Abstract
The OAS has been torn between an urge to innovate and to maintain the status quo in terms of democratization. Momentum in building a “right to democracy”1 or a “collective defense of democracy” paradigm2 was accelerated by the end of the Cold War and the wave of democratic transitions experienced throughout the Americas on a national basis. Yet the collective efforts of the OAS toward the building of democratic values continued to face a number of serious constraints. At an instrumental level, the means of translating the inter-American system of democratic solidarity into practice has been a daunting task. Club multilateralism proved effective in smoothing some crises, most notably that of Guatemala in 1993. In other cases the limitations of this paradigm were strongly evident. The Haitian experience revealed the difficulty in enforcing economic sanctions. In the case of Paraguay’s crisis of 1996, the OAS response time was questioned and attention was drawn to its inadequate preventative and monitoring abilities.3 The OAS has been criticized as well, in a more general context, for what has been called a “firefighter approach”4: focusing on extinguishing threats to democracy among nation states when they ignite rather than preventing crises before they flare up. At a more conceptual level, the OAS members’ degree of commitment to collective initiatives to safeguard democracy underscores the conflicting foreign policy principles found in the region, most notably the perennial tension between support for pro-democracy collective interventions and the respect for non-intervention and state sovereignty.5
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Notes
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G. Pope Atkins, Latin America in the International Political System, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 210. Forged in the context of recurring and/or threatened interventions by European states in order to protect their overseas residents or collect debts owed them, the Calvo and Drago Doctrines stressed absolute sovereignty and territorial inviobility as fundamental rights of states.
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On the UN context see David Malone, Decision-Making in the UN Security Council—The Case of Haiti1990–1997 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
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Carlos H. Acuña and William C. Smith, “The Political Economy of Structural Adjustment: The Logic of Support and Opposition to Neoliberal Reform,” in Latin American Political Economy in the Age of Neoliberal Reform, ed. William C. Smith, Carlos Acuña, and Eduardo A. Gamarra (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994), 17–66;
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and Fault Lines of Democracy in Post-Transition Latin America, ed. Felipe Aguero and Jeffrey Stark (Miami: North-South Center Press, 1998).
For an excellent short summary of the on-going nature of these problems see Michael Shifter, “The Future of Democracy in Latin America,” in Freedom of the World 2003—The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties, Freedom House (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003).
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© 2006 Andrew F. Cooper and Thomas Legler
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Cooper, A.F., Legler, T. (2006). The OAS Democratic Solidarity Paradigm: Agency Innovation and Structural Constraints. In: Intervention Without Intervening?. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983442_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983442_2
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