As Ivo and Jim know from other discussions, I’m not a supporter of the Concert of Democracies. I largely agree with their starting point of a critique of the United Nations. The limits of what’s been achieved in the latest UN reform efforts are telling. Bold ideas on humanitarian intervention and “responsibility to protect” from the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2001-02, only to be watered down in what the UN was willing to adopt in 2005, and then giving us all these resolutions on Darfur claiming to be “seized with the matter,” but no real action behind the words. A name change on the main human rights body, and some membership jiggering, but still well short of principled human rights advocacy and defense.

Other examples as well that Ivo and Jim and others cite. The criteria that a new major institution needs to meet, though, is that it both substantially improves on the flaws of existing institutions and that it doesn’t bring significant problems of its own. Four points why I don’t think the Concert of Democracies meets these, the 2nd criteria in particular.

Who gets in? Ivo and Jim talk about 60-some countries that’d be charter members. Some are straightforward, others less obvious but valid. So too with some clear non-members. But what about countries like Jordan and Morocco? The criticism of earlier versions like Secretary of State Albright’s “Community of Democracies” was for including them. That does bend the criteria. But there are consequences of excluding them. And there are those who would push to include them (especially since without them there’d be few if any Arab states). And not just these two, other as well in the grey areas. At minimum this’d gobble up the agenda and attention away from the founding purposes of foreign policy coordination. So into the net assessment of the Concert’s pros/cons we have to include the negative effects on some of those excluded and U.S. relations with them, as well as the agenda consumption by debates about internal business. These are not just matters that “political scientists could argue for hours on end about,” as Ivo and Jim write; it’s the stuff of endless filibustering by “real-world” diplomats.

Who gets kicked out? I’m guessing Thailand would have been a member prior to the recent coup. Would it now be kicked out? What about the less blatant coups we sometimes see in Latin America? Here too at minimum there’d be agenda diversion to the internal business of membership, which’d take away from the original foreign policy coordination goal.

Is democracy necessary for foreign policy cooperation? I continue to think not. We are cooperating with China in a number of areas. In many others that we’re not, it’s more because of divergent interests than the nature of our regimes. And I think we can achieve more cooperation with them through better strategy and diplomacy within the differences as they exist now between our political systems. I know the example of the Saudis and other “he may be an S.O.B. but he’s our S.O.B.” miscalculations. But there are other cases in which we can and should cooperate with nondemocracies. Jordan and Morocco again come to mind. We also did pretty well with Libya getting Qaddafi to get out of the terrorism business and give up his WMD programs.

Is democracy sufficient for foreign policy cooperation? This gets into the “democratic peace” debate. I do buy the dem peace theory insofar as democracies are much less likely to fight wars against each other. That’s not to be minimized, but it still leaves large areas of foreign policy cooperation for which I’m not convinced being fellow democracies suffices. I give credence to the argument, including as made by Christoph Bertram in one of the rejoinders in The American Interest, that US-European cooperation has been driven by our shared histories and cultures as well as our shared security interests, not just and perhaps even more than our being democracies. In the contemporary context and looking ahead, I can see democracies such as Brazil and Argentina, emerging as regional powers and with a fair share of issues with and against the United States from our histories, being less than cooperative on a host of other issues. Cutting into this from another direction, if China were to become a democracy, would they automatically more cooperative on issues of geopolitical interest?

To pursue the Concert of Democracies would be a major commitment of resources, attention, themes, focus. While it would have some benefits, I’m not convinced it nets out positively.

Constructive debate among AAbroaders