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The ‘Concert of Democracies’: Why some states are more equal than others

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Abstract

This article engages with a discourse emerging from international political theory, international law and political science on awarding privileges to democracies in crucial issues of global governance. Proposals that a ‘Concert of Democracies’ should be legally entitled to take decisions in case the United Nations Security Council is unable or unwilling to act are amongst the most prominent expression of this vision of the stratification of the international society into first-class and second-class regimes. The article reconstructs central tenets of this discourse on the inclusion and exclusion of regime types and shows that this kind of differentiation of states has been very much inspired by readings and appropriations of ‘democratic peace’ scholarship in International Relations. The article critiques the underlying problematic theoretical assumptions and the practical implications of democratic peace theory and policy proposals inferred from it.

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Notes

  1. Some pertinent quotes are provided in the ‘democratic peace blog’ of R.J. Rummel, see http://democraticpeace.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/826/, accessed 8 August 2012.

  2. A detailed critique of the Princeton Project's Final Report lies beyond the scope of this article, but see, for example, the scathing critique by Parmar (2009).

  3. Slaughter de-emphasized the distinction between liberal and non-liberal states in later works, for example Slaughter (2004).

  4. See in detail the critique by Reus-Smit (2001, pp. 585–589).

  5. ‘(P)edigree refers to the depth of the rule's roots in a historical process; determinacy refers to the rule's ability to communicate content; coherence refers to the rule's internal consistency and lateral connectedness to the principles underlying other rules; and adherence refers to the rule's vertical connectedness to a normative hierarchy, culminating in an ultimate rule of recognition which embodies the principled purposes and values that define the community of states’ (Franck, 1992, p. 51).

  6. Cf. also Buchanan and Keohane (2004).

  7. By ‘minimal democracy’ Buchanan means: representative, majoritarian legislative institutions, institutionally secured accountability of government and a modicum of freedom of speech and association (2007, p. 279).

  8. This term was coined by John Owen (2004, p. 605).

  9. For some more recent reviews on this, see Geis and Wagner (2011) and Müller and Wolff (2006). For the early controversies between Realists and DP researchers, see the reader Brown et al (1996).

  10. For a detailed discussion on this point, see for example MacMillan (1995), Jahn (2005) and Eberl (2008).

  11. For a notable exception, see Reiter and Stam (2002, pp. 203–204).

  12. It is impossible to review here the extensive DP research (I have done this elsewhere, see Geis, 2001, and Geis and Wagner, 2011) – but see Russett (1993) and Lipson (2003) for two exemplary monographs in this regard.

  13. As Dan Reiter and Allen Stam have claimed in their much debated monograph Democracies at War (2002).

  14. A few examples are provided by Czempiel (1996), Russett (1993), Russett and Oneal (2001) and Lipson (2003).

  15. I should stress that DP research plays a crucial but far from exclusive role here. The other influential discourse is the Western human rights empowerment discourse. I have focused on the role of DP in this article as this is regarded as a clearly identifiable, profiled research programme in IR scholarship with a high academic and political prominence, whereas the human rights discourse seems to be more diverse and carried by a more diffuse cast of actors.

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  1. Department of Political Science, University of Magdeburg, Zschokkestrasse 32, Magdeburg, D-39104, Germany

    Anna Geis

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Geis, A. The ‘Concert of Democracies’: Why some states are more equal than others. Int Polit 50, 257–277 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2013.2

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