime has made it less prone to political manipulation. The drafters of the anti-coup sanction felt it would not work well if it were left to political leaders to apply it. They made a conscious effort to distance its operation from the OAU and the AU political leadership. As we shall see, this is a crucial divergence between the two respective regimes. The inability of the two organizations to deal effectively with authoritarian backsliding also requires interpretation. If we examine the actors involved, we can observe the role which political cleavages within the organizations play in stymieing efforts to counter backsliders. The AU has not been able to deal decisively with authoritarian backsliders in part because it does not have the necessary legal instruments to do so and in part because a determined group of AU political leaders have been frustrating attempts by AU bureaucrats to find extra-legal instruments to deal with elected officials who are abusing their powers. The group involving African dictators such as Gaddafi of Libya and Bashir of Sudan has been acting as gatekeeper, undermining AU bureaucrats’ attempt to put human rights violations and abuse of powers on the agenda of AU summits.52 They have resisted attempts to introduce liberal ideas and discourse into Pan-Africanism, claiming that they would deprive Africans the chance to develop organic political institutions and undermine African cultures. In private, it is not uncommon to hear members of the group accusing the pro-democracy campaigners as serving as agents of the West and neo-colonialism. These states’ foreign ministers and ambassadors rallied behind Mugabe during the discussion of the report on Zimbabwe. Some criticized the AU bureaucrats, and in particular, the then Chairperson of the Commission, Omar Konare, for overstepping their powers by compiling the report and submitting it for the consideration of AU organs. They lobbied the Assembly not to discuss the 2004 report on human rights situation in Zimbabwe. This dictatorial bloc in the AU no doubt also helps account for the painfully slow ratification and entry into force of the AU Democracy Charter as a treaty. It is particularly worrisome for the AU Democracy Charter’s promotion agenda that Gaddafi was elected in February 2009 as chairman of the AU. It is no wonder that so much of the impulse for an AU democracy promotion and protection role has come from networks of non-state actors and intergovernmental bureaucrats, as alluded to above and as we shall discuss in further detail below. The dominant cleavage within the OAS is the United States –Latin America and Caribbean divide. Historical events in the region remind us of the pronounced political and economic power asymmetries between the United States and the rest of the region, as well as periodic US hegemonic intentions in the Americas. This cleavage has influenced the politics of democracy promotion in two ways. First, the cleavage transposes a geopolitical dimension which can block efforts to counter backsliding. For example, the Fujimori government’s bilateral cooperation on counter-narcotics, its fight against Sendero Luminoso terrorists, and its celebrated status as a champion of Washington-sanctioned market reforms for a long time softened the United States’ approach to Peru


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as democracy was gradually dismantled during the 1990s. Similarly, to the outrage of those within the OAS attempting to respond to Ecuadorian president Lucio Gutie´rrez’s overt anti-democratic measures in December 2004, their efforts were staunchly resisted by the US government. Not surprisingly, Gutie´rrez enjoyed a close relationship with the United States for pursuing market friendly policies as well as his cooperation in the war on drugs, including extending his support for a US airbase on Ecuadorian soil. Second, suspicions of US intentions have at times seriously impeded the implementation of defence-of-democracy measures or efforts to consolidate the CDD regime. In December 2001, concerned about possible ulterior motives on the part of the United States, Caribbean member states of the OAS refused to endorse invoking the IADC in the immediate aftermath of an armed attack on the presidential palace in Haiti. In June 2005, a US attempt at the Fort Lauderdale General Assembly to strengthen the IADC by creating a civil society mechanism for monitoring member state compliance with the Democratic Charter was almost universally rejected. Many OAS members perceived the proposed mechanism as a thinly veiled effort to use democratic criteria as the pretext for attacking and undermining the Venezuelan government. Again in 2007 at the General Assembly in Panama, OAS members struck down a US proposal to invoke the IADC against Venezuela for authoritarian backsliding that included Cha´vez’s closure of a major opposition-owned media network, RFTC. In sum, the future of the CDD regime depends on a dramatic improvement in US – Latin American relations. Recent cooperation among the United States, the OAS, and the Sistema de Integracioń Centroamericana (Central American Integration System or SICA) in the face of the Honduran coup in June 2009 is encouraging in this regard. Efforts to counter the erosion of democracy by elected leaders are subject to strong sovereignty norms in the inter-American system largely prompted by fears of US intervention and mistrust of US intentions. For instance, Article 3(e) of the OAS Charter states, ‘Every State has the right to choose, without external interference, its political, economic, and social system and to organize itself in the way best suited to it, and has the duty to abstain from intervening in the affairs of another State.’ Article 19 goes further by stipulating that, No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. The foregoing principle prohibits not only armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, and cultural elements.

