A League of Democracies?

In the latest issue of Foreign Policy, Thomas Carothers has a piece (which is basically an executive summary of a longer report that he recently wrote for the Carnegie Endowment) analyzing the notion, which has gained some traction among U.S. foreign policy elites lately, of creating a "League of Democracies." He notes that scholars from numerous points on the ideological spectrum, in addition to the McCain campaign, have begun to swing behind the idea that the way for the United States to restore its international credibility and gain support for its international behavior is to corral the world's democracies into a formal organization that can supplement, if not eventually supplant, the United Nations as the arbiter of international legitimacy. The idea is that the world's democracies, by virtue of their commitment to similar values, have basically parallel interests, and that an organization that can exploit that convergence of interests should be better able to promote democracy, development, and global security than an organization like the U.N., which is hobbled by the necessity of creating consensus among a group of governments with fundamentally divergent worldviews.

Carothers criticizes this logic, noting that it is based on false premises and that, especially now, it presents a pie-in-the-sky view of the amount of leverage the U.S. has over other democratic powers in Europe, South America and South Asia. The basic problem with the proposed League (or "Concert" as some would have it), is that it assumes that democracies worldwide have broadly shared interests, and that those interests will generally coincide with those of the United States. This, Carothers argues, is simply not the case. Particularly outside of Western Europe, many democracies have international agendas that are at best divergent from that of the United States, and at worst openly hostile to it (he brings up Argentina, Ecuador and Palestine as immediate examples). Democracies reflect the will and interests of their populations. In decades past, when the only democracies of any note were wealthy, western, and had shared fascist and/or communist enemies, the interests of those populations were reasonably convergent. Now (thankfully), there are vibrant democracies in every corner of the globe, representing the full spectrum of global wealth and culture. It is simply unreasonable to expect that convergence to endure.

Under such circumstances, any proposed League of Democracies would have to either restrict membership to those states that are both democratic and have good relations with Washington - exposing it as a mere tool of American empire rather than a legitimate pillar of a liberal international order - or would have relatively open membership, but have an issue portfolio no more expansive than the lowest common denominator of policy convergence among its participants. Either way, it would not fulfill the lofty goals that have been set for it.

Carothers' critique is valuable but, frankly, doesn't go far enough. Even if, somehow, there were to be enough agreement among the world's major democracies on an international policy agenda to make such an organization work effectively - which there won't be - formalizing a bloc of international democracies would seriously antagonize authoritarian powers like Russia and China, ossifying geopolitics along outdated ideological fault lines, increasing the likelihood of international conflict and making it immensely more difficult to deal with transnational issues like terrorism, environmental degradation and trade.

Though it has gotten some traction among liberal internationalists (many of whom, like Dr. Ikenberry, I respect enormously), the intellectual lights driving the idea most forcefully seem to be unrepentant neoconservatives (Charles Krauthammer and Robert Kagan have given the idea their enthusiastic support), who unabashedly seek a way to formalize an alliance against states that they see as potential challengers to U.S. hegemony (China and Russia) as well as to induce allies and potential allies to support the failed policy of attempting to isolate America's enemies. I have previously expounded on the numerous follies of this worldview, so I won't bore readers with another rant. Suffice to say, though, that creating an exclusive club of global democracies would unnecessarily antagonize numerous great powers, encouraging military and economic competition at a time when their opposites are sorely needed.

None of this is to say that I don't give credence to the idea that democratic governments have greater legitimacy on the world stage. I would be fine with setting a standard - applied on an informal basis - of cooperation and consultation among the world's democracies. Military and humanitarian interventions that gain the blessing of the major democratic powers have, in my mind, sufficient legitimacy even without the blessing of the United Nations. On this point I differ with Shashi Tharoor, who writes an otherwise sensible analysis of the issue. I would be thrilled to see the United States cooperate in a more close and nuanced way with emerging democratic powers like India and Brazil. Furthermore, promoting democratic development, though not at the point of a gun, remains an important long-term interest of the United States, and we ought to be thinking seriously about how best to do that going forward. To formalize such arrangements in some type of league, though, would be pointlessly coercive, antagonistic, and ultimately ineffective.

We have more pressing problems to solve.