Does international law work, and if so, how? In the last twenty years eight regional
intergovernmental organizations have adopted treaties
requiring all participants to be democracies and specifying sanctions
to be leveled against members
that cease to
be democracies. In this work I examine
to what extent these agreements are helping protect the governments of their members
from coups. I find that, between 1991 and
2008, states subject to these treaties were less likely to experience attempted coups d’etat, and were less likely
to be overthrown when coups were attempted, but that the evidence varies widely in particular cases.
Case studies of coups in Honduras, Mali and Thailand support the view that coup leaders
do take such treaties into account when choosing coup consolidation tactics such as coup-legitimating rhetoric
and selecting members
of the coup coalition. All in all, these regimes
show promise if not yet dispositive effect.
However, these findings cast some doubt on the efficacy of international human rights
law more generally. State leaders
have a direct self-interest in maintaining an effective coup-prevention regime. If they are no more effective
at this than this evidence
suggests, they are unlikely
to enforce more conventional human rights agreements that less directly impact their own interests.
Writing a dissertation is an all-consuming process – it has a tendency to infiltrate aspects of your life far removed from your daytime
academic pursuits – and so there is a sense in which every person
with which I have had meaningful interactions over the last three years has influenced the following document
in some way. The following
people particularly helped
make this dissertation a reality. They all contributed in some way to
make it better and possible; however, as always,
its failures remain
my own.
Shortly before
dawn on the day of June 28, 2009, 200 soldiers stormed
the presidential residence
in Tegucigalpa, Honduras
and seized leftist
President Manuel Zelaya Rosales.
Soldiers took Zelaya to a waiting military
airplane and flew him to Costa Rica where they left him on an airstrip, still
in his pajamas. Shortly after
noon that day, the Honduran Congress convened
and considered the report of a secret
commission that had ostensibly been created on June 25 to consider
constitutional crimes attributed to Zelaya. Also considered by Congress
was a resignation letter supposedly written by Zelaya – dated
three days before
the coup. The Congress
voted to accept
Zelaya’s “resignation” and then
declared President of the Congress Roberto
Micheletti Bain to be interim
President until elections
in November. In accepting the position, Micheletti said “I do not arrive
at this position via the ignomious route
of a coup d’etat, I arrive as the product
of an absolutely legal
transition.”1
In some ways these facts fit in with a long pattern
of coups d’etat in Latin America. One recently-created dataset
counts an astounding 145 coups and coup
attempts in the region between
1950 and 1999 (Powell and Thyne 2011).
However, there was an important
difference in the Honduran case that has received a great deal of
attention in the popular media but less, to this point, in the academic
literature: a robust international response
condemning the coup because it contradicted the principles of a regional
treaty called the Inter-American Democratic Charter (IADC). In the IADC, signed in 2001, all members of the Organization of American States
(OAS) pledged to punish the government of any regional
state that came to power through “an
unconstitutional interruption of the democratic order” (Art. 19). OAS members,
other states and international organizations placed a variety of sanctions on the Micheletti government such as denying the coup regime
international recognition and access to international credit and aid. Honduras was suspended from the OAS, no country
in the world recognized the new government, and the total economic sanctions may have been as
great as US $2 billion
(Legler 2010). This is a very different international response than what Luttwak
(1969) had described
as typical during the Cold War:
[R]ecognition is usually
granted to illegitimate governments after a polite interval
if there are convincing assurances about their continuity in terms of foreign relations. After the necessary exchanges
of information and assurances, the new government will usually be recognized; this will be so even if its illegality is an embarrassment, as in the case of the United States and Latin American
coups (Luttwak 1969, 181).
In Honduras the Micheletti government managed to resist
international pressure and hold elections
in November 2009, with most of the international community
over the next two years finally agreeing
to recognize new President Porfirio
Lobo. However, the episode raises an interesting question as to whether the possibility of a similar international response
may have dissuaded
would-be coup leaders
in other countries.
Regional regimes
for the defense of democracy
have been adopted
not only by the OAS but
by many other IGOs as well, and it is an interesting question as to whether these “democracy clauses”
(e.g. Farer 1995;
Piccone 2006) are producing their
desired effects. It is this question
that motivates this dissertation: Do democracy clauses
in fact help prevent governments from falling to coups?
What are Democracy Clauses?
While democracy clauses are mostly post-Cold War phenomena, there is some history of states creating treaties that give the collective members the right to intervene in domestic
Democracy clauses are unusual compared
to other international treaties governing
politically sensitive issues
in that they are enforced
with great consistency. As will be shown, every successful coup that has occurred in a state subject to a democracy
clause since 2000 has been suspended from relevant IGOs, or condemned
and suspension withheld only after assurances that elections would be held shortly. This is a very high level of enforcement for any international treaty, but especially so for treaties
where core sovereignty
issues are in play. However,
that these treaties
are being enforced
does not necessarily
tell us whether they are working to prevent usurpations of power.
So What?
The question is important for several reasons.
Twenty years ago, Samuel Huntington
looked at the remarkable increase
in the number of democracies in the world from 1974 to 1991 and proclaimed this “Third Wave” of democracies to be one of the
including interstate peace (e.g. Russet and Oneal 2001), intrastate peace (e.g. Hegre et al 2001), economic
growth and stability
(e.g. North, Wallis
and Weingast 2009; Acemoglu
and Robinson 2012), protection of human rights (e.g. Davenport
and Armstrong 2004; Bueno de Mesquita et al 2005),
and of the environment (e.g. Farzin and Bond 2004).