During the 1990s, it appeared as if new regional democracy and human rights norms were making serious inroads into traditional sovereignty norms. It seemed as if the Americas were moving ‘beyond sovereignty’53 or at least were ‘conditionalizing’ sovereignty practices according to new democratic criteria.54 Rather, it is


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probably more accurate to speak of how the juxtaposition of existing sovereignty norms with newer human rights and democracy norms has conditioned the CDD regime, leading to new hybrid norms and practices. The state-centric nature of the OAS process has led to the emergence of a hybrid procedural norm of ‘by invitation only’. The norm has restricted the OAS ability to promote democracy in the Americas. With the exception of suspending member states and the use in Haiti in 1991 of economic sanctions following a coup, OAS pro-democracy intervention, no matter how soft, normally requires a formal invitation by the host government. This includes fact-finding missions led by the Secretary-General and electoral observation missions.55 The strict ‘by invitation only’ norm in the OAS contrasts with the AU norms and practices which empower the AU Commission to conduct fact-finding missions without the express consent of member states. The AU has sent numerous fact-finding missions to crisis states in Africa without the need for an official invitation. A prominent case is the role the AU played in the resolution of the recent post-elections crisis in Kenya. The AU appointed the former UN secretarygeneral to lead a team of Africans to negotiate a power-sharing agreement in Kenya without seeking the invitation of the parties concerned. The absence of a ‘by invitation only’ norm also applies to electoral monitoring. The AU did not seek the express consent of member states before it deployed electoral monitors in Ghana (2000, 2004, 2008), Zanzibar (2000, 2003, 2005), Zimbabwe (2000, 2008), Kenya (2002, 2008), Nigeria (2003, 2007), Swaziland (2003), Mozambique (2003, 2004), Sierra Leone (2004, 2007), Malawi (2004), Cameroon (2004), Lesotho (2005), Zambia (2006), Gambia (2006), Seychelles (2006) and Uganda (2006). The AU democracy and defence norms obligate parties to inform the AU Commission, and more precisely, its Department of Political Affairs of any scheduled elections and to invite it to send an electoral observer mission. The African Democracy Charter also requires parties to provide free access to information, to ensure freedom of movement of the mission and to cooperate with the mission. The African Democratic Charter has a built-in mechanism to ensure that the selection of members of AU missions as well as the work of the missions is independent of politics. The actors who pushed for the adoption of these measures explain the relatively de-politicized nature of the process of conducting AU missions. These mechanisms emerged out of the activist work of indigenous African knowledge networks such as the African Bar Association and the Association of African Jurists. Its history can be traced to the 1960s when African jurists demanded an African multilateral instrument to promote and defend human rights and democracy in Africa during the first meeting of the International Commission of Jurists held in Lagos in Nigeria from 3 – 7 January 1961.56 Similar demands were made at the meeting of the African Bar Association and the French-speaking African jurists in the later half of the 1960s.57 The specific instruments themselves were developed by AU bureaucrats in Political Affairs and Legal Affairs Departments with technical support from Khabele


