“A community of democracies in the Americas” – instilling substance into a wondrous phrase

Abstract

The OAS Charter declared the hemisphere's support for democracy, but Article 18 of the Charter, barring interference of any kind, effectively left the declaration toothless. With the spread of democracy and the end of the Cold War, the hemisphere moved in 1991 to build a network of democratic solidarity. The Inter‐American Democratic Charter, affirmed in Lima on September 11, 2001, represented a major step in the direction of building a “community of democracies in the Americas”. This paper describes the strengths and flaws in the Charter, beginning with its bloated and imprecise definition of democracy. It outlines the threats and challenges to democracy at three different levels of democratic development, and proposes a set of collective responses and a mechanism for judging the state of democracy in the Americas and deciding on the most effective collective response that could really instill substance in the phrase – if accepted by the states of the Americas.