However, most of the factors that have been found to influence the likelihood of democratic survival are beyond
the control of human actors.
Some factors, like beneficial
levels of economic development, region,
historical legacies, and culture are endowments
that new democracies either have or do not. There is little
if anything that anyone can
do to influence these endowments, particularly in the unstable early years of a regime, and thereby increase the likelihood of democratic survival. Other factors, like economic
growth, level of inequality and choice of institutions are amenable to some human influence, but not much.
Implementing policies that spur economic
growth and decrease
inequality are very difficult in a technical sense and always
involve trade-offs between rival interest groups that are difficult to manage in a political sense. Moreover,
whatever influence constitutional choices have on democratic survival,
the choice of institutions during the transitional phase is rarely done with a view to long-term
stability. It is far more likely
that the motivation for choice of institutions is locking in the distributional prerogatives of those
parties that happen
to be involved in the constitution-
draft
This provides motivation to look to whether the international community
may play a role in the resilience of unconsolidated democracies. However, here again we find few
mechanisms by which this can occur. Some international influences on democratic consolidation are now acknowledged, most prominently regional
diffusion (Gleditsh and Ward
2006; Brinks and Coppedge 2006), the influence of regional or global hegemons (e.g. Thyne 2011), and the conditionality requirements imposed by the European
Union (e.g. Vachudova 2005).
However, as with the factors
discussed above, the application of these
influences to any particular country
comes only from accidents of history. No country can change its region or geopolitical importance in the hopes of preserving democracy.
Upon reviewing this literature one is left with the dismal prospect
that in democracy we may have identified a way to increase peace, prosperity and protection of human
rights, but no way of achieving it in any intentional way. It is in this context that regional regimes
to defend democracy
become very interesting. If they were to work they
could provide a way for concerned parties
in new democracies to shore up their regimes against the most common kind of authoritarian challenge. This is no small thing
when few other options are available.
The possibilities of democracy clauses
have attracted attention and enthusiasm in some
quarters. In the wake of the apparently effective response of MERCOSUR and the OAS to a coup in Paraguay
in 1996, the Economist claimed
“But for MERCOSUR, Paraguay would this year almost
certainly have gone back to military rule” (Economist 1996). In reviewing the incident, Larry Diamond described the regional response
to the Paraguay incident as “decisive” to “preserving Parguay’s
fragile democratic experiment” (Diamond 2007, 136). Munoz (1998,
1) argued that the creation
of the OAS regime was an
“historic stride toward
reaffirming democracy.” More recent appraisals of the OAS system like Cooper and Legler (2006)
and Boniface (2007 In addition, there
are reasons to believe that the response
of the African Union may have led to rapid restoration of democracy after
two coups in 2003 in Guinea-Bissau
and in Sao Tome and Principe (Diamond
2007, 148-149), and Legler and Tieku (2010) and McGowan (2006, 242) have argued
that the democracy clauses of the AU and of the Economic Community
of West African States (ECOWAS)
may well have prevented
coups since they were enacted
a decade ago.
There is one more reason it is worth knowing
if democracy clauses
are effective: the question of whether the sovereignty costs of membership are worth paying.
As Farer (1996) said in an early discussion of the OAS defense-of-democracy regime,
the rise of these
treaties represents a very interesting aspect of the evolution of sovereignty. Upon reviewing studies of OAS action in Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, and Peru in the early 1990s,
Farer remarked:
[N]othing in the case studies subverts
the conviction all of us began with – that external action wisely
conceived and sensitively executed can do much to advance
the democratic agenda. The possibility of effective external
action has been widened by a growing tolerance for measures,
from electoral observation to economic embargos, that would once have been indicted
by key Latin elites on the grounds
of principle, if no other.
This widened tolerance, if not active
enthusiasm, for collective action represents a new and very great retreat from the original
and intrinsically flawed
idea of sovereignty as unbounded national will, a retreat made inevitable by the contradictory interests of the governing elites,
who irrespective of their
will form a loose but still recognizable regional political system. (Farer 1996, 5)
This trend has only intensified since Farer wrote
those words fifteen
years ago, even within fora like the AU and ECOWAS that have historically been very protective of their rights to non-interference. The reason, most likely, is that offered
up by Farer, Moravcsik (2000), Hawkins
and Shaw (2007),
Parish and Peceny
(2002) and others: democratic leaders
of unconsolidated democratic states desire some third-party guarantor to protect them against
their anti-democratic domestic
political opponents. As Farer said at
the outset of his inquiry,
“the premise is that, although
external action is not often decisive, the credible threat
of externally imposed
economic or military
sanctions can give an incipient democracy breathing space or can facilitate its restoration after a coup” (Farer 1996, 4-5).
When states join these regional
democracy treaties, they give up to regional
IGOs a portion of their right
to non-interference, and it is over a very sensitive area of domestic politics. Succession is one of the core aspects of domestic sovereignty, and one that is
often politically fraught,
a fact as well known
to the United States as any other
country. Giving a regional
IGO the right to interpret a state’s own constitution to validate successions
to executive office
is a substantial sovereignty cost. If states
are paying such a
costly toll for the benefit
of protecting their
regimes against unconstitutional overthrow, it would be good to know whether
the price is worth it.
Whether such ambitious
schemes will work is a separate question,
and one that this dissertation will try to answer. Can an international treaty really prevent
a determined would-be
autocrat from overturning the democratic order and seizing
power for himself/herself?