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Matlosa, the Research Director of the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa (EISA). The ideas in the Charter were discussed extensively by African experts on democracy during a conference organized jointly by the South African Independent Electoral Commission and the AU Commission in Pretoria in South Africa in April 2003 before they were submitted to the Council of Ministers summit held in Maputo, Mozambique in July 2003 and in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in May 2004.58 The absence of a ‘by invitation only’ norm in Africa is significant as its presence in the OAS has contributed to five distortions in practice. First, while upholding the sovereignty of member states, it impedes preventive diplomacy and rapid response to crises, as the actors involved find themselves obliged to negotiate the terms of their intervention with the host government. Second, perverse situations may occur, as in Peru’s crisis in 2000, where the OAS had to obtain the green light for a High-Level Mission from the very head of state guilty of eroding democracy in that country. Third, sovereignty restrictions have limited OAS democracy promotion and defence activities to specific moments within representative democracies. That is, the OAS finds it easiest to support democracies at election time through election observation missions invited by member governments. With a democratic mandate and legitimacy in hand, democratically elected governments have made it much more difficult for the OAS to intervene to defend or promote democracy in between elections. Accordingly, sovereign constraints in a way limit the OAS to the promotion of ‘electoralism’ and also obstruct its capacity for responding to authoritarian backsliding. Fourth, along similar lines, apart from invited election observation missions that normally provide an external seal of approval, member states are extremely reluctant to endorse peer review mechanisms for monitoring their compliance with the IADC. An important proposal that was struck down in the negotiation of the IADC was precisely the idea to use in situ visits by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights as a democratic peer review mechanism.59 It is noteworthy in this regard that the AU has incorporated a compliance mechanism within its Democracy Charter. Fifth, in the case of election monitoring, clever governments can use the ‘by invitation only’ prerogative to negotiate the terms of the observation mission, such as when to issue the invitation (how soon before the election date), who is invited to become an observer, and access to electoral institutions, software and hardware. In the December 2006 national elections, Venezuelan authorities were very effective in shaping the OAS election observation mission to its liking. The intertwining of regional sovereignty and democracy promotion norms has created an important new procedural norm within the CDD regime: ‘by invitation only.’ Conclusion In this article, we have compared the regional democracy promotion and defence regimes of the OAS and the AU. Our emphasis has been on how actors and


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processes that create regimes shape their norms and practices. We show that while the state-driven process of regime construction in the Americas has imposed important sovereign limits on the promotion and defence of democracy, the expert-driven process of regime formation in Africa has compelled African leaders to take a more legalistic, even constitutionalist path. That is, the persistence of authoritarianism in many AU member states has obliged the network of champions of regional democracy promotion to legalize the democracy promotion regime in the direction of minimizing political interference through a greater delegation of responsibilities to AU bureaucrats, such as via automatic anti-coup sanctions, and unhindered fact-finding missions and international election observation. Similarly, they framed the African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance, as a constitutional document to serve as a foundation for extending and safeguarding democratic practices in the non-democratic parts of the continent. In the inter-American context, despite the wishful thinking behind the InterAmerican Democratic Charter, the interstate path has shaped a regime with more emphasis on the defence of democracy rather than its promotion. This differs from the African Union, whose constellation of state, intergovernmental, and non-state actors has influenced a regime that by necessity both defends democracy and promotes its longer term extension to the entire region. To borrow McMahon and Baker’s terminology, when it comes to democracy the OAS is a ‘protector’ whereas the AU is both a ‘protector’ and a ‘creator’.60 Where the politics of inter-American democracy defence remain almost exclusively the domain of the politicians and their diplomatic representatives, in the African Union the politics of the regional democracy project has created an opening for non-state actors to play a central role in regime development.61 This also reminds us about the diverse possibilities in multilateralism, from more restricted interstate to more open and complex forms.62 In highlighting these regional paths, our analysis has yielded interesting insights. First, it is inaccurate to assume that inter-American and African pro-democracy multilateralism are mere vestiges of the localization of international norms that originated in established Western democracies. The African and inter-American regimes are both homegrown projects that have been developed to address distinct regional problems. Here we must recall the important distinction between democracy norms and democracy promotion norms. Although democracy has increasingly become valued worldwide, as we have illustrated, the distinct actor sets in each region’s multilateralism have crafted unique forms of promoting and defending democracy. Second, part of our argument is clearly counter-intuitive when it comes to the causal weight of democratic density in explaining the prospects for regional democracy promotion. As these pages have underlined, although the democratic density issue is unavoidable, lesser democratic density among the member states of a regional organization, in this case the African Union, need not necessarily limit multilateral democracy promotion activity to a facade. Although the network of state, intergovernmental, and non-state champions of democracy promotion have a long way to go to defeat


