The Case for a League of Democracies

I love John McCain's proposal for a international league of democratic states.

The idea's bipartisan, (relatively) new, and exciting.

The notion of a concert of great democratic powers augmenting the moribund international institutions of the post-World War II-era couldn't come at a better time, as the United Nations descends into further irrelevance amid Third World radicalism that enables the worst excesses of rogue state manuevering in the new global system of transnational terror.

Current American preponderance will be more effective with a new array of structures conducive to cooperation among liberal democratic polities.

Robert Kagan makes the case for a league of democracies at the Financial Times:

With tensions between Russia and Georgia rising, Chinese nationalism growing in response to condemnation of Beijing’s crackdown on Tibet, the dictators of cyclone-ravaged Burma resisting international aid , the crisis in Darfur still raging, the Iranian nuclear programme still burgeoning and Robert Mugabe still clinging violently to rule in Zimbabwe – what do you suppose keeps some foreign policy columnists up at night? It is the idea of a new international organisation, a league or concert of democratic nations.

“Dangerous,” warns a columnist on this page, fretting about a new cold war. Nor is he alone. On both sides of the Atlantic the idea – set forth most prominently by Senator John McCain a year ago – has been treated as impractical and incendiary. Perhaps a few observations can still this rising chorus of alarm.

The idea of a concert of democracies originated not with Republicans but with US Democrats and liberal inter­nationalists. Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state, tried to launch such an organisation in the 1990s. More recently it is the brainchild of Ivo Daalder, a foreign policy expert and senior adviser to Barack Obama. It has also been promoted by Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton university, and professor John Ikenberry, the renowned liberal internationalist theorist. It has backers in Europe, too, such as Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, who recently proposed his own vision of an “alliance of democracies”. The fact that Mr McCain has championed the idea might tell us something about his broad-mindedness. But Europeans should not reach for their revolvers just because the Republican candidate said it first.

American liberal internationalists like the idea because its purpose is to promote liberal internationalism. Mr Ikenberry believes a concert of democracies can help re-anchor the US in an internationalist framework. Mr Daalder believes it will enhance the influence that America’s democratic allies wield in Washington. So does Mr McCain, who in a recent speech talked about the need for the US not only to listen to its allies but to be willing to be persuaded by them.

A league of democracies would also promote liberal ideals in international relations. The democratic community supports the evolving legal principle known as “the responsibility to protect”, which holds leaders to account for the treatment of their people. Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, has suggested it could be applied to Burma if the generals persist in refusing international aid to their dying people. That idea was summarily rejected at the United Nations, where other humanitarian interventions – in Darfur today or in Kosovo a few years ago – have also met resistance.

So would a concert of democracies supplant the UN? Of course not, any more than the Group of Eight leading industrialised nations or any number of other international organisations supplant it. But the world’s democracies could make common cause to act in humanitarian crises when the UN Security Council cannot reach unanimity. If people find that prospect unsettling, then they should seek the disbandment of Nato and the European Union and other regional organisations which not only can but, in the case of Kosovo, have taken collective action in crises when the Security Council was deadlocked. The difference is that the league of democracies would not be limited to Europeans and Americans but would include the world’s other great democracies, such as India, Brazil, Japan and Australia, and would have even greater legitimacy.

Note Kagan's key point: The new body would act when "the UN Security Council cannot reach unanimity," which is most of the time!

During the Cold War, precisely two major multilateral actions were taken under traditional theories of collective security: In Korea in 1950, when the Soviet Union boycotted the Security Council vote on North Korean aggression, and in 1990, at the end of the Cold War, when both President G.H.W. Bush and Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev joined together in a New World Order to authorize the repellence of Iraq's invasion Kuwait.

Despite the democratic league's origins in Democratic Party foreign policy circles, the proposal will be resisted vigorously by leftists now that McCain's endorsed it.

McCain's recently backed off the proposal, but he shouldn't.

The idea offers a genuinely important alternative to the postwar system of international institutions. As Kagan notes, the traditional order of multilateral institutions will not be replaced, but facing a little competition, they might improve their speed and efficiency in responding to the world's contemporary crises.