International Organizations & Democracy: Toward a Global "Guarantee Clause"

Abstract

Morton H. Halperin is senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and co-author of Self-Determination in the New World Order (1992). Kristen Lomasney is second-year master's candidate at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. As democracy spreads throughout the globe, many people are rediscovering truth understood by the Framers of the United States Constitution: true world order requires that all constituent states be ruled by governments that both derive their legitimacy from the consent of the people and are limited in power. Indeed, because the Framers believed that the states of the new Union could not coexist peacefully unless they all possessed political institutions based on the principle of representation, the delegates to the Federal Convention of 1787 inserted into the new Constitution clause compelling the federal government to ensure a Republican Form of Government to every state. Today, as we move toward new world order, the international community must be willing to make this same commitment: guarantee of constitutional democracy to every nation that has already established this modern equivalent of republican government. The movement toward an international guarantee clause is already underway; indeed, according to legal scholar Thomas Franck, governments worldwide have begun to realize that their legitimacy in the international arena depends on meeting normative expectation of the community of states--namely, that those who seek the validation of their empowerment patently govern with the consent of the governed. In conformity with this principle of entitlement, the international community has recently begun to support and nurture right to democratic governance by intervening against illegitimate regimes: one such example is the imposition of economic sanctions against Peru following President Alberto Fujimori's suspension of that country's