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formidable authoritarian resistance in Africa, they have already shown how innovative multilateral measures can make small yet qualitatively significant contributions to advancing democracy. The OAU and the AU forged a strong anti-coup norm and applied hefty sanctions against coup makers in spite of the democratic deficit among many of its member states. Put another way, the African Union has not had to wait until the democratic deficit among many of its member states is corrected in order to engage in meaningful democracy promotion activity. Consequently, we need a more nuanced appreciation of the role of the democratic density factor. From a long term perspective, this must provide at least some encouragement when examining the prospects for multilateral democracy promotion in such regions as the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Third, our research suggests that regime performance can be related to the political dynamics of regime membership. The state of US – Latin American and Caribbean relations has been a key determinant for regime growth and consolidation. Warm relations between the United States and the rest of the region coincided with the period of most dynamic change in the OAS collective defence of democracy regime during 1991 – 2001. By contrast, deteriorating relations in the new millennium between the United States and the region, especially during the Bush, Jr., presidency, affected the ability of the OAS to utilize and strengthen its defenceof-democracy arsenal. In Africa, the oft tense relationship between African authoritarian leaders on one hand and new African democratic states such as South Africa, Mali, Ghana, and Cape Verde and AU bureaucrats on the other, is clearly a major contributing factor to AU’s inability to deal with authoritarian backsliders. Similarly, the OAS state-centric process has blended existing regional sovereignty norms with newer democratic ones to forge a new hybrid procedural norm of ‘by invitation only’. This norm requires the OAS to obtain the explicit consent of the host government in order to intervene on behalf of democracy, contributing to a number of distortions in OAS interventions. Its absence in Africa has allowed the AU to send numerous fact-finding missions to crisis states in Africa in a relatively timely way, as illustrated recently in the AU’s success at brokering a power-sharing agreement in Kenya in 2008. On a final note, an important cross-regional public policy lesson is that we must move beyond the simplistic identification of best practices for cross-fertilization if we seek to improve the promotion and defence of democracy across different regions.63 As we have underlined, AU and OAS practices are very much idiosyncratic, embedded in and conditioned by particular regional problems and actor sets. As regional organizations such as ASEAN move tentatively forward with their own fledgling efforts to advance democracy, it must be with an acute awareness of the possibilities and limits of their own paths.

Acknowledgements This article originated as a paper presented at the 2008 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA) held in San Francisco. It represents an equal

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co-authorship. In addition to the literature cited here, our research benefited from numerous interviews with African Union and OAS democracy promotion officials and specialists. Their identities have been kept intentionally anonymous. The authors wish to acknowledge the enthusiastic support and feedback that they received from Larry Diamond. They are also grateful to Dickson Eyoh, Bathseba Opini, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Tom Legler received generous support from a Universidad Iberoamericana research grant for this article. Both authors would like to thank Sarah Mughal, Anabel Lo´pez, Fredy Macedo, and Ana Caridad for their research assistance. The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes


