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Achieving Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Thomas Pogge
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Type
Part IV: International Policy Reforms
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 21 , Issue S1: Dealing Fairly with Developing Country Debt , November 2007 , pp. 249 - 273
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2007

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References

Notes

1 To complement this brief account, let me mention some important works on large-scale modern democracy: Charles Beitz, Political Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Norberto Bobbio, The Future of Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Thomas Christiano, The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996); David Copp et al., eds., The Idea of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Robert Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad, eds., Constitutionalism and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Jon Elster, ed., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority (New York: The Free Press, 1994); Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); David Held, Models of Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Bernard Manin, Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 [1993]); Nancy Rosenblum, ed., Obligations of Citizenship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1984 [1943]).

2 This literature is vast and still growing very rapidly. Here and in note 5, I can list only a few representative samples: Bruce Ackerman, The Future of Liberal Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); John H. Herz, ed., From Dictatorship to Democracy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982); Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

3 Some representative examples are Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), The Politics of the World-Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), After Liberalism (New York: New Press, 1995), and The Essential Wallerstein (New York: New Press, 2000); Richard Falk, The End of World Order (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983); Roberto Unger, Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative (London: Verso, 1998).

4 Regarding this goal, see Otfried Höffe, Demokratie im Zeitalter der Globalisierung (Munich: Beck Verlag, 1999).

5 Important instances of such work include David A. Crocker, “Reckoning with Past Wrongs: A Normative Framework, ” Ethics & International Affairs 13 (1999), pp. 43–64; Pablo de Greiff, “Trial and Punishment, Pardon and Oblivion: On Two Inadequate Policies for the Treatment of Former Human Rights Abusers, ” Philosophy and Social Criticism 12 (1996), pp. 93–111; Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity (New York: Routledge, 2001); Carla Hesse and Robert Post, eds., Human Rights in Political Transitions: Gettysburg to Bosnia (New York: Zone Books, 1999); Neil J. Kritz, ed., Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1995); David Little, “A Different Kind of Justice: Dealing with Human Rights Violations in Transitional Societies, ” Ethics & International Affairs 13 (1999), pp. 65–80; Jaime Malamud-Goti, Game Without End: State Terror and the Politics of Justice (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996); Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); Carlos Nino, Radical Evil on Trial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Robert Rotberg and Dennis Thompson, eds., Truth v. Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Naomi Roht-Arriaza, Impunity and Human Rights in International Law and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Lawrence Weschler, A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (New York: Pantheon, 1990).

6 See Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), sec. 2.

7 Ibid., sec. 36.

8 Tom J. Farer, “The United States as Guarantor of Democracy in the Caribbean Basin: Is There a Legal Way?” Human Rights Quarterly 10 (1988) pp. 12, 157–76; Tom J. Farer, “A Paradigm of Legitimate Intervention, ” in Lori Fisler Damrosch, ed., Enforcing Restraint: Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993), pp. 316–47; Stanley Hoffmann, “Delusions of World Order, ” New York Review of Books 39, no. 7 (1992), pp. 37–43; Stanley Hoffmann, The Ethics and Politics of Humanitarian Intervention (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996).

9 When a democratically legitimate government has been unconstitutionally replaced by an authoritarian junta, for example, some governments may not want to judge the change unconstitutional because they view the new government as “friendlier” and perhaps even had a hand in bringing it to power. Other governments may come under pressure from more powerful states to refrain from such a judgment—pressure they find it hard to resist when doing so would adversely affect their own interests.

10 One way to cope would be for this government to offer future resource exports as collateral for its debts. Potential authoritarian successors could then renege on these debts only by halting such resource exports altogether.

11 As evidence that something like this can happen, consider the 1997 Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Officials in International Business Transactions, which ended a longstanding practice under which most developed states (though not the United States after 1977) permitted their companies to bribe foreign officials and even to deduct such bribes from their taxes. Public pressure, generated and amplified by Transparency International, played a vital role in building momentum for this convention, which thus sets a hopeful precedent. Still, one should not overlook the fact that while the suppression of bribery may well be in the collective self-interests of the developed states and their corporations, the Democracy Panel and the Democracy Fund are not.

12 This name alludes to a period in Dutch history that began with the discovery of huge natural gas reserves in 1959 and, by the 1970s, produced revenues and import savings of about $5 to $6 billion annually. Despite this windfall (enhanced by the “oil-shock” increases in energy prices), the Dutch economy suffered stagnation, high unemployment, and finally recession—doing considerably worse than its peers throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.

13 Ricky Lam and Leonard Wantchekon, “Dictatorships as a Political Dutch Disease” (Working Paper, Yale University, January 19, 1999), pp. 35–36. In a later paper, Wantchekon presents data to show that “a one percent increase in resource dependence as measured by the ratio of primary exports to GDP leads to nearly 8 percent increase in the probability of authoritarianism.” Wantchekon, “Why Do Resource Dependent Countries Have Authoritarian Governments?” (Working Paper, Yale University, December 12, 1999), p. 2, available at http:\\www.yale.edu/leitner/pdf/1999-11.pdf. For earlier work on the Dutch Disease, see Jeffrey D. Sachs and Andrew M. Warner, “Natural Resource Abundance and Economic Growth” (Development Discussion Paper No. 517a, October 1995), available at http:\\www.hiid.harvard.edu/pub/pdfs/517.pdf.

14 The value of immovable public property abroad is rarely significant, and I will therefore ignore such property, which, in any case, poses problems very similar to those posed by movable goods.

15 The developed countries also enjoy more lucrative business opportunities as a third dubious benefit: Authoritarian rulers, made more frequent by the international resource privilege, are more likely to send the proceeds from resource sales right back to the affluent countries, to pay for high-margin weaponry and military advisers, as well as for advanced luxury products, real estate, and financial investments.