Democratic Governance and International Law (review)

Democratic Governance and International Law, Gregory H. Fox & Brad R. Roth eds. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

This is an important and timely collection of essays focused on the status and implications of the "democratic entitlement" ¹ in contemporary international law. Among the more important issues examined in the nineteen, often densely documented, contributions are the extent to which a right to democratic governance is affirmed in international conventions, the rulings of international bodies and state practice, and the nature of existing or emerging norms associated such a right. The volume also examines an important set of related questions, including: does contemporary international law support intervention to restore democratic governance and, if so, under what conditions; are pro-democratic intervention pacts lawful; does international law permit democratic states to display intolerance toward non-democratic parties; to what extent have norms regarding a democratic entitlement influenced state practice regarding state and governmental recognition; what effect has widespread democratization had on state practice regarding accountability for human rights violations; do current or emerging norms of international law serve to legitimize false, superficial or insubstantial forms of democracy and what form of democratization should be promoted by international law? While differing perspectives on these and other questions related to the status and implications of the democratic entitlement are to be found in the collection, the volume--with a few expressions of dissent--generally gives expression to a liberal internationalist outlook which emphasizes evidence in support of a growing recognition of an entitlement to democratic governance. The criteria of democratic governance identified in many, though by no means all, of the essays, largely reflect Western liberal democratic values. A suspicion that a certain selective perception and to a degree, ideological bias, may be affecting the parsing of the normative evidence and policy issues is furthered by the fact that the analytical voices speaking on these pages are exclusively those of Western scholars. To the editors' credit, however, the issue of tendential Western liberal views of democracy and the nature of the democratic entitlement is raised and examined in the collection, most directly in contributions by Brad Roth, Martti Koskenniemi, Jan Black, and Susan Marks. Still, the collection might have been further strengthened by including perspectives on these questions from Latin American, African and Asia scholars. This having been said, there is much to praise in this collection. Though a detailed examination of all nineteen contributions is beyond the scope of this essay, an effort will be made below to highlight what this reviewer found to be the more noteworthy aspects of the collection.

In their introduction the editors, Gregory H. Fox, and Brad R. Roth, review recent developments in international law which affect the status and determinacy of a right to political participation and what has been referred to by Thomas Franck as the democratic entitlement. Concluding that "it is now clear that international law and organizations are no longer indifferent to the internal character of regimes within sovereign states," ² they preview the major questions to be raised in the text. The core of these questions whether a democratic entitlement or more specifically a right to democratic governance has emerged as a part of international law is the subject of the first essay in the collection by Thomas Franck. Franck reproduces and updates the analysis of an emerging right to democratic governance which appeared earlier in the American Journal of International Law. ³ Whether a right to democratic governance is now widely recognized as a part of contemporary international law is clearly an important question upon which Thomas Franck deserves credit for focusing attention. In approaching this question, however, many of the essays in the current volume appear to offer a mix of advocacy, policy recommendation and analysis. In addition the democratic entitlement is in more than one essay characterized in some contexts as an "emerging" ⁴ part of international law and in other contexts as a firmly established norm. Though the case could...