1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

Like Krasner, we define regimes as sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given issue-area. See Krasner, ‘Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables’. On the Inter-American Democratic Charter, see special issue on the Inter-American Democratic Charter edited by Maxwell A. Cameron, Canadian Foreign Policy 10, no. 3; Cooper and Legler, Intervention without Intervening: The OAS Defense and Promotion of Democracy in the Americas; Fabry, ‘The Inter-American Democratic Charter and Governmental Legitimacy in the International Relations of the Western Hemisphere’; Legler, ‘The Inter-American Democratic Charter: Rhetoric versus Reality’. On the African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance, see Eborah, ‘The African Charter on Democracy, Election and Governance: A New Dawn for the Enthronement of Legitimate Governance in Africa?’; McMahon, ‘The African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance: A Positive Step on a Long Path’; Saungweme, ‘A Critical Look at the Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance in Africa’; Wodzicki, ‘The Inter-American Democratic Charter and the African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance: A Comparison’. Pierson, ‘Increasing Returns, Path Dependency, and the Study of Politics’; Pierson, The New Politics of the Welfare State; Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis; Gazibo, ‘The Forging of Institutional Autonomy: A Comparative Study of Electoral. Management Commissions in Africa’. Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Moravcsik, ‘The Origins of Human Rights Regimes: Democratic Delegation in Postwar Europe’. Legler, ‘The Inter-American Democratic Charter: Rhetoric versus Reality’. McFaul, ‘Democracy Promotion as a World Value’; McMahon and Baker, Piecing a Democratic Quilt? Regional Organizations and Universal; McMahon, ‘The African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance: A Positive Step on a Long Path’; Wodzicki, ‘The Inter-American Democratic Charter and the African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance: A Comparison’. An international norm is a standard of appropriate behaviour for actors of a given identity. Katzenstein, ‘Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security’; Finnemore and Sikkink, ‘International Norms Dynamics and Political Change’. Acharya, ‘How Ideas Spread: Whose Norms Matter? Norm Localization and Institutional Change In Asian Regionalism’. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Wodzicki, ‘The Inter-American Democratic Charter and the African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance: A Comparison’.

Democratization 12. 13. 14. 15.


16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

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Gratius and Legler, ‘Latin America is Different: Transatlantic Discord on How to Promote Democracy in Problematic Countries’. Pevehouse, Democracy from Above? Regional Organizations and Democratization. See also McMahon and Baker, Piecing a Democratic Quilt? Regional Organizations and Universal. Hawkins, ‘Protecting Democracy in Europe and the Americas’. Su´mate is a Venezuelan civic organization that was created in 2002 to promote democratic citizenship and safeguard democracy against alleged threats from the Cha´vez government. Despite its claims to be an impartial promoter of democracy within the country, it has never been able successfully to alter widespread perceptions, both domestically and internationally, that it is a partisan organization that is pro-opposition and viscerally anti-Cha´vez. For more on Su´mate, consult http://www.sumate.org/ nosotros.html. For descriptions of the evolution of the OAS collective-defence-of-democracy regime, see Bloomfield, ‘Making the Western Hemisphere Safe for Democracy? The OAS Defense-of-Democracy Regime’; Cooper and Legler, ‘The OAS Democratic Solidarity Paradigm: Questions of Collective and National Leadership’; Cooper and Legler, Intervention without Intervening: The OAS Defense and Promotion of Democracy in the Americas; Munõz, ‘The Right to Democracy in the Americas’. OAU, ‘Report of the Secretary General to the Fifty-first Ordinary Session of Council of Ministers’. AHG/DECL.1 (XXXIV). African Union, The Constitutive Act; African Union, Declaration of the Heads of State and Government of the African Union on the Fourth Ordinary Session of African Union. Organization of African Union (OAU), Introductory Note to the Report of the Secretary General to the Thirty-Third Ordinary Session of OAU of Organization of African Unity. Organization of African Union, Ushering the OAU into the Next Century: A Programme for Reform and Renewal. OAU, ‘Report of the Secretary General to the Thirty-fifth Ordinary Session of Organization of African Unity’. Salim, Report of the Secretary General. The Secretary-General was given responsibility to assist in restoring constitutional order in African states that experienced coups d’e´tat after the Harare summit. The institutionalization of democracy promotion within the OAU, together with the template provided by the OAU response to Koroma’s coup d’e´tat in May 1997 allowed the Secretary-General to push African leaders to adopt more democratic measures. OAU, ‘Decision of Assembly of Heads of State and Government of Organization of African Unity on Unconstitutional Changes of Government in Africa’. For detailed accounts of the IADC negotiation process, see Cooper, ‘The Making of the Inter-American Democratic Charter: A Case of Complex Multilateralism’; Cooper and Legler, Intervention without Intervening: The OAS Defense and Promotion of Democracy in the Americas. On the ‘democratic entitlement’ trend in the IADC and in international law, see Fox, ‘Democracy, Right To, International Protection’. For analyses of the IADC’s provisions, see Ayala Coroa and Nikken Bellshaw-Ho´gg, Collective Defence of Democracy: Concepts and Procedures; Cameron, Canadian Foreign Policy 10, no. 3; Cooper and Legler, Intervention without Intervening: The OAS Defense and Promotion of Democracy in the Americas; Legler, ‘The InterAmerican Democratic Charter: Rhetoric versus Reality’.

486 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.


33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42.

T. Legler and T. K. Tieku OAU, Report of the Secretary General to the Thirty-fifth Ordinary Session of Organization of African Unity. Obasanjo and Mosha, Africa Rise to the Challenge: Conference Report on the Kampala Forum; Zartman and Deng, A Strategic Vision for Africa: The Kampala Movement. The major conference of the group was organized between 19 and 20 May 1991 in Kampala in Uganda. It was attended by over 500 people, including representatives of African intellectual communities and former African heads of state, the group developed continent-wide principles and benchmarks designed to demand certain ‘standards of behaviour . . . from every government [in Africa] in the interest of common humanity’. OAU, ‘Report of the Secretary General to the Fifty- first Ordinary Session of Council of Ministers’. OAU, ‘Decision of Assembly of Heads of State and Government of Organization of African Unity on Unconstitutional Changes of Government in Africa’. African Union, African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, 5. Article 2 and Articles 3 through 6. Aspirational principles are difficult to enforce. This is why all aspirational principles lack strong sanction regimes. For discussion of the various elements of the African Democratic Charter, see McMahon, ‘The African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance: A Positive Step on a Long Path’; Saungweme, ‘A Critical Look at the Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance in Africa’; Eborah, ‘The African Charter on Democracy, Election and Governance: A New Dawn for the Enthronement of Legitimate Governance in Africa?’; Wodzicki, ‘The Inter-American Democratic Charter and the African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance: A Comparison’. For analyses of the OAS responses to these crises, see Boniface, ‘The OAS’s Mixed Record’; McCoy, ‘International Response to Democratic Crisis in the Americas, 1990–2005’; McCoy, ‘Transnational Response to Democratic Crisis in the Americas, 1990–2005’. Valenzuela, ‘Paraguay: The Coup That Didn’t Happen’. Cooper and Legler, ‘The OAS in Peru. A Model for the Future?’; Cooper and Legler, ‘A Tale of Two Mesas: The OAS Defense of Democracy in Peru and Venezuela’; Cooper and Legler, Intervention without Intervening: The OAS Defense and Promotion of Democracy in the Americas. Craig L. Arcenaux and David Pion-Berlin, ‘Issues, Threats, and Institutions: Explaining OAS Responses to Democratic Dilemmas in Latin America’, Latin American Politics & Society 49, 2 (Summer 2007): 1–31; Boniface, ‘The OAS’s Mixed Record’; Levitt, ‘Ecuador 2004–2005: Democratic Crisis Redux’; McCoy, ‘International Response to Democratic Crisis in the Americas, 1990– 2005’; McCoy, ‘Transnational Response to Democratic Crisis in the Americas, 1990 –2005’. On the Venezuela crisis, see Cooper and Legler, Intervention without Intervening: The OAS Defense and Promotion of Democracy in the Americas; Legler, ‘Venezuela 2002–2004: The Cha´vez Challenge’; and Parish, Peceny and Delacour, ‘Venezuela and the Collective Defence of Democracy Regime in the Americas’. Nonetheless, the OAS performance has been disappointing when it comes to armed rebellions that have sought to oust democratically elected leaders. It is worth noting that the OAS did little to prevent an armed rebellion from toppling Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004. McGowan, ‘Coups and Conflict in West Africa, 1955–2004’. Boniface, ‘The OAS’s Mixed Record’; Encarnacioń, ‘Venezuela’s “Civil Society Coup”’.

Democratization 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.


50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

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Boniface, ‘The OAS’s Mixed Record’; McCoy, ‘International Response to Democratic Crisis in the Americas, 1990–2005’; McCoy, ‘Transnational Response to Democratic Crisis in the Americas, 1990–2005’. Bratton and van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa; Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi, Public Opinion, Democracy, and Market Reform in Africa. Legler, Intervention without Intervening: The OAS Defense and Promotion of Democracy in the Americas. We are grateful to Helen Barnes for giving one of us the opportunity to consult her detailed work at the Carter Center on the applications of the InterAmerican Democratic Charter. Levitt, ‘Ecuador 2004–2005: Democratic Crisis Redux’. Acevedo and Grossman, ‘The OAS and the Protection of Democracy’. See http://www.afrol.com/articles/13595; http://www.irinnews.org/report. aspx?reportid¼50560. Moravcsik, ‘The Origins of Human Rights Regimes: Democratic Delegation in Postwar Europe’. On the efforts by the Alfonsıń government to defend and promote democratic values via its foreign policy, see Fournier, ‘The Alfonsıń Administration and the Promotion of Democratic Values in the Southern Cone’. See also McMahon and Baker, Piecing a Democratic Quilt? Regional Organizations and Universal, 93–4. The group includes Algeria, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Egypt, Gabon, Guinea, Libya, Lesotho, Niger, Sudan, Togo and Tunisia. Farer, Beyond Sovereignty: Collectively Defending Democracy in the Americas. Van Klaveren, ‘Political Globalization and Latin America: Toward a New Sovereignty’. Another sovereignty-democracy promotion hybrid is a new norm opposing the use of force to defend democracy. OAS member states (as well as the Rio Group) simply will not condone military intervention to uphold or restore democracy. Accordingly, an interesting division of labour has emerged. On the one side, the OAS has limited itself to soft forms of intervention in defending democracy, such as declaratory diplomacy, the good offices of the Secretary-General, and the facilitation of democratic dialogues. On the other, where military interventions have occurred, they have been under the rubric of threats to international security under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council, as in Haiti in 1994 and 2004. Umozurike, ‘The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights’. Nkulu. ‘The African Charter on Human and People’s Rights: An African Contribution to the Project of Global Ethic, 1997’. See decisions EX.CL/DEC.31(III); EX.CL/124(V). Legler, ‘Peru Then and Now: The Inter-American Democratic Charter and Peruvian Democratization’; Legler, Intervention without Intervening: The OAS Defense and Promotion of Democracy in the Americas; McMahon and Baker, Piecing a Democratic Quilt? Regional Organizations and Universal, 103. McMahon and Baker, Piecing a Democratic Quilt? Regional Organizations and Universal. In their recent monograph on the African Union, Makinda and Wafula stress the need for greater strategic leadership to advance the AU’s agenda on governance, democracy, and the rule of law. Their vision of strategic leadership, however, is statecentric, focusing exclusively on state and AU leaders. As our analysis has underlined, however, non-state actors acting through knowledge networks with state and intergovernmental leaders, have been a crucial impulse for the rise of the AU democracy

488

62. 63.

T. Legler and T. K. Tieku promotion regime. See Makinda and Wafula Okumu, The African Union: Challenges of Globalization, Security, and Governance. See O’Brien, Goetz, Scholte, and Williams, Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements. The sharing of best practices, for example, seemed to be the prime motivation behind a conference on the democratic charters of the two regions organized by the OAS and the AU in Washington, DC, in July 2007.

Notes on contributors Thomas Legler is Professor of International Relations at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.


Thomas Kwasi Tieku teaches International Relations and is Director of the African Studies Program at the University of Toronto, Canada